How Lloyds Banking Group teamed up with Rory Sutherland to create AI “intimacy at scale”

Lloyds Banking Group (LBG) CMO Suresh Balaji has shared details of a recent pilot which pitted humans against AI in a race to create “intimacy at scale”.

Speaking at the FT’s Global Banking Summit, the marketer explained that ‘Project Turing’ had attempted to understand where AI is able to outperform people.

To test this, the financial services giant teamed up with Rory Sutherland and Ogilvy to create an experiment. Three teams competed to design a travel booking feature to fit into the Lloyds app. One team comprised 50 specialised agents, a second was a human team which was banned from using AI tools or even using Google, while a third blended both.

While the AI-only team excelled at quickly reviewing research to uncover patterns and generate insights, it was unable to express brand tone – for example, what Balaji referred to as “British charm”. Meanwhile, the human-only team performed better creatively, but was unable to scale its efforts.

The hybrid team was the most effective, with the AI coming to play the role of prompting the humans towards better creative work.

Balaji said the pilot had provided valuable insight into the goal of creating “intimacy at scale”. He notes that if the bank can create a unified data layer, this could allow it to mass customise its communications, from travel-specific imagery to generating likenesses of someone’s pet when selling them insurance.

He added that the bank is not just using generative AI. Rather than long research cycles involving public surveys, which can produce generic results, applying AI to genuine behavioural data surfaces real pain points that can be solved.

LBG’s CEO, Charlie Nunn, echoed these perspectives later in the conference, saying that the bank ultimately saw AI as a way of delivering better customer outcomes.

He shared a couple of use cases, including an agentic AI advice tool which the bank is designing to help make investment guidance accessible to anyone who wants it. For retail banking customers, Lloyds is looking to create a chatbot which will allow people to interrogate their spending and budgeting in a conversational way.

As Balaji notes, trust is still a differentiator in banking, which is why he calls the overall approach “experimenting with bumpers”.