The University of Glasgow and Lloyds Banking Group have launched a new research partnership that will explore how AI can support software and data engineering.
The partnership, which will take place over the next four years, will see the organisations explore how large language models(LLM)-based coding and agentic AI tools can be used to improve the work of the tech team at Lloyds.
This means semi-autonomous AI agents could be deployed to complete various software and data engineering tasks at the banking giant, including code writing and debugging and “project management tasks”.
The joint effort will be led by Dr Tim Storer and Dr Peggy Gregory from the University of Glasgow and Dr Shane Montague and Prof Andrew McDonald from Lloyds.
“Agentic-driven software engineering is a fast-developing sector with the potential to enable human engineers to work more efficiently by automating some tasks and allowing them to focus their skills on higher-level work,” said Storer.
“However, there has been relatively little research in industry on how integrating agentic AI into software engineering practices can be done effectively in large-scale organisations.
“Together, we will enable the Group’s plans to increase their software development capacity, produce high-quality research for the benefit of all, and influence national policy and industry standards.”
The partners will publish regular research papers documenting their work throughout the process.
“We’re excited to partner with the University of Glasgow to gather rigorous, real-world evidence from day-to-day engineering work, so we can understand what really works and how agentic AI can be applied effectively and responsibly at scale,” said Montague.