Banking conglomerate, Lloyds, teams up with UnlikelyAI to trial revolutionary AI technology.
In a significant move aimed at enhancing innovation and improving customer experience in the financial sector, Lloyds Banking Group has partnered with UnlikelyAI. This collaboration seeks to leverage neurosymbolic AI, a cutting-edge technology that combines symbolic reasoning with neural networks, to provide more complex, trustworthy, and empathetic guidance to customers.
Currently, Lloyds Banking Group's AI chatbot, integrated within its app, handles relatively simple queries. However, recognising the growing customer expectations for more nuanced AI support, the bank aims to evolve this into an AI agent capable of offering sophisticated financial advice. This agent will be designed with three core principles to promote responsible AI adoption and build customer trust: transparency, consent, and empathy.
Transparency involves clearly explaining why specific guidance is offered, while consent ensures that the AI avoids prescriptive commands to respect customer autonomy. Empathy ensures that recommendations are aligned with the customer's best interests, not the bank's.
William Tunstall-Pedoe, Founder and CEO of UnlikelyAI, expressed that this partnership represents a significant milestone in making AI effective, trustworthy, safe, and compliant in the banking sector. Tunstall-Pedoe is renowned for creating the voice assistant Evi, which was acquired by Amazon in 2012.
UnlikelyAI's platform is currently being tested within Lloyds Banking Group's innovation sandbox. The experiment aims to explore the use of neurosymbolic AI across the Group, with a focus on delivering responsible, accurate, and consistent support. The goal is to determine how the UnlikelyAI technology could supercharge customer experience in the future.
Ranil Boteju, Chief Data and Analytics Officer at Lloyds Banking Group, believes the partnership will allow for the testing of innovative new features that are not only useful, fast, and intelligent, but also transparent and reliable.
This partnership between Lloyds Banking Group and UnlikelyAI follows a discussion on the No Ordinary Tech Podcast about how fintechs and businesses can work together to accelerate innovation. By harnessing UnlikelyAI's neurosymbolic AI, Lloyds Banking Group is not only enhancing its technological capabilities but also its understanding of how to apply AI ethically and effectively in financial services.
In summary, Lloyds Banking Group's partnership with UnlikelyAI represents a significant step towards transforming its customer experience. The goal is to evolve the AI chatbot into an empathetic and transparent AI agent that helps customers make complex financial decisions with confidence, all while promoting responsible AI principles in banking.
The collaboration between Lloyds Banking Group and UnlikelyAI, driven by the implementation of neurosymbolic AI, aspires to transform the AI agent within the bank's app to offer sophisticated financial advice, ensuring compliance, empathy, and transparency for the customers. William Tunstall-Pedoe, the founder of UnlikelyAI, emphasizes that this partnership signifies a crucial progression towards making AI both reliable and compliant in the banking sector.
