Lloyds Banking Group has announced it is collaborating with UnlikelyAI to explore how neurosymbolic AI can boost innovation across the organisation and improve the customer experience.

UnlikelyAI’s platform aims to provide AI that is free of hallucinations, reliable, transparent, and explainable through its neurosymbolic approach, which combines neural networks that learn from data with logic and rules-based symbolic reasoning.

Lloyds Bank said it plans to trial the technology within its Innovation Sandbox, which will involve a proof of concept experiment to identify how neurosymbolic AI can be used across the group in a way that delivers "responsible, accurate and consistent support."

It added that it will use the technology alongside existing AI platforms to support better customer experiences and "reinforce its leadership in responsible AI adoption."

UnlikelyAI was founded by William Tunstall-Pedoe, the creator of the voice assistant Evi, which was acquired by Amazon in 2012 and integrated into the creation of the Alexa voice assistant by the Evi team two years later.

“We're harnessing the power of AI to revolutionise banking," said Ranil Boteju, chief data and analytics officer, Lloyds Banking Group. "UnlikelyAI's neurosymbolic approach will allow us to test innovative new features for colleagues and customers that are not only useful, fast and intelligent, but also transparent and reliable."

The move comes after the chief executives of Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds Bank, and NatWest faced questions from MPs about IT vulnerabilities and the growing use of AI across the banking sector in May.

At the time, Lloyds boss Charlie Nunn said that the bank is exploring the use of AI as a way of helping to give extra advice to customers.

"When we look at the latest large language model version that is coming fully into diffusion now, what we are most excited about is that it can help us to interact with customers better," he said. "We can understand them, provide them with more personalised advice and provide them with a more joined-up experience."

In April, Lloyds migrated key data science and AI platforms to Google Cloud as it sought to strengthen its AI capabilities.

Google Cloud provides a wide range of cloud computing services, offering an AI stack with its own planet-scale infrastructure, custom chips, AI generative models and development platform.

The move has seen Lloyds migrate over 15 modelling systems to the new platform, including hundreds of individual models from the group's on-premises infrastructure.

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