Lloyds Is Now Running Some of Its AI on Gemini

I'm not saying we've defeated London, but its oldest banks are now running on Gemini.

To be fair, that overstates it. It's one bank, the part running on Gemini is an internal platform for building AI agents, and I'll spend the rest of this piece walking the line back. On October 8, Google Cloud posted this on X:

"Lloyds, one of Britain's largest banks, is putting Gemini to work for customers and colleagues in a highly regulated industry."

Before we get to Lloyds, look at our own side of the Atlantic, because American banks got there first.

The American banks went first

Morgan Stanley announced OpenAI as its wealth management partner in March 2023 and rolled out its GPT-4-based AI @ Morgan Stanley Assistant to financial advisors that September. According to OpenAI, more than 98 percent of advisor teams now use it, and the firm later added Debrief, a meeting-notes tool built on Whisper and GPT-4.

Wells Fargo announced an expanded relationship with Google Cloud on August 5, 2025, to put AI agents in the hands of its employees through Google Agentspace. American Banker reported the rollout was meant to reach all 215,000 employees over time, from branch bankers to investment bankers, using Gemini Deep Research, NotebookLM and agents the bank builds itself.

Bank of America built its own tools in-house. Erica, its customer assistant, launched in 2018, and the bank says clients have used it more than 2.5 billion times. More than 90 percent of its employees use the internal version, Erica for Employees.

So the largest American banks are buying their AI from Google and OpenAI, or building it themselves. None of that is a scandal. It is a purchasing decision, and it means a few California companies now sit inside the daily work of a large part of the American banking system.

Then Lloyds

The Lloyds story is less dramatic than the post makes it sound. On May 1, 2026, Lloyds Banking Group announced Envoy, an internal platform for building and running AI agents, "Built with Google Cloud." Its chief operating officer, Ron van Kemenade, said Envoy "helps our employees become more productive, improve customer journeys, and launch potentially disruptive business models."

On October 8, Google Cloud's CEO Thomas Kurian listed Lloyds among customers at Google's Gemini at Work event. Google described Envoy as "a secure, Gemini-powered pipeline" that "has already onboarded nearly a thousand engineers," with uses running "from fraud detection to commercial client onboarding."

Trade reporting fills in the rest. QA Financial reported on October 6 that Lloyds has also put an AI financial assistant in its mobile app for millions of customers, that the bank has around 22 million mobile banking users, and that its AI Academy is meant to support 67,000 employees. QA Financial did not say which company's model runs that customer assistant, so I won't either.

That's the deal: about a thousand engineers building AI agents on Google's platform inside one British bank, with human checks before anything goes live. It does not mean Google runs Lloyds.

Is Lloyds a City bank?

Partly. Lloyds Bank started in Birmingham in June 1765 as Taylors & Lloyds, the town's first bank. Lloyds Banking Group as a company dates only from 2009, when Lloyds TSB took over HBOS during the financial crisis. The group's corporate address is 25 Gresham Street, London EC2V 7HN, which is in the City of London. Its registered office is in Edinburgh, at The Mound, because the parent company is registered in Scotland. So it is fair to say the group's corporate address is in the City. Calling it a City of London bank, full stop, goes too far.

The City itself is small. My book, The Veil of the Square Mile, starts from the fact that it covers about one square mile, roughly 1.12 if you want to be exact. A lot of banking business is run out of that one square mile. Some of it now runs on software from Google.

The power and water bill

All of this runs in data centers. Google's 2025 Environmental Report says its data centers and offices consumed about 8.1 billion gallons of water in 2024. Google compares that to the water needed to irrigate 54 golf courses a year in the American Southwest. Every "Gemini-powered" banking tool depends on buildings like these, along with the power lines and water permits that serve them.

Where that leaves us

For a long time, a lot of the money business ran through London. Now London's banks are buying their AI tools from American companies, on American cloud platforms, much as Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley already do. Nobody defeated anyone. Both countries' banks made the same purchasing decision, and they made it from the same few American vendors.

That shift is worth paying attention to.

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Jack Schumacher is the author of The Veil of the Square Mile (The Veil Press).