Lloyds Banking Group research suggests UK businesses are increasingly connecting artificial-intelligence adoption with job creation and skills investment rather than treating automation solely as a route to reducing headcount.
The latest Lloyds Business Barometer findings show 54% of surveyed businesses saying AI has created new jobs within their organisation, while 58% plan to increase spending on AI-related workforce skills during the coming year.
Among businesses planning higher investment, 42% expect to spend between £25,000 and £100,000 on AI upskilling and 26% expect spending between £100,000 and £250,000.
The findings also expose a capability gap. While 54% of respondents believe their existing workforce has the AI skills the organisation needs, 31% say it does not.
Training is the most common response. Some 43% said they were looking to introduce AI-skills training, 32% planned to expand existing programmes, 24% were placing greater emphasis on AI capability during recruitment, and 21% were creating specific AI-related roles.
The pattern differs substantially by company size. Lloyds said AI adoption averaged 79% among businesses with turnover above £10m, while 77% of larger businesses expected to increase skills investment. Productivity was the main motivation for 74% of that group.
Across the full survey, 61% of businesses said they currently use AI. Adoption was higher among internationally active companies than businesses focused solely on the domestic market.
The gap between adoption and capability is becoming more commercially important as AI enters operational processes. Early use often centred on individual productivity tools, content generation, research, and experimentation. More mature deployments increasingly touch software development, customer service, finance, fraud prevention, document processing, marketing, and workflow automation.
Those applications require employees who can do more than operate a chatbot. Organisations need people capable of defining appropriate use cases, assessing output quality, managing data, redesigning processes, understanding security and compliance risks, and measuring whether an implementation produces a worthwhile return.
Amanda Murphy, chief executive of Lloyds Business and Commercial Banking, said success would depend on “building the skills, culture and confidence to use it effectively”.
The bank is itself pursuing that model. Lloyds recently set out an AI-led efficiency strategy as part of its Accelerate 2030 programme, linking technology investment with more than £2bn of planned cost savings.
It has also announced plans for more than 1,000 AI-related roles during 2026, including almost 300 positions connected with agentic AI, alongside a Level 6 AI Engineering apprenticeship. Lloyds says more than 65,000 employees have completed internal training on responsible AI use.
The coexistence of automation and recruitment illustrates how technology can change the composition of work without producing a uniform employment outcome.
Some repetitive or administrative tasks can be automated, reducing the labour required for specific processes. At the same time, implementation creates demand for engineering, data, governance, product, cybersecurity, compliance, training, and change-management skills.
Whether the net employment effect is positive will vary by business and over time. Survey respondents saying AI has created jobs are reporting their own current experience, not a forecast of economy-wide employment.
The findings are therefore evidence about business behaviour rather than proof that AI adoption will increase total UK employment. Companies can create new specialist roles while reducing or redesigning other positions, and that balance may change as technology matures.
Cost, data quality, and access to skills were the most commonly cited barriers to extracting greater value from AI, each identified by roughly one in six respondents. Domestic-only businesses were more likely to highlight cost, while internationally operating companies more frequently cited data quality.
The split reflects the different resources available to large and small businesses. Larger organisations can spread technology investment across more employees and processes, build specialist teams, and fund formal training programmes. Smaller companies may rely more heavily on external software providers and have less capacity for experimentation that does not produce an immediate return.
Skills investment may therefore become another dividing line in AI adoption. Access to widely available software reduces the technology barrier, but the ability to integrate it safely and productively still depends on organisational capability.
Nearly six in ten respondents said businesses that fail to adopt AI will be at a competitive disadvantage. That view was particularly strong among larger companies and internationally active businesses.
The next phase of adoption will test whether that confidence is justified. Businesses are committing money to projects that increasingly need measurable productivity, revenue, service, or cost outcomes rather than experimental value alone.
The Lloyds data suggests employers increasingly recognise that workforce capability is part of that equation. Technology can be purchased relatively quickly; building the judgement, process knowledge, and technical capability required to use it effectively takes considerably longer.
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