Lloyds’ Sharon Doherty is rethinking work, one AI decision at a time

At UNLEASH in Paris last year, Sharon Doherty told her HR peers that the function should be the “vibe King or Queen” of how organizations feel.

However, that also means having tough conversations and tackling the tasks “too hard to change.”

Almost one year later, the Chief People and Places Officer at Lloyds Banking Group is gearing up to take to the stage again at UNLEASH 2026 in Paris.

She says that the main difference between now and October last year is how people have moved from general excitement and compiling use cases on AI to “figuring out how they really create value for their customers and shareholders.”

“People are now becoming much more considered about where AI fits in their strategy.”

Ahead of this year’s show, UNLEASH Editor John Brazier sat down with Doherty to dig into her mandate at Lloyds Banking Group and the future of a human-AI hybrid workforce.

John Brazier: Everyone says AI is changing the workplace, but what's the change you're seeing that most people aren't talking about yet?

Sharon Doherty: I always say that the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed, but I am seeing a pivot to positive. We’ve been there for a long time in terms of how AI can help us grow and be a bigger part of our Accelerate 2030 strategy; whether that’s our in-app AI assistant now available to all our customers or our Invest AI that democratizes access to investment advice. Those are growth strategies for us.

Many organizations are also starting to see that some of their employees are very quickly becoming almost natives with AI, while some are still not grabbing hold of it in the way that, ultimately, we're all going to have to. It’s not as straightforward as ‘those in tech and those not’ or ‘young people or mature people’. We’re all starting to get into the details that will help us get to the value of AI.

JB: How has your relationship with your CTO and CFO counterparts changed over the past couple of years, and is it different from any partnership you've had before?

SD: There are three forums at LBG where we come together in slightly different ways. We have a ‘control tower’ where myself and the CTO come together monthly to co-chair and drive the agenda forward on our 11 big AI bets.

The second is the AI ethics committee where we again come together with other parts of the business to work on the implications of AI; two years ago we probably weren’t doing that.

The final one is an all-company employee experience committee, which I chair with a cross-functional team, where we’re looking to build technology-related employee experience activities particularly around AI but not exclusively. How do we build one front door, a super-agent? What does the AI architecture look like? What do our help desk architectures look like? That's a slightly different construct. That's where HR is leaning in, looking cross functionally and bringing together the teams from finance and technology, in particular.

JB: As Chief People and Places Officer, you think about both the workforce and the workplace. Has that dual lens changed how you're approaching AI compared to a more traditional HR role?

SD: As the Places director, I have accountability for a significant annual budget, so you turn up very much as a business leader to determine how you create value, manage improvements and productivity, and technology, data and AI is part of that.

I like to feel that I provide a home for our employees, in terms of the offices that we have, but also for the AI agents because I also look after the data centers. It definitely makes you think about the experiences you’re providing; whether that is the data centers and sustainability for AI agents or the physical buildings for people.

We've revamped our global estate now, creating great spaces for our people to come together, because some of the best work happens when people are in a room, collaborating, solving problems and making real connections. We've also just brought a few thousand kids into our buildings over summer, either for work experience or family fun days.

JB: What's the hardest decision you've had to make so far in preparing your organization for an AI-driven future – one where there wasn't an obviously right answer?

SD: This is a funny moment in time because you have to make choices with conviction, but stay incredibly flexible as you review those choices.

For example, one is the tools. We’ve all run towards Copilot or Gemini as tools that can help us scale, but at the time we’ve been flexible and experimented with Claude. Trying to figure out what that future looks like is something we’re all experiencing; there are different combinations depending on what serves your customer as well. Those are difficult decisions because they tend to be multi-million-pound decisions that have significant impact on your customers and your employees.

It’s similar to investments in training when we look at splitting that across builders, enablers, all employees and leaders. We’re fortunate that we can invest significantly but even so there is a choice of what to put into those different groups. Do you place your bets on training people that are actually building products, and how much have you got left to support the broader organization or your leaders? Those are trade-off decisions in front of many people at the moment.

JB: Looking back at how you've shaped the People function at Lloyds, what's one call you'd make differently if you were starting fresh today?

SD: We've been learning about AI and implementing it for about three years now. We were quite early in understanding that this was important, but it is only in the last six to nine months where I've actually created a dedicated team to work on enterprise-wide AI transformation in the People team.

They're looking at reinventing work; not the skills content, but the future skills required. I've always had people doing some of that, but not in a concentrated way. If I had my time again, I would put that team in place in mid ‘25 rather than Q2 ‘26. We need that team for two or three years, whilst we reinvent work.

It's easy to say, but starting to get organizations to think right-to-left, rather than left-to-right, and having stimulus that helps leaders change workflows, is a particular type of work you need dedicated focus on.