Barclays has signed an agreement with public cloud giant Microsoft that will see the latter’s generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tool Copilot rolled out to 100,000 of the bank’s employees globally.
The banking giant plans to integrate Microsoft 365 Copilot into its in-house employee productivity tool to create a single AI agent that will provide staff with one-stop-shop access to its broad ecosystem of digital services.
These include collaboration tools, employee portals and online resources that its staff need to do their jobs, with Barclays claiming the move will improve productivity.
In a blog post, Microsoft said the agreement will see it provide Barclays employees with access to several of its AI offerings. These include its Copilot-powered Colleague AI Agent tool, designed to help staff book business travel, check policy compliance and find assistance with HR-related queries.
There is also a personalised, semantic Content Search tool to help staff surface location-based information with context based on their user profiles, and another called Colleague Front Door. The latter is billed as an agentic dashboard that is accessed via the employee experience platform, Microsoft Viva, that Barclays staff will use to book annual leave, and will serve them up with personalised news and announcements from around the company.
Craig Bright, group CIO and deputy group co-chief operating officer at Barclays, said the company and its staff are already well-versed in using AI tools, but it is seeking out additional gains and improvements by expanding its use of the technology to include generative AI.
“At Barclays, we’ve been leveraging the power of AI, and now GenAI, to drive deeper insights, improve efficiency and create a more intuitive experience across the organisation,” he said.
Indeed, a report – covered by Computer Weekly in April 2025 – by benchmarking firm Evident confirmed Barclays as being the tenth biggest hirer of AI talent within the banking sector.
Bright continued: “Our roll-out of Copilot, integrated with our colleague productivity tool, is a significant step forward in simplifying the way we work, making it easier to get things done.”
News of the deal between Microsoft and Barclays emerged last week, in a report by news site Bloomberg, where details of the 100,000-seat deployment were said to have been flagged by Microsoft chief commercial officer Judson Althoff during a company town hall meeting.
The report claimed that Barclays was one of several household names, touted by Microsoft, that had signed up to similar-sized Copilot-related deals, including the likes of Volkswagen, Siemens and Toyota.
Prior to this, Barclays had embarked on a trial roll-out of Microsoft 365 Copilot involving 15,000 of its employees.
The deal marks a deepening of the technology partnership between the two companies, with the pair previously announcing that Barclays had named Microsoft Teams as its preferred collaboration platform.
Microsoft UK CEO Darren Hardman said the company has always marked itself out as being an “innovator” within the banking sector by “embracing new technology waves” to serve its customers and colleagues better.
He continued: “The adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot to be the UI [user interface] for Barclays AI will help it to deliver on its bold vision of putting AI in the hands of every employee, and we look forward to working closely with Barclays to help its colleagues maximise the benefits from using this transformational technology.”
