Nationwide has warned that measuring the financial returns from artificial intelligence remains a significant challenge, even as it deploys the technology across its workforce.
The building society has issued around 1,000 premium Microsoft 365 Copilot licences to staff across its combined Nationwide and Virgin Money finance team, with 2,500 engineers using Github Copilot.
Paul Ballard, Nationwide’s technology transformation director, said the organisation could see staff using AI more regularly and completing tasks faster, but had not yet linked that to bottom-line results.
“The thing that we’ve not nailed yet… is what’s the value that we’re receiving from it?” Ballard said. “We can see the value, but how does that translate?”
Nationwide initially joined Microsoft’s early access programme with around 300 users and held only around 1,000 premium Copilot licences at the start of this year.
Ballard emphasised the weight of responsibility the lender feels when committing to AI spending on behalf of its members, citing a straightforward financial principle.
“Every pound that we spend is a pound of our customers’,” he said. “We were quite mindful that we really understand where the value is.”
Finance was among the first divisions to expand its use, with staff deploying Copilot to analyse spreadsheets, review documents, draft emails and summarise meetings.
Nationwide has also previously used GPT-4 through Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI service to help generate customer letters, cutting the average time taken from around 45 minutes to between 10 and 15 minutes.
Ballard stressed that the AI rollout is focused on boosting productivity rather than cutting jobs, framing the investment as a tool to support existing employees rather than replace them.
“We very much see this as giving the existing workforce better tools so they produce more output for our customers,” he said.
The building society is now exploring AI agents for areas including anti-money laundering, customer due diligence, business analysis and mortgage operations, though full automation remains a distant prospect.
Ballard said Nationwide was “nowhere near autonomous agents”, with human oversight retained across all current AI applications at the organisation.
“The biggest risk is complacency with this stuff,” he said. “If it works 99 times, brilliant. If the hundredth time it doesn’t, how do you make sure you spot it?”
To manage AI governance, Nationwide has established an AI council spanning technology, security, legal and procurement, and has consolidated 19 separate data stores onto Microsoft Azure and Azure Databricks.
Microsoft (MSFT) reported that its 365 Copilot product passed 30 million paid seats in its latest quarter, with enterprise customers holding more than 50,000 seats increasing more than seven-fold year on year.
Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s executive vice president for Copilot, Agents and Platform, identified financial services as among the fastest sectors to adopt workplace AI, alongside technology and pharmaceuticals.
Microsoft’s revenue rose 18 per cent to $90bn in the three months to June, while Azure revenue jumped 43 per cent, reflecting surging corporate demand for AI infrastructure globally.
Competition in the corporate AI market is intensifying, with Google, OpenAI and Anthropic all pushing their own workplace products as businesses gain greater flexibility in choosing between different underlying models.
Despite its extensive Microsoft relationship, Nationwide does not plan to rely on a single AI provider, with Ballard saying the lender was looking at “different models for different use cases” and wanted to retain “optionality.”
Ballard also described Nationwide’s broader investment philosophy as a “no FOMO” approach, cautioning that businesses should resist pressure to deploy AI indiscriminately without a clear strategic purpose.
“AI isn’t the answer to everything,” he said. “You just need to be really mindful of what’s the opportunity that you’re trying to solve.”