Barclays scales up its use of Claude
Disclosed Barclays's expanded use of Claude — the Colleague Knowledge Assistant, which UK staff use to find information relating to more than 20 million retail customers, is used by more than 16,000 people and has handled more than 1 million searches since its launch in 2025. The Global Markets organization uses Claude to triage and route about 120,000 incoming emails a day. Said it plans to extend Claude Code to 50% of its developer headcount by the end of 2026 and to the majority of its software engineers in 2027. Group co-COO Craig Bright said the bank is moving AI toward increasingly agentic capabilities embedded in the way it builds.
Why it matters
A rare case of a large bank in a regulated industry disclosing seat counts and processing volumes. 16,000 people and 120,000 items a day are operating scale, not a "pilot", and the target of 50% of developers shows coding-agent adoption turning from an option into a plan. All figures are the two companies' announcements.
Source — Primary sources first; secondary reports are labelled “Press”
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