TL;DR

Barclays has appointed Anita Tanna, its group chief of staff, as the bank’s first chief AI officer, QA Financial reported on 30 October. Tanna announced the role on LinkedIn, saying she will speed up AI adoption across the group and target the areas of greatest value. HSBC, ANZ and Bank of Ireland have each appointed a first holder of the job this year too.

A business leader, not a technologist

Tanna arrived at Barclays in 2021 as a managing director running equity sales for Europe, the Middle East and Africa in the corporate and investment bank, and took over as chief of staff to the group in 2024. She described AI as having “enormous potential to transform how we serve our customers and clients”, calling it “a critical enabler of our strategy”. QA Financial notes that her announcement sets out no detailed remit for testing or assurance, and that her background brings a commercial lens to an agenda increasingly judged on returns.

The context: cuts and scale

Presenting the bank’s third-quarter results, CS Venkatakrishnan, its chief executive, said it intended to “employ AI at scale”. Discussing roughly 5,000 job cuts this year, he said 60% “relate to support functions, including fewer developers as AI makes our people more productive”.

Barclays’ engineers have described the practices underneath that ambition. In a podcast interview cited by QA Financial, principal AI engineer Andy McMahon named observability as the first concern in putting agents into production, and argued that agents need “autonomy within bounds” and programmable kill switches. “You can’t just give an AI agent like carte blanche to do what it wants,” he said. Internal tools came first, he added, and the bank is “now starting to push some stuff out customer-facing”.

The bank signed up in February to AI Live Testing, the FCA scheme for trialling AI in live settings, as did Lloyds and UBS.

Looking Forward

Other UK employers are creating the role too: Morrisons and PwC UK have each named one. In our view, the telling choice at Barclays is a commercial leader rather than an engineer, which suggests the job is about deciding where AI is worth deploying. As QA Financial argues, a new title does not by itself settle what evidence the bank will demand before an agent goes in front of customers.