Lendi Group factors AI use into annual performance reviews

Lendi Group will incorporate metrics on AI use into its annual staff performance reviews at the end of July, determining - for example - how effectively people train and use AI agents.

Lendi Group's Matthew Hargreaves.

The fintech, which has committed to become operationally AI-native by June of this year, is reinforcing this commitment through its HR processes.

“[When] we go into our annual reviews at the end of July, people are expected and will be reported on their AI usage, the agents working for them, their performance of [working with] the agents, not just them,” head of productivity and automation Matthew Hargreaves told Atlassian’s Team ‘26 conference in the United States earlier this month.

“Everyone in our organisation becomes a leader. Whether [or not] that’s a leader of humans, everyone’s a leader of their agents. You have to coach them.”

Hargreaves said the presence of AI agents is changing the way he works personally, including the way he runs meetings. 

“I find myself now in meetings recapping deliberately because I know it needs to be picked up on the transcript, being really clear and deliberate in [ensuring] that is done because I’m going to rely on those transcripts later,” he said.

Hargreaves said that agents are also empowering staff to take an idea, push it “all the way through [an] agentic workflow and actually have that first line of code created.”

“It’s empowering not just for me - I have teams and people who can now create working prototypes using tools such as Magic Patterns and others.”

Magic Patterns is an AI-based design and rapid prototyping tool that Lendi has adopted.

More marketing, HR use cases

In addition to measuring staff directly on their AI agent use, Hargreaves revealed more uses of agentic technology in internal functional areas, including in marketing and HR.

These use cases involve staff filing an electronic form through Jira Service Management (JSM), which is then picked up by an agent and actioned. 

Hargreaves said that parental leave applications are now handled by AI agents.

“What we do now is whoever’s applying goes through [a] JSM [form], it gets picked up by an agent, that agent goes away [and] works out the term which they can actually have leave for,” he said.

“This is as opposed to going to a person who runs a heap of numbers that might take up to a week. 

“That is now a massive unlock and I’m sure a relief to the person applying that they get a quick answer about how long they can actually take [off].”

A similar process is used to streamline the approval of new marketing content and communications, ensuring in particular that it meets legal requirements.

“Every piece of marketing content that goes to the public, whether it be an Instagram [post, or] in a store, has to be reviewed by our legal team,” Hargreaves said.

“The marketing team fills in a JSM form, which goes through the workflow, invokes an agent automatically that picks it up and reviews against our branding guidelines, our legal terms etc. 

“If it’s a hard pass it goes straight back to the user, [and] that marketing content can then go live so much quicker. 

“If it’s rejected, it doesn’t meet those guidelines, it goes to the legal team. They then review - but they have insights, they know where to review, where to leave feedback, where to change it.”

Hargreaves said the agent ensured that marketing content could be approved in a timely fashion, addressing changes occurring in the home loan and housing market.

“We need to be fast in our industry,” he said.

“[Recently] in Australia the RBA increased interest rates. We have to react to that - we have to get communications and content out about that sort of stuff.”