Skip to Content News Archives Economy Energy Oil & Gas Renewables Electric Vehicles Mining Commodities Agriculture Real Estate Mortgages Mortgage Rates Finance Banking Insurance Fintech Cryptocurrency Work Wealth Smart Money Wealth Management Investor Personal Finance Family Finance Retirement Taxes High Net Worth FP Comment Executive Women Puzzmo Newsletters Financial Times Business Essentials More Innovation Information Technology FP500 Podcasts Small Business Lives Told Tails Told Shopping Financial Post Store Obituaries Place a Notice Advertising Advertising With Us Advertising Solutions Postmedia Ad Manager Sponsorship Requests Classifieds Place a Classifieds ad Working Profile Settings My Subscriptions Saved Articles My Offers Newsletters Customer Service FAQ News Economy Energy Mining Real Estate Finance Work Wealth Investor FP Comment Executive Women Puzzmo Newsletters Financial Times Business Essentials HomeFinanceBankingInformation TechnologyCIBC weighs costs as select employees test more powerful AI toolBanks have moved quickly to put AI tools in employees’ hands, but are now grappling with how to manage token expensesAuthor of the article: You can save this article by registering for free here. Or sign-in if you have an account.CIBC has also tested open-source AI models, including from Canadian startup Cohere, though it isn’t using them at enterprise scale yet. Photo by Peter J. Thompson/PostmediaCanadian Imperial Bank of Commerce is testing a new artificial-intelligence workspace with about 250 handpicked employees as the company weighs how quickly it can expand access to a tool that is more powerful — and more expensive — than its first internal chatbot.Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada.Exclusive articles from Barbara Shecter, Joe O'Connor, Gabriel Friedman, and others.Daily content from Financial Times, the world's leading global business publication.Unlimited online access to read articles from Financial Post, National Post and 15 news sites across Canada with one account.National Post ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition to view on any device, share and comment on.Daily puzzles, including the New York Times Crossword.Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada.Exclusive articles from Barbara Shecter, Joe O'Connor, Gabriel Friedman and others.Daily content from Financial Times, the world's leading global business publication.Unlimited online access to read articles from Financial Post, National Post and 15 news sites across Canada with one account.National Post ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition to view on any device, share and comment on.Daily puzzles, including the New York Times Crossword.Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience.Access articles from across Canada with one account.Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments.Enjoy additional articles per month.Get email updates from your favourite authors.Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience.Access articles from across Canada with one accountShare your thoughts and join the conversation in the commentsEnjoy additional articles per monthGet email updates from your favourite authorsSign In or Create an AccountorThe Toronto-based lender first launched an internal AI tool called CAI just more than a year ago. The new version uses agentic AI, which can plan and execute complex, multistep tasks from start to finish. Beyond analyzing documents and generating blocks of text, such tools use more powerful reasoning to build finished products such as spreadsheets, pitch decks and fully formatted reports.The advantages are compelling but don’t come cheap. The original CAI tool, which CIBC built in house, costs about $3 per user per month on average, compared with roughly $40 a month for some fixed-license enterprise AI assistants such as Microsoft Corp.’s Copilot or Google’s Gemini, according to the bank.Breaking business news, incisive views, must-reads and market signals. Weekdays by 9 a.m.By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc.A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder.The next issue of Posthaste will soon be in your inbox.We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try againThe cost climbs for more advanced agentic tools, including products from OpenAI and Anthropic PBC. CIBC users testing CAI 2.0 are racking up $4 to $250 monthly, depending on how heavily they use it.“It’s too powerful to have 50,000 people just using it without control,” Jaime Tatis, CIBC’s chief data and artificial intelligence officer, said in an interview. “We’re going to have a very strategic approach to how we roll this out gradually.”Large banks have moved quickly to put AI tools in employees’ hands, but many firms are now grappling with how to manage token expenses — the computing costs generated by widespread use of the technology. JPMorgan Chase & Co. chief financial officer Jeremy Barnum recently said the bank is urging employees to avoid deploying the most sophisticated models for basic tasks such as summarizing reports.CIBC started its latest pilot with about 50 users and has expanded it to roughly 250, drawing from areas including business banking, capital markets, legal, procurement and risk. The entire executive team, including chief executive Harry Culham, is testing the new model, and a handful of wealth advisers are also experimenting with it.An average of 20,000 people use the initial tool every day. The bank doesn’t track the prompts employees enter, which it says are encrypted, but it does monitor usage patterns, token spending and employee proficiency, ranking users from novice to “professor.” That data helped CIBC identify a network of about 1,000 internal AI champions, who have given feedback on new features and use cases.“CAI 2.0 is very different, because it’s agentic,” Tatis said, noting that it could take half an hour of compute time to generate a presentation an employee would be able to show a manager. “So for that, you need a little bit more expertise and know-how on what you need to do, how you want to do it and understanding how the platform works.”As generative AI tools advanced rapidly, CIBC chose to build its own employee platform rather than relying entirely on an outside vendor. Along with product designers, a team that started with about five tech developers and grew to roughly 20 built CAI 1.0 over about a year and a half, according to the bank. The 2.0 version was built in about three months by Tatis’s team using the existing foundation.The bank built what he described as a custom software “harness” around multiple, more-advanced large-language models from OpenAI and Anthropic, connecting them to CIBC’s internal data and setting security and access permissions. To keep costs under control, CIBC can limit access to highly advanced models such as Anthropic’s Opus, which is available to only 150 to 200 employees.CIBC has also tested open-source models, including from Canadian startup Cohere, though it isn’t using them at enterprise scale yet. Such models don’t require license fees, but companies still need to pay for computing resources and assume more responsibility for liability and security. Tatis said he expects they’ll eventually offer the bank more options, lower costs and a backup if access to a current vendor changes.Having access to a Canadian model could also help avoid dependency on a specific region, Tatis said, noting that open-source models are also coming out of Europe and China. Foreign governments and firms were left in limbo in June when President Donald Trump’s administration restricted access to Anthropic’s Claude Mythos 5 model to a limited number of United States organizations.CIBC hasn’t needed spending caps for CAI 1.0 because the average cost is low. But for the newest version, there will be limits and business-unit charge-backs. One user might consume $3,000 per month in AI tokens, Tatis said, but if that work generates $1 million in revenue, the business leaders might decide the cost is justified.“That’s a no-brainer,” he said.A handful of junior bankers in CIBC’s capital-markets unit are testing CAI 2.0 for tasks such as environmental, social and governance reporting and quarterly filings, according to the bank. They send regular feedback to the development team outlining what the tool did well and where it fell short.CIBC is also testing a feature that asks the AI to estimate how many human-equivalent hours it saved. The early results still require a human check, with users reporting that, in some cases, the system overstated the time saved because work was produced that wasn’t needed. Join the Conversation This website uses cookies to personalize your content (including ads), and allows us to analyze our traffic. Read more about cookies here. 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