Bank pilots agentic AI workspace, calls it a Canadian banking first - Wealth Professional
CIBC's new tool lets staff delegate multi-step work to AI agents and free up client time CIBC has begun piloting an artificial intelligence workspace that lets employees hand off complex, multi-step tasks to AI agents, the bank announced on July 31, describing the tool as the first enterprise-wide agentic AI workspace in Canadian banking. The platform, CIBC AI 2.0 or CAI 2.0, runs on an agentic harness the bank says it built in-house. According to CIBC, the system lets users connect their own data and tools, then delegate work to AI agents that can plan, coordinate and finish tasks independently. The bank offered one illustration of the tool at work: while an employee sits in a client meeting, CAI 2.0 can pull research from several sources, assemble the findings into a structured report and draft a presentation, leaving material ready to refine once the meeting ends. CAI 2.0 remains in pilot. During that phase, staff can use it to develop client proposals and pitchbooks and to coordinate compliance and regulatory work in one place. They can also compress financial analysis into a review-and-refine step and compare documents such as multiple credit agreements side by side. “CAI 2.0 is a transformative platform that reflects our thoughtful and holistic approach to AI innovation,” said Jaime Tatis, CIBC’s executive vice-president and chief data and artificial intelligence officer. Embedding agentic AI into daily work, Tatis said, is meant to help teams find information and simplify tasks so they spend more time on client-facing work. Staff started building CAI 2.0 after the bank rolled out an earlier tool, CIBC AI (CAI), to more than 50,000 employees worldwide. That first product began as a chat assistant and grew into a platform supporting hundreds of use cases across the bank’s business lines, the bank said, with roughly 20,000 employees using it each day. CIBC’s move lands as global peers push similar tools toward client-facing work. JPMorgan told CNBC in June that AI had driven a 20 percent rise in private banking gross sales and could eventually let individual bankers expand client coverage by as much as 50 percent, according to chief analytics officer Derek Waldron. A survey by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, cited by the Bank of England, found 52 percent of finance firms already using agentic AI. Regulators, meanwhile, have grown more cautious. In Canada, the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions privately warned major banks that advanced AI systems could heighten cyber risk, PYMNTS reported, and OSFI later confirmed it had issued guidance and published a bulletin on generative and agentic AI. The regulator said its approach stays technology-neutral, focused on how institutions govern emerging risks rather than on specific products. CIBC did not disclose a timeline for moving CAI 2.0 out of pilot, or what it has spent on the technology.