The Financial Post reports in its Tuesday, Aug. 4, edition that Canadian 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.
The Post's Christine Dobby writes that CIBC first launched an internal AI tool called CAI just over 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 about $40 a month for some fixed-licence enterprise AI assistants such as Microsoft's Copilot or Google's Gemini, according to CIBC.
The cost climbs for more advanced agentic tools, including products from OpenAI and Anthropic. CIBC users testing CAI 2.0 are racking up $4 to $250 monthly, depending on how heavily they use it.
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