CAI – Lyndon Pan

I designed an AI app. Here’s how it went.

The year was 2024. ChatGPT was more than a year old and it was taking over the internet, and Microsoft was going around selling their Copilot app as a corporate-friendly ChatGPT solution. A VP at the bank I work at had an idea: how about we make our own GPT wrapper app? We can tailor its features to our own needs and it might be cheaper. And so CIBC AI or CAI was born.

Conceptualizing

CAI was positioned as a work app from the beginning, and at the time, LLMs were known for being great for fetching information from text-based documents and synthesizing. The first few wireframes I made had a very clear focus on this use case – there was this assumption that users would often bring their own documents into a chat.

An initial wireframe of the CAI app's main chat interface. — A files panel to the left, a chat panel in the middle, and a “saved/takeaways” panel on the right. There was probably some NotebookLM influence.

The Saved panel idea was dropped rather quickly in favour of simplicity (ChatGPT literally just had a chat bar at the time).

With a bit of polishing, things started to take shape:

A more polished, medium-fidelity user interface mockup. — We did end up putting the navigation at the top instead of the way it’s shown here. Bad decision & it eventually had to be changed.

Old thoughts

Admittedly, some UX considerations at the time were very “old school” when looking back at them. Please witness this very convoluted way of trying to make sure the LLM knows which file the user was referring to.

A set of design annotations about a "file mentioning" mechanism in CAI's compose box.

Another design mockup showing preset prompts in the chat UI allowing the user to pick an uploaded file.

This was before we knew that you could just type the file name and the language model would be good enough to understand what you were getting at. Sigh.

Ambitions

All the major / popular AI apps were bringing out new features on a 24-hour interval. Under their influence, it was only fair that our team also had new feature ideas every single week. Some of them made it to production, some of them didn’t or ended up being added much later in a very different way. Here are some drafts for a few of them:

A set of design iterations for the side panel with a couple more feature enhancements. — Enhanced attachments: pick from files, emails, or calendar events

Design draft for an Editorial Assistant feature that allows the user to check a piece of text against various CIBC internal rulebooks. — Editorial Assistant. This allows the user to revise content based on various internal rulebooks.

An admin dashboard and a search feature:

A moment in time

I dropped from the CAI team in mid 2025, shortly after its bank-wide launch. There were some other stuff that I really wanted to get back to, and a 50:50 time split wasn’t feasible for me due to how fast-pace CAI needed to be.

At the time of launching CAI to the entire bank, it was a chat app with various “recipes” (think custom GPTs in ChatGPT or Gems in Gemini) to help with specific tasks.

Since I left, CAI has gone through many more feature enhancements and a major redesign. It now has a marketplace, smart libraries, connectors to other apps, and looks nothing like what I’m showing here. I’m happy to be part of the journey and it was cool to see a product evolve based on rapidly-changing user needs and industry landscape.