AI In Production: What Canadian Banks Are Actually Doing
Every bank has a graveyard of AI pilots that went nowhere. Your innovation team ran the pilot. The results looked promising. And then it sat in a slide deck for 18 months. If that sounds familiar, this session was built for you.
Our Speaker
Trevor Palmquist, Celestial Systems
Trevor has spent two decades working inside private debt and capital markets, raising capital across Canada, the US, and the Middle East, and watching deals move at the speed of whoever had the fastest process. He's seen firsthand where manual underwriting and document chaos cost lenders time, capital, and closed deals. At this session, Trevor will walk through where AI is actually moving from pilot to production inside financial institutions, what separates the initiatives that ship from the ones that stall, and how Canadian banks can build the internal case for moving forward without taking on risk they can't defend.
What You'll Experience
This is a candid look at what Canadian banks are actually deploying in production today — not demos, not sandboxes, not another trends overview you could have read in a whitepaper.
✅ The Pilot-to-Production Gap: A breakdown of the most common failure modes after a successful pilot — organizational, technical, and political — and the patterns that separate banks that ship from banks that stall
✅ AI in Commercial Lending: Real examples running in production across credit analysis, document processing, risk assessment, and portfolio monitoring — with actual results
✅ Governance and OSFI: How Canadian banks are building AI systems that satisfy regulatory expectations and internal audit requirements without slowing everything down
✅ Getting Buy-In: How to build the internal case for moving AI into production with your risk committee, technology steering committee, and frontline teams
✅ Prioritizing Your Pipeline: A practical framework for evaluating which AI initiatives in your current pipeline are ready to move forward and what conditions need to be in place
You'll Walk Away With:
📋 A production readiness framework for evaluating your current AI pipeline and identifying what's ready to move
📋 A governance checklist for building AI systems that satisfy OSFI expectations and internal audit requirements
📋 A one-page business case template for presenting production AI initiatives to your risk committee or board
📋 Real implementation patterns from Canadian banking environments you can reference in your next leadership conversation
This Session Is For:
Chief Information Officers and Chief Technology Officers ready to move the AI agenda forward.
Chief Risk Officers and Chief Credit Officers who need to modernize without creating regulatory exposure.
VPs of Commercial Lending and Business Banking looking to compress timelines and reduce manual effort.
VPs of Digital Transformation and Innovation who are tired of pilots that go nowhere.
Directors of AI, Data, and Analytics trying to build momentum across the organization.
Senior Managers leading AI or automation initiatives who need a clearer path to production.
If you've sat in a steering committee meeting about AI and left with more questions than answers, this session will help. No technical background required.
The Challenge You're Facing
The gap between AI pilots and AI in production is where most Canadian banks are stuck right now. The technical side is rarely the problem. It's the organizational, governance, and prioritization failures that kill momentum after a pilot succeeds. This session is about what's on the other side of that gap — and how the banks that are past it got there.
About Celestial Systems
Founded in 2001, Celestial Systems combines deep expertise in AI with a heritage of application engineering for regulated industries. With headquarters in Vancouver and a fully in-house engineering team, Celestial helps financial services organizations move AI from pilot to production in practical, responsible ways — building systems that deliver results without creating risk they can't defend.
Space is limited to ensure the conversation stays meaningful. Register now to secure your spot.