Wealthsimple's LLM journey: building a secure internal generative AI platform for employee productivity
Wealthsimple needed a secure way for employees to leverage LLMs without inadvertently sharing sensitive financial data with external providers, while also overcoming low adoption of an early internal gateway that employees perceived as an inferior copy of ChatGPT.
How it works
Common implementation structure
How this type of workflow is generally built, generalized across documented cases — not tied to any one vendor's stack. Click any stage to read what happens there. Specific products that implement these stages appear in “Tools commonly seen” below.
Stage 1 · Gateway receives and proxies requests
Employees access the LLM gateway, available behind a VPN and gated by Okta, which proxies conversations to external LLM providers and tracks usage.
Over 2200 messages are sent daily, close to a third of the company are weekly active users, slightly over half are monthly active users, and about 80% of all LLM usage flows through the internal gateway; almost everyone surveyed reported that LLMs significantly improved their productivity.
What failed first
Early nudge mechanisms that sent Slack reminders to employees using ChatGPT directly failed to change behavior, and the PII redaction model introduced accuracy and relevancy problems that degraded the user experience.