As one of the world’s largest exchange operators, Cboe Global Markets plays a pivotal role in powering the global financial ecosystem. With platforms spanning equities, options, futures, foreign exchange, and digital assets, Cboe facilitates billions of messages every day. This immense scale generates staggering volumes of data — a challenge and an opportunity that the organization has embraced as it builds an AI-driven future.

In the second installment of this three-part interview series, Eileen Smith, Senior Vice President of Data and Analytics at Cboe, sits down again with Clyde Gillard, North America AI GTM Leader at HPE, to unpack how Cboe is leveraging AI to drive innovation and efficiency. The conversation explores the company’s evolving AI strategy, high-impact use cases, and the cultural shifts enabling teams across the organization to adopt advanced technologies with confidence.

The first part of this series traced Smith’s journey to Cboe, highlighting her leadership in transforming the organization’s data infrastructure and managing the extreme data volumes that underpin its global markets.

Leveraging AI to transform internal efficiencies

Smith explains that Cboe’s approach to generative AI (GenAI)  began with a focus on internal use cases. The goal has been to harness the company’s vast data assets to improve efficiency, empower employees, and support business operations.

“We’re trying to figure out how to leverage it internally as much as we can with all our data, with all of the internal information that we have, and supporting our internal customers and businesses as a whole to make sure that we’re as efficient as we can be.”

While AI has quickly gained momentum within Cboe, she admits that her perspective has shifted dramatically over the past year: “If you’d asked me this question a year ago, I might have rolled my eyes and said, ‘You know, it’s a little thing. It’s not going to be a big deal.’ Obviously, I would’ve been wrong.”

A conservative yet strategic approach

As a highly regulated exchange operator, Cboe remains cautious about deploying AI in its trading platforms, says Smith. She is certain that such integrations are not on the immediate horizon.

“We’re not going to be putting AI in our trading platforms, at least not any time soon. But in helping our trade desks and our operations people service our customers, that’s a huge benefit.”

Internally, AI is already delivering measurable impact, says Smith, enabling better data monetization, enhancing customer support, and improving decision-making across teams.

To drive AI innovation systematically, Cboe has established an AI Center of Excellence (AICOE), a small but influential team responsible for building tools and guiding adoption. She shares that one of its early achievements has been the creation of an internal AI-powered chatbot that integrates multiple data sources, including trading data, documentation, and internal systems.

“It can look at our trading data, our internal documentation, and all of our different places where we have information. And then we have an API for it so technical teams can leverage large language models (LLMs). People without coding skills can just use the chatbot.”

Furthermore, Smith states that people also approach her team with ideas. “It’s a matter of where we think the biggest bang for the buck is and where we put our resources.” This has created many internal wins. Listing some examples, she says, “We have a primary listing market in Canada, and we were leveraging AI to make sure our companies meet the listing standards. And it’s a huge time saver.”

Another one of Cboe’s most engaging initiatives has been its AI Olympics, designed to encourage employees to experiment with AI and pitch innovative ideas.

“A networking team won, and they used to get a lot of tickets and questions. They used AI to sort through the tickets and help them increase their first-time response and their time to resolution.”

The results speak for themselves:

• 98% improvement in initial response times (driven by AI-powered automation)
• 45% reduction in ticket resolution times
• Freed-up engineering resources for more complex problem-solving

This winning solution has inspired multiple implementations across the organization, Smith adds.

Speed, scale, and education

Cboe’s journey from experimentation to implementation has been remarkably fast.

“We really started the AICOE last fall. It’s been less than a year since we started it. The AI Olympics were also held last fall, and from idea to production, it was probably four or five months.”

Equally critical has been a company-wide education strategy, she notes. Out of 1,600 employees, over 1,000 have been formally trained on AI concepts and tools. Informal sessions and cross-team collaborations are helping accelerate adoption, making AI a core part of Cboe’s culture.

Prioritizing use cases: An art, not a science

With AI gaining traction, managing demand for new use cases has become a balancing act. The senior leadership team is highly enthusiastic about AI and has even encouraged everyone to include an AI-related objective in their 2025 goals, says Smith. This has been a major win for the AI Center of Excellence in driving organization-wide excitement and engagement, she adds.

“The prioritization process is, at this point, still more art than science.” She highlights that AI innovation at Cboe is not confined to the AI Center of Excellence alone.

“It’s not just the three or four people that are dedicated to the AICOE doing this. A lot of different groups are doing it.”

Wrapping up, Smith explains that her team manages the client engagement software, which presents significant opportunities for leveraging AI.

“The people who run the client engagement software, working with the AICOE and business users, are coming up with ways to mine all that data. There’s a lot of scaling in the company taking place because of that.”

Furthermore, Smith adds that centralizing tools while empowering employees is key. She concludes optimistically: “We’re starting to get to the place where there are more ideas than resources, which is actually a great place to be.”

CDO Magazine appreciates Eileen Smith for sharing her insights with our global community.