How Chime is Using AI to Accelerate Product Innovation

A behind-the-scenes look at how AI is accelerating product planning and research to deliver smarter, more responsive member experiences—part of the AI at Chime series.

At Chime, our mission has always been to help our members achieve financial progress. That means building products that are fast, helpful, and designed around real needs. In 2025, we found a better way to do that: by putting AI to work behind the scenes.

What started as a small experiment is now a big shift. AI isn’t just something we’re testing. It’s part of how we work, helping our teams move faster, learn more from our members, and deliver better experiences across the board.

Building something great takes time, but when that time slows decision-making or delays new features, it can impact our members. That’s why we’re using AI to reimagine parts of our product process, starting with how we plan and prioritize.

“AI has helped us cut our product planning cycles from two weeks to as little as three days,” says Dennis Yang, Principal Product Manager and AI lead at Chime. “And we’re doing it without skipping any of the checks that keep our standards high, like reviews, validation, and approval requirements.”

Before, writing and aligning on a new feature plan could take up to ten days. Now, AI tools help teams get there in just a few, so we can spend more time making thoughtful decisions and less time stuck in documents.

AI isn’t just helping us plan faster, it’s helping us understand our members more quickly.

Every day, Chime hears from members through support tickets, survey feedback, interviews, and social channels. Our research team now uses AI tools to organize that feedback, identify trends, and turn it all into insights, faster than ever. Those insights are then shared across teams to drive product decisions and shape real-time member support. That means we can identify bugs sooner, adjust features based on feedback, and get updates to our members faster.

“AI helps us find patterns quickly,” says Chuck Liu, Director of User Research at Chime. “It helps us identify the right problems to solve while our team retains full decision-making authority. We’ve built safeguards into our process—every insight is reviewed for validity and audited by our researchers before it drives action. It’s about using AI responsibly: accelerating our work without compromising the rigor and scientific standards our research is built on.”

The results of using AI in our product org are already showing up in how we work:

• 75% of researchers cut analysis time from nearly a week to just 1-3 days
• 100% say they save time each week—many by 6 to 10+ hours
• 90% say AI makes it easier to find insights
• 3 in 4 now share findings with other teams more frequently

More insights, shared more often, with more people focused on what matters: building the right solutions for our members.

AI is helping us serve members better every single day and at a much greater frequency than ever before. Within three months of rollout, one in four Chimers had adopted AI research tools. Today, that number has skyrocketed.

“Now, 90 percent of Chimers use AI monthly as an assistant tool integrated into existing workflows,” says Yang. “That’s not a test—it’s a new operating model.”

Product managers use AI to draft roadmaps. Researchers use it to turn raw interviews into thematic insights. Customer support uses it to spot patterns in feedback. Legal and compliance teams review AI-assisted documentation with precision and speed.

Across the board, AI is helping teams move from insight to idea to impact—faster, more efficiently, and always with a focus on what our members need most.

Chime’s approach to AI isn’t automation for automation’s sake. It’s about designing systems that enhance human judgment, not replace it.

That’s why every AI-assisted output—from a draft spec to a research summary—is reviewed and refined by the teams who know our members best. It’s AI with oversight, giving us speed with accuracy, and allowing us to innovate with intent.

AI is no longer a side project at Chime. It’s central to how we build, learn, and deliver. By accelerating product planning and research, we’re shortening the distance between member feedback and product solution. We’re summarizing insights faster. Sharing them more broadly. And building in a way that keeps our member obsession intact—even as we scale.

Because at Chime, building for the long haul means evolving how we work today.