Nearly half of Canadian workers are anxious about AI, but HR plays a key role in smoothing things out: experts
Canadian employees are watching their workplaces transform in real time – and many don't like what they see. Nearly half of employed Canadians (46 per cent) say AI has had an impact on their long-term career, according to a 2026 survey by Borderless AI, while one in five feel less secure in their role or career path due to AI automation. A 2025 survey by the Toronto Metropolitan University's (TMU) Diversity Institute found that 42 per cent of Canadian workers are now concerned their roles could be replaced by computers or robots – up from 27 per cent just two years prior.
Another 2025 survey of Canadian adults by Abacus Data found that nearly half of employed Canadians (47 per cent) are worried that AI and automation could soon force them to change their job or career, and that anxiety climbs to 55 per cent among workers aged 18 to 29.
The data shows that the narrative around AI in Canadian workplaces is, in many cases, being written by fear. HR leaders who fail to take ownership of that story risk watching AI adoption stall, trust erode, and talent disengage, according to Thanuja Thananagayam, Senior Manager, People and Culture at the Canadian Centre for Diversity and Inclusion, and a strategic HR instructor at both McMaster University and the University of Toronto Mississauga.
“The biggest gap I'm seeing is the communication gap,” says Thananagayam. “A big part of change management is communication – if you apply simple change management principles, it's about centring around people – so the minute you don't involve your employees in these decisions and communicate effectively, that's where the fear bottles up and has compounding effects.”
The good news: HR is uniquely positioned to change the conversation, but it requires more than a memo, says Thananagayam.
Leadership misalignment and a narrative vaccuum
When organizations rush into AI pilots without first aligning their leadership teams and communicating clearly, employees fill the silence with their worst assumptions, says Jodi Baker Calamai, National Managing Partner, Human Capital at Deloitte. “Step one to being effective on any AI transformation is aligning across the C-suite on your organizational position and then articulating that position in the most plain English humanly possible to your workforce, to your clients, and to your collaborators,” says Baker Calamai. “Where we find organizations falter on that step and rush into pilots and deployments, there tends to be a crack in terms of people's understanding of the why and the reality.”
That crack can be costly. Baker Calamai points to Deloitte's human capital trends research, in which says roughly eight in 10 of nearly 10,000 respondents believed colleagues using AI were doing so simply to appear more productive. In the absence of a clear organizational narrative, employees aren't interpreting AI as a business improvement tool – they're treating it as a performance game, or a signal of coming cuts, she says.
Jean-Nicolas Reyt, associate professor of organizational behaviour at McGill University, says HR has to account for the fact that the organization’s goals with transformation don’t necessarily gibe with what employees want. “I think a lot of employees see AI as a threat, and in my opinion they're right to see it as a threat,” says Reyt. “I don’t know of any CEO out there who is saying, ‘Let's implement AI so you can work less or I can pay you more’ – they're saying, ‘Let's implement AI so we can cut costs,’ and cutting costs isn’t really the main motivation of most employees.”
If the business case for AI is articulated only in terms of efficiency and cost reduction, employees hear one thing: their labour is being made redundant, according to Reyt. HR's job is to reframe the story in terms that actually land.
Reframing tasks, not eliminating people
One of the most important distinctions HR can make – and communicate – is between AI replacing jobs and AI reshaping the tasks within them. The two are very different and conflating them accelerates fear, says Thananagayam.
Thananagayam encourages organizations to break jobs down into their component parts before attempting any narrative around AI. “There are some repetitive tasks, some administrative tasks, often time-consuming work, and then there's deeply human relational work and strategic work,” she says. “AI can’t replace high-end tasks like decision-making, creativity, or human connection, so it’s about how you frame that – and HR plays a massive role in that, because anything to do with humans has to come through change management.”
Reyt uses a concept borrowed from Microsoft to describe the mindset shift organizations need. “Microsoft calls their AI Copilot – it still implies human control and it focuses people on how AI is going to help, not what it's going to replace,” he says. “I actually like the idea of Copilot, as opposed to having an AI just do whatever they want.”
The 2026 Canadian Employment Pulse Check by Borderless AI found that while 46% of employed Canadians say AI has already impacted their long-term career, more than a quarter (26%) feel more secure and are actively building new skills to work with AI. That shift – from fear toward agency – doesn't happen by accident. It happens when organizations invest in clear communication and upskilling, and Canadian HR teams driving transformation are learning quickly that the message and the training must go hand-in-hand.
Building a human-centred AI policy – with employees at the table
The most resilient AI transformation strategies don't just communicate policy down the chain of command – they bring employees into the process of building it, says Baker Calamai. “A human-centred AI policy doesn't just look at the tools we use or how they're used,” she says. “It looks at what it means for a human to leverage tools to be effective – if AI is doing work I traditionally did, what work am I actually on the hook for doing? Do I have the skills? Am I being supported to develop them? Does my reward structure enable that? And in the reverse case where AI makes a decision and it's wrong – what is my role in that process?”
For Thananagayam, the mechanism of employee involvement is equally important. “The human-centered policy, for me, is about organization rather than creating the policy and governance structure and transferring out to the employee. It’s getting them involved in that process,” she says. “And this is where I see HR can play a massive role, such as facilitating focus groups, advisory committees, or enabling those cross-functional working groups and having listening sessions – at the end of the day, HR deals with people, so it’s about centring people and listening to them before you develop an AI policy, whatever it's going to look like.”
The TMU Diversity Institute research underscores the urgency. Despite broad anxiety about AI, 47 per cent of workers say their workplaces have been too slow to adopt new technologies and 41 per cent say they struggle to keep pace with digital change already underway. Workers aren’t uniformly resistant to AI; many are frustrated that their organizations haven't given them the tools, training, or clarity to engage with it meaningfully.
“The wait-and-see approach is not a strategy,” she says. “Get in there – experiment, play, learn, and assess.”
Effective AI rollouts, according to Baker Calamai, require recognizing that not all employees will respond the same way. “You're going to have fast adopters who set the pace and others who are skeptical or hesitant – and they probably don't fall in the patterns one might assume based on demographics or career history,” she says. “The best strategies to an AI-enabled workforce recognize that diversity and involve communication and empathetic messaging, reassurance where possible, an opportunity to redesign work, skill-building and leadership role modelling."
For Thananagayam, the long view is what HR leaders should keep in mind when shaping their organization’s AI narrative. “AI is here and it's not going anywhere,” she says. “This is the future of work and if we don't figure out a way for this to work in the current climate, it's going to determine the success or the failure of an organization.”
