Are Canadian workers adopting tech fast enough?

In the second quarter of 2025, 12.2% of Canadian businesses reported using AI to produce goods or deliver services in the previous 12 months. That figure doubled from 6.1% a year earlier, which sounds like good news. Then you look at the comparisons.

The OECD average in 2025 was 20.2%, up from 8.7% in 2023. Denmark, Finland and Sweden all exceeded 35%. Large American firms with 250 or more employees report adoption of 37%. Two-thirds of Canadian businesses reported no plans to adopt AI at all, and of those, 78.1% said AI was simply not relevant to their goods or services.

There is some more recent cause for optimism. Statistics Canada's Canadian Survey on Business Conditions, covering April to May 2026, puts Canadian business AI adoption at 19.2% - triple the 6.1% recorded when the question was first asked in Q2 2024. The U.S. Census Bureau's Business Trends and Outlook Survey for the same period puts American business AI adoption at 17 to 20%, leaving the two countries essentially tied. Whether that convergence holds, and whether it reflects genuine adoption or definitional shifts in the surveys, is a live debate among economists.

But here is the harder question, and the one that matters more for HR leaders than any adoption rate: research published in Canadian Public Policy finds that complementary organizational capabilities - data infrastructure, skilled workers, and adaptable workflows - are decisive in whether Canadian businesses convert AI investment into actual productivity gains. Canada may be closing the adoption gap. It has not yet closed the productivity gap. And those are different problems.

The productivity context

From 1981 to 2024, US labour productivity grew 127%. Canada's grew 61%. After 2017 the gap accelerated: Canadian business productivity fell 0.6% while the US posted a 10.1% gain over the same period. Canada's GDP per capita now sits at roughly 78% of the US level.

Canada ranks 13th globally on innovation inputs - venture capital, university-industry collaboration, research spending - but just 20th on outputs, dragged down by weak results in high-tech exports, trademarks and industrial designs. It ranks lowest in the G7 in converting innovation inputs into economic value. The country trains for the race and tends to lose to competitors who barely warmed up.

AI adoption could change that arithmetic. Estimates suggest AI could increase annual labour productivity growth in Canada by 0.4 to 1.1 percentage points over the next decade. The federal government's AI for All strategy targets a jump in business adoption from roughly 12% to 60% by 2034. But the gap between Ottawa's ambition and what happens inside organizations is where the actual work lives - and that gap is an HR problem as much as a technology one.

The adoption gap is a size gap

Canada's AI adoption problem is partly a firm-size problem. Across OECD countries, 52% of large firms use AI compared with 17.4% of small firms - a 35 percentage point gap by size. Canada is a country of small firms. About 85% of its ICT companies have fewer than ten employees. Smaller firms lack the scale to invest in the data infrastructure, specialist talent and adaptable workflows that turn AI access into AI productivity.

Among Canadian businesses using generative AI, SMEs with fewer than five employees show 39% usage rates, rising to 60% and above among those with 20 to 49 employees. The tools are accessible. The organizational capability to extract value from them is not evenly distributed.

For HR leaders in larger organizations, this creates a specific responsibility. The productivity gains from AI will accrue disproportionately to firms that can build the surrounding infrastructure - training programmes, workflow redesign, data governance, change management. In a country where most employers cannot afford to do that, the ones who can have an obligation to do it well.

The training gap inside the adoption gap

Among Canadian businesses that reported using AI in Q2 2025, the most common application was text analytics (35.7%), followed by data analytics (26.4%) and virtual agents or chatbots (24.8%). These are the lighter-touch applications - useful, but not transformative. The more demanding uses that drive genuine productivity gains require both technology and organizational change.

As HCAMag has reported on the AI training gap, a 2024 Future Skills Centre survey found 44% of employed Canadians using AI tools at work have received no formal training. The Ipsos AI Monitor 2026 found 67% of Canadians say AI makes them nervous - among the highest rates globally. Just 20% believe AI will improve their job.

ATB Financial gave its entire workforce access to AI tools early and saw quick individual adoption. Converting that into organisational productivity proved harder. "We've definitely seen huge individual productivity uptake," says Tara Lockyer, Chief People, Culture, Brand and Communications Officer at ATB Financial. "But we're having a really hard time harnessing that for the organization - how do you harness that productivity at the team level or at the line of business level so that it can be redeployed? We haven't figured that one out at all."

The CFIB finds that businesses investing in AI are also more likely to invest in employee training - suggesting the two move together rather than in sequence. The implication for HR is direct: technology deployment and workforce development are not separate workstreams. Organizations treating them as sequential will not close the gap.

What the data actually asks of HR

The adoption numbers are improving. Canada's business AI adoption has tripled in two years. Whether that translates into productivity gains depends on whether firms build the complementary capabilities around it - and Canada's track record on that conversion is not strong.

Lewis Curley, Lead Partner, People and Change for Ontario and Atlantic at KPMG Canada, frames the HR ask plainly: "Build a clear view of workforce exposure and identify where AI can enhance work in a way that improves productivity without eroding trust. Then invest in manager readiness, because managers are the ones translating strategy into employee experience."

A PwC Canada report projects that in an accelerated-adoption scenario, Canadian GDP could reach $3.65 trillion by 2035 - roughly 9% above baseline. That figure assumes adoption actually converts to output. Based on current evidence, that conversion is the problem Canada needs to solve - and it is not a technology problem. It is a people and process problem, which means it is an HR problem.

Is Canada adopting tech fast enough? Faster than it was. Fast enough to close the productivity gap? Not yet.