AI is leaving no industry untouched, whether it’s video games, Hollywood, or the auto industry’s driverless taxis.
But a broader, non-niche-specific impact is AI in the business sector. While the US is well on its way to seeing AI in every business model, Canadian businesses “lag behind,” reports Toronto Metropolitan University’s The Dias, a public policy and leadership institute, in a report funded by Amazon.
Here are some highlights.
Canada’s businesses aren’t adopting AI fast enough for the economy
Compared to the US, Canada’s economy has fallen by 5.6% in the last century. The culprit? A slow adoption of digital technology in countless industries, especially in the vast majority of non-frontier firms (whereas frontier firms, the most productive, are fewer in number yet quicker to adopt AI).
Yet Canada launched the Pan-Canadian AI strategy in 2017 to develop and implement new AI tech. Unfortunately, the research side never led into diffusion, or actual implementation of the technology studied and researched.
The Dias’ report found that as of 2021, under 4% of Canadian businesses with 5 employees or less adopted AI. Still, this mainly speaks to smaller businesses. Larger firms (100+ employees) were much more likely to have introduced AI into their workflows.
Utilities and information & cultural industries see the highest AI adoption
Not all niches are equal in Canadian AI adoption. Here are the top industries that were 10X more likely to adopt AI than the slower industries:
- Utilities
- Information & culture
- Insurance
- Finance
Conversely, here are some of the slower industries that haven’t adopted AI much at all:
- Real estate
- Healthcare
- Retail and wholesale trade
- Construction
Machine learning and automated workflows among most popular forms of AI adoption
While many AI tools promote productivity, Canadian businesses don’t use them all equally. Here’s the order of most to least use AI functions across Canadian businesses in general:
- Machine learning
- Automated workflows
- Speech recognition
- Non-specific AI
- Virtual agents
- Facial recognition
- AI-integrated hardware
- Other
Larger and smaller firms both showed high use of automated workflow-type AI, with larger firms leading into machine learning a bit heavier.
Barriers to AI adoption include lack of training and unidentified business value
While specific barriers vary from province to province, here are the top barriers to AI adoption across Canada shown in the report:
- No business need for AI
- Lack of awareness of technologies available
- Other
- Lack of employee training and experience
- Cost barriers
- Incompatibility with existing software
- Security concerns
- Legal issues
The top barrier (no business need identified) rang true for businesses of all sizes and all sectors assessed.
Read the full report from The Dias here.
