In 2023, 98% of companies were defined as small, while medium‑sized firms accounted for another 1.5%. Just 0.3% were large employers, yet those firms employed more than a third of Canadians and were most likely to make large capital investments.
Rogers argued that stronger investment in machinery, equipment and intellectual property, including AI, is essential “to make long‑term fundamental change, to raise growth on a more permanent basis, to increase production per employee, increase our living standard.”
Tiff Macklem, the Bank of Canada’s governor, previously underlined that AI adoption among Canadian firms remains limited, even as the technology offers a potential way to raise the economy’s speed limit without reigniting inflation.
Policy thinkers also pushed for a more targeted debate about who would capture AI’s gains. “We can’t just blindly chase productivity gains through AI adoption itself,” said Vass Bednar of the Canadian Shield Institute. “Gains will accrue to the firms that own the intangible layer like data, intellectual property, models and computing access.”
For mortgage lenders and brokers, the message cuts both ways. AI already promised to automate document handling, triage complex files and sharpen credit analytics, but deployment remains patchy. New research from MIT’s Project Iceberg suggested AI could technically handle nearly 12% of work tasks and that only a tiny share of staff qualified as true “AI practitioners,” with most employees using the tools superficially.