Some of Canada’s banks are among the major employers rolling out AI technology in the workplace.Tijana Martin/The Canadian Press
Major employers in tech and finance increasingly expect new recruits to be “AI-literate” and have a firm grasp of how to use artificial-intelligence tools to boost their efficiency, marking a clear shift in expectations of new employees.
Bank of Montreal BMO-T and Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce CM-T have rolled out AI technology to their workforces at great speed over the past year, and now expect that both incoming hires and current staff can use generative AI tools in their day-to-day duties.
“AI is now a core skill for anyone we are bringing into the institution,” said Larissa Chaikowsky, chief learning officer and head of talent at BMO. “We want them to be fluent in being able to consume AI tools because it has become so embedded and so core in the way we work.”
Ms. Chaikowsky added that more than 90 per cent of BMO’s 53,000 employees now use Microsoft Copilot in their jobs.
Generative AI – a type of artificial intelligence that can create content, processes, images and videos based on patterns that it learns from existing data − has exploded in use globally since 2023. AI technology has also improved in exponential fashion in the past six months, with AI agents such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Microsoft Copilot being able to perform complex research and organizational tasks with the right prompts from a user.
Across the corporate world, business leaders are racing to incorporate generative AI into their workflows in the name of efficiency and cost-effectiveness as the technology morphs into an operational necessity for most organizations.
E-commerce platform Shopify Inc. SHOP-T recently mandated that managers wanting to hire must demonstrate why they need an extra person for the task and why using AI isn’t sufficient. In an April, 2025, memo, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke laid out his expectation for staff: that every employee thinks reflexively on how to incorporate AI into their jobs, emphasizing that it is not feasible to “opt out” of learning the skill. Mr. Lütke also noted that AI usage questions will now be on staff performance reviews.
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At CIBC, a new AI tool called CIBC AI or “CAI” was introduced to staff in the past year, and is used in most workflows across the bank, according to Brent Chamberlain, vice-president of talent acquisition at the bank. Mr. Chamberlain emphasized that when the bank thinks about attracting talent, it evaluates a candidate’s potential to learn and adopt new technologies.
“We’ve trained over 46,000 team members on responsible AI practices and access to CAI requires learning for all team members, ensuring that everyone using the platform understands the power and the limits of AI,” he said.
Ms. Chaikowsky said that for her, using AI on a daily basis saves an immense amount of time on the research aspect of her job. “I might have spent 45 minutes summarizing meeting notes and looking for relevant documents in the past, and now that’s done in a few minutes. As a result, I have more time for face-to-face conversations with my team.”
She noted that BMO recently started running a series of courses for employees on how to use the right “prompts” to leverage the most out of generative AI. “We are investing a lot in our AI learning curriculum.” Prompts are instructions that users give to an AI agent: the more specific and clear a prompt, the better the agent’s response is.
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At Wealthsimple’s Launchpad, a year-long paid internship program for high school graduates, candidates are expected to be AI-native, according to Diana McLachlan, the company’s chief people officer. “Some of the questions in the interview process are: Do you reflexively think about and use AI? Are you able to give us an example of how you could use AI to make a process more efficient?” Ms. McLachlan told The Globe and Mail.
In Canada, AI adoption has been slow to pick up. A Statistics Canada survey from December of last year found that 12 per cent of businesses have adopted AI in a substantial way. The majority of businesses in Canada did not use AI at all, or used it only infrequently.
In the U.S., however, recent research by the Longitudinal Expert AI Panel – a collaborative venture of computer scientists, AI industry leaders and economists to forecast the impact of AI on life in the coming decade – found that 18 per cent of all work hours are now being assisted by AI, up from 2 per cent in September, 2024.
The adoption of AI tools has led to significant concerns of job losses in many white-collar sectors.
A Stanford University research paper suggested that AI-driven automation has caused a 13-per-cent drop in entry-level jobs in the U.S. since 2022, particularly in tech and finance. There is scant research on how AI is reshaping the Canadian labour market.
In a recent speech, Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem said that the central bank had not seen much of an impact of AI on the labour market, but there was early evidence that AI is reducing the number of entry-level jobs.
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CEOs of some major companies have openly acknowledged that job cuts due to AI have already begun and will continue. Amazon.com Inc. CEO Andy Jassy said last June that generative AI will mean fewer people doing some jobs and a reduction in the total corporate work force head count over the next few years. Amazon has already had two major cuts of its white-collar work force in the past three months. Last fall, Salesforce Inc. slashed 5,000 customer support positions, with its CEO Marc Benioff saying that he needed “less heads” because AI agents handled a large share of interactions.
As AI adoption expands across Canadian banks, however, human-resources leaders are reluctant to directly address whether the technology will reduce the size of their staff.
When asked whether BMO employees – particularly in administrative roles – could find themselves out of a job in the near future, Ms. Chaikowsky said she believes AI will change how work gets done at BMO, but not eliminate the need for people. “It frees up time for us to do more value-add work.”
Wealthsimple is trying to boost head count in its product design and AI department, Ms. McLachlan said. The financial company recently launched a recruiting program called North Star, targeting Canadians working abroad to return to Canada for jobs at Wealthsimple.
For Helena Pagano, chief people and culture officer at SunLife Financial Inc., SLF-T helping legacy employees become AI literate is key in building a competitive work force.
“I’m not too worried about the younger folk, they will be technologically savvy, they’ll know how to use AI tools. To me the biggest focus right now is how do you change the way older employees think about problems and systems and get them to incorporate AI into their work?” she said. “That’s this year’s focus.”