{"id":44751,"date":"2025-08-04T14:28:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-04T14:28:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/44751\/"},"modified":"2025-08-04T14:28:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-04T14:28:09","slug":"canadas-risk-averse-businesses-are-slouching-toward-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/44751\/","title":{"rendered":"Canada\u2019s risk-averse businesses are slouching toward AI"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Canada ranks among the least AI literate nations globally, according to KPMG, despite AI’s ability to reduce business operating costs and increase employees productivity.Dado Ruvic\/Reuters<\/p>\n

John Turley-Ewart is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail, a regulatory compliance consultant and a Canadian banking historian. <\/p>\n

Many Canadian businesses never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. That is the emerging consensus as artificial intelligence adoption advances with pace in the U.S., the E.U. and Asia while most Canadian businesses dawdle. A course correction is needed. <\/p>\n

Just as business leaders are now calling<\/a> on Canada to be an energy superpower, the same urgency is needed for Canada to be an AI superpower. <\/p>\n

AI\u2019s applicability runs across the business spectrum, from large corporations to small- and medium-sized enterprises, or SMEs. The productivity gains are particularly evident for SMEs that deploy AI to manage repetitive tasks and support operations.<\/p>\n

Opinion: Canada has a rare chance to become an energy superpower. Let\u2019s not squander it<\/a><\/p>\n

The Business Development Bank of Canada\u2019s recent impact assessment<\/a> demonstrated that, \u201cA staggering 97% of SMEs using AI reported tangible benefits from using AI, including increased efficiency, reduced costs, higher sales, improved customer service, and better management of sales, production, or inventory.\u201d <\/p>\n

AI can reduce operating costs and increase the productivity of existing employees. And yet, for most Canadian businesses, AI is apparently a mystery yet to be solved. The same seems to be true of Canadians more generally.<\/p>\n

KPMG reported<\/a> that \u201cCanada ranks among the least AI literate nations globally.\u201d <\/p>\n

Evan Solomon, Canada\u2019s Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation, suggested<\/a> to BNN Bloomberg that business leaders are \u201cnot sure how it will address the bottom line.\u201d <\/p>\n

RBC points to<\/a> a lack of \u201cimagination\u201d and laments that \u201conly 12% of Canadian firms have integrated AI into their production or services, placing Canada among the lowest in AI adoption in the OECD.\u201d<\/p>\n

Canada\u2019s first AI Minister Evan Solomon on his plan to scale up the industry<\/a><\/p>\n

Sheldon Fernandez, an AI strategist and former CEO of DarwinAI, a Canadian AI start-up that was bought by Apple in 2024, has direct experience promoting productivity-improving AI tools to Canadian businesses. <\/p>\n

His story is telling<\/a>: \u201cThe corporate clients we engage are just very risk averse. It was much easier to engage in an experimental project with our companies and partners in the United States and Europe and even Asia than here in Canada,\u201d he said on RBC\u2019s Disruptors podcast. That \u201cvery risk adverse\u201d Canadian business culture is the problem. Mr. Fernandez believes it is \u201climiting the aggressive adoption of AI transformation in this country.\u201d<\/p>\n

We have seen this play out before. Opportunity knocks, and businesses won\u2019t answer the door. In the mid-2000s, federal government policies initiated in the late 1990s led to balanced budgets and new business tax advantages compared to other jurisdictions. Despite these advantages, economist Don Drummond noted<\/a> on the Let\u2019s Talk Economics podcast that Canadian businesses were more inclined to rely on a cheap Canadian dollar than productivity investments. <\/p>\n

When those advantages slipped away under the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau, businesses began to notice and demands for change in Ottawa were voiced, culminating in an open letter<\/a> supporting the Conservatives in the April 28 federal election signed by more than 30 business leaders.<\/p>\n

\u201cProductivity has stalled. Economic growth has slowed. Our GDP per capita is shrinking,\u201d they said. <\/p>\n

Opinion: To foster greater trust in artificial intelligence, we need better regulators<\/a><\/p>\n

Yet, the slow adoption of AI raises questions about Canadian businesses. What are they doing to invest in their own success? The inability of so many to effectively manage AI integration that will enable them to help themselves and improve productivity, economic growth and GDP per capita points to a culture of complacency.<\/p>\n

Canada\u2019s aging digital infrastructure is a monument to that complacency. \u201cCanada trails every other G7 nation in AI computing infrastructure, possessing only one-eighth to one-tenth of the available compute performance per capita compared to countries like the U.S.,\u201d according to RBC<\/a>. AI is the high-speed train that needs high speed tracks and engines. Canadian AI is running on 1960s era rails built for plodding diesel engines.<\/p>\n

What makes business AI-adoption rates so puzzling, as Minister Solomon hinted at in a recent interview<\/a>, is that Canada is known for its \u201cpioneering frontier AI research.\u201d It is home to the \u201cGodfather of AI<\/a>,\u201d and Nobel Laureate in Physics, University of Toronto\u2019s Geoffrey Hinton. The country also has AI research organizations that do world-leading work: The Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, the Vector Institute in Toronto, as well as the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute.<\/p>\n

Is AI dulling critical-thinking skills? As tech companies court students, educators weigh the risks<\/a><\/p>\n

That Canada is blessed with such rich AI research and innovation, and yet 88 per cent of our businesses have not even started to integrate AI into their operating models, speaks to a troubling lack of curiosity.<\/p>\n

We face a future where an inquisitive person writes a prompt in their AI tool of choice asking: Why didn\u2019t Canadian businesses adopt AI sooner and prosper? <\/p>\n

If we don\u2019t change course the answer will be: \u201cRisk aversion.\u201d Most Canadian businesses lacked the courage to innovate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Canada ranks among the least AI literate nations globally, according to KPMG, despite…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":44752,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,901,276,277,888,902,879,877,903,49,48,876,895,896,891,878,875,46,549,295,894,887,914,880,881,893,889,890,884,904,885,909,910,912,907,911,905,908,882,898,899,714,897,906,865,61,900,892,886,883,913],"class_list":["post-44751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-alberta","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-arts-news","tag-bc","tag-breaking-news","tag-breaking-news-video","tag-british-columbia","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-canada-news","tag-canada-sports","tag-canada-sports-news","tag-canada-trafficcanada-weather","tag-canadian-breaking-news","tag-canadian-news","tag-economy","tag-education","tag-environment","tag-federal-government","tag-foreign-news","tag-globe-and-mail","tag-globe-and-mail-breaking-news","tag-globe-and-mail-canada-news","tag-government","tag-life-news","tag-lifestyle","tag-local-news","tag-manitoba","tag-national-news","tag-new-brunswick","tag-newfoundland-and-labrador","tag-northwest-territories","tag-nova-scotia","tag-nunavut","tag-ontario","tag-pei","tag-photos","tag-political-news","tag-political-opinion","tag-politics","tag-politics-news","tag-quebec","tag-sports-news","tag-technology","tag-travel","tag-trudeau","tag-us-news","tag-world-news","tag-yukon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44751"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44751\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}