{"id":480807,"date":"2026-02-17T14:03:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-17T14:03:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/480807\/"},"modified":"2026-02-17T14:03:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-17T14:03:07","slug":"major-employers-in-tech-and-finance-expect-new-hires-to-be-ai-literate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/480807\/","title":{"rendered":"Major employers in tech and finance expect new hires to be AI literate"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

Some of Canada\u2019s banks are among the major employers rolling out AI technology in the workplace.Tijana Martin\/The Canadian Press<\/p>\n

Major employers in tech and finance increasingly expect new recruits to be \u201cAI-literate\u201d and have a firm grasp of how to use artificial-intelligence<\/a> tools to boost their efficiency, marking a clear shift in expectations of new employees.<\/p>\n

Bank of Montreal BMO-T<\/a> and Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce CM-T<\/a> 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. <\/p>\n

\u201cAI is now a core skill for anyone we are bringing into the institution,\u201d said Larissa Chaikowsky, chief learning officer and head of talent at BMO. \u201cWe 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.\u201d <\/p>\n

Ms. Chaikowsky added that more than 90 per cent of BMO\u2019s 53,000 employees now use Microsoft Copilot in their jobs. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Generative AI \u2013 a type of artificial intelligence that can create content, processes, images and videos based on patterns that it learns from existing data \u2212 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\u2019s ChatGPT, Anthropic\u2019s Claude and Microsoft Copilot being able to perform complex research and organizational tasks with the right prompts from a user. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

E-commerce platform Shopify Inc. SHOP-T<\/a> recently mandated that managers wanting to hire must demonstrate why they need an extra person for the task and why using AI isn\u2019t sufficient. In an April, 2025, memo<\/a>, Shopify CEO Tobi L\u00fctke 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 \u201copt out\u201d of learning the skill. Mr. L\u00fctke also noted that AI usage questions will now be on staff performance reviews. <\/p>\n

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At CIBC, a new AI tool called CIBC AI or \u201cCAI\u201d 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\u2019s potential to learn and adopt new technologies.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve 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,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

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. \u201cI might have spent 45 minutes summarizing meeting notes and looking for relevant documents in the past, and now that\u2019s done in a few minutes. As a result, I have more time for face-to-face conversations with my team.\u201d <\/p>\n

She noted that BMO recently started running a series of courses for employees on how to use the right \u201cprompts\u201d to leverage the most out of generative AI. \u201cWe are investing a lot in our AI learning curriculum.\u201d Prompts are instructions that users give to an AI agent: the more specific and clear a prompt, the better the agent\u2019s response is. <\/p>\n

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At Wealthsimple\u2019s Launchpad, a year-long paid internship program for high school graduates, candidates are expected to be AI-native, according to Diana McLachlan, the company\u2019s chief people officer. \u201cSome 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?\u201d Ms. McLachlan told The Globe and Mail. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

In the U.S., however, recent research by the Longitudinal Expert AI Panel \u2013 a collaborative venture of computer scientists, AI industry leaders and economists to forecast the impact of AI on life in the coming decade \u2013 found that 18 per cent of all work hours are now being assisted by AI, up from 2 per cent in September, 2024. <\/p>\n

The adoption of AI tools has led to significant concerns of job losses in many white-collar sectors.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

How a small-town company that can trace its roots to 1917 is helping fuel the AI boom<\/a><\/p>\n

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 \u201cless heads\u201d because AI agents handled a large share of interactions. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

When asked whether BMO employees \u2013 particularly in administrative roles \u2013 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. \u201cIt frees up time for us to do more value-add work.\u201d <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

For Helena Pagano, chief people and culture officer at SunLife Financial Inc., SLF-T<\/a> helping legacy employees become AI literate is key in building a competitive work force.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not too worried about the younger folk, they will be technologically savvy, they\u2019ll 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?\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s this year\u2019s focus.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Some of Canada\u2019s banks are among the major employers rolling out AI technology…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":480808,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,49174,61],"class_list":{"0":"post-480807","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-streetwise","14":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480807","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=480807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480807\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/480808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=480807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=480807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=480807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}