The amount of Canadian businesses using artificial intelligence (AI) to produce goods or deliver services doubled between May 2024 and May 2025, according to a new survey from Statistics Canada (StatsCan), but the technology’s effect on company headcount has yet to materialize.
According to the survey, 12.2 percent of businesses reported using AI to produce goods or deliver services over the 12 months preceding the survey, an increase from the 6.1 percent that reported the same in the previous survey in 2024. Despite the uptick, nearly 90 percent of those businesses reported no change to their employment levels after implementation, but the number of businesses that increased headcount due to AI declined from 8.8 percent to 4.3 percent.
The survey found that many businesses do not consider AI investment to be required for their operations.
The data comes from the Canadian Survey on Business Conditions, which StatsCan conducted between early April and early May 2025, to gather information on the use of AI and its impacts on businesses, as well as their expectations moving forward. The survey sampled 21,357 people from a total of 9,103 businesses or organizations, according to StatsCan.
The survey found that many businesses do not consider AI investment to be required for their operations, with 41.2 percent reporting it to be “not relevant” and 17.3 percent plainly classifying it as “not important.” A combined 28.4 percent classified investing in AI as “very” or “somewhat important.”
Given the survey’s sample time period, the ever-increasing presence of AI-first policies has yet to be captured. In early April, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke published an internal memo stating that employees must prove AI can’t do the job before asking for additional resources or headcount. Shopify’s approach garnered support from tech moguls, and joined a growing list of companies considering AI use before adding talent.
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“We want to be an AI first company, let’s make sure we put all the foundation infrastructure in place, and let’s enable our teammates to embrace it,” Fullscript CEO Kyle Braatz said at AccelerateOTT last week, adding that he wanted to build a “forcing function” around it.
“It’s not about cost saving, I want to actually grow more,” Braatz added.
Last month, Kitchener-Waterloo-based OpenText followed suit, cutting 1,600 jobs as it made AI use a baseline expectation for employees.
The industries most likely to use AI remained the same as last year, according to the survey, with 30 to 35 percent of surveyed companies in the information and cultural industries; professional, scientific and technical services; and finance and insurance space reporting to have used the technology within the 12 month timeframe. AI use was lowest in the accommodation and food services; agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting; and transportation and warehousing industries, at 1.5 to 1.8 percent.
Feature image courtesy Steve Johnson via Unsplash.