Artificial intelligence (AI) has been a hot topic for some time now, but in many ways we are still at the front edge of its potential impact on the workplace and the economy (not to mention on our personal lives and society in general).

The inclusion of specific questions about the impact of AI in the Canadian Survey on Business Conditions sheds some light on this.

The adoption of AI for business purposes is not as widespread as the headlines might suggest with only 1 in 10 businesses (12%) in Canada using AI in the production of goods or services over the last 12 months.

Among the subset of businesses using the technology, AI is changing the work done by humans with over 8 in 10 reporting that it has reduced tasks previously performed by employees to either a large (5%), moderate (32%) or small (47%) extent.

The impact of this on the staffing levels of these businesses has been modest with about 9 in 10 reporting no impact on their total number of employees. A slightly larger share said it has led to a decrease in employment (6%) than an increase (4%).

The most common AI application used by these businesses was text analytics (36%) followed by data analytics (26%), and virtual agents/chat bots (25%).

When asked about the importance of investing in AI tools* to the operations of their business, about 3 in 10 respondents said it was very (8%) or somewhat (20%) important with 6 in 10 saying it was not important (17%) or not relevant (41%). (The remaining 13% did not know.)

These findings suggest that, whatever is next for AI in the workplace, its usage is far from ubiquitous and, for those businesses that have adopted it, its impact on employment levels has been fairly small. With that said, the fact that 1 in 10 businesses are already using AI could also be interpreted as a sign of things to come.

*Artificial intelligence tools were defined as software applications that use AI algorithms to perform specific tasks and solve problems such as ChatGPT, Github CoPilot, DALL-E, Paradox.

Answer to the previous trivia question: Saudi Arabia is the largest oil producer in OPEC.

Today’s trivia question: How many forms of communication is the protocol droid C-3PO in the Star Wars movies fluent in?