Turley-Ewart: Canada’s risk-averse businesses are slouching toward AI
2025/08/05 2 Comments
Arguably, the hardest issue to address:
…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.
Canada’s aging digital infrastructure is a monument to that complacency. “Canada 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.,” according to RBC. 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.
What makes business AI-adoption rates so puzzling, as Minister Solomon hinted at in a recent interview, is that Canada is known for its “pioneering frontier AI research.” It is home to the “Godfather of AI,” and Nobel Laureate in Physics, University of Toronto’s 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.
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.
We face a future where an inquisitive person writes a prompt in their AI tool of choice asking: Why didn’t Canadian businesses adopt AI sooner and prosper?
If we don’t change course the answer will be: “Risk aversion.” Most Canadian businesses lacked the courage to innovate.
Source: Canada’s risk-averse businesses are slouching toward AI
About Andrew
Multicultural Meanderings 
Interesting article. But the author is a bit more concerning.
He seems to run a firm called Regulatory Risk Management Inc, but the firm has no website. The only location I found for this firm is listed as “closed.” It’s difficult for me to discern what his interest is in more Canadian firms adopting AI, but I feel fairly certain that he has one.
In my experience, most people who contribute op-eds do so from the perspective of their interests. Doesn’t mean arguments are invalid but you are right to note that caution is needed.