How many Canadian businesses use AI in 2026?

Most claims about AI adoption come from vendor surveys of their own customers. This page uses only federal and provincial government sources: Statistics Canada's Canadian Survey on Business Conditions (CSBC), the Nova Scotia Department of Finance's summary of the same survey, and the federal AI strategy. Every figure below names its source and release date.

The survey asks a specific question: did the business use AI to produce goods or deliver services in the last 12 months? A company where one person asks ChatGPT to tidy an email now and then may answer no. Read the numbers as "AI is part of how the work gets done," not "someone has tried it."

What percentage of Canadian businesses use AI?

19.2% of Canadian businesses used AI to produce goods or deliver services in the 12 months before the second-quarter 2026 survey. Statistics Canada first released the figure in The Daily on May 27, 2026 and published a fuller analysis on June 11, 2026. Data was collected from April 1 to May 6, 2026.

The same question gave 12.2% in the second quarter of 2025 and 6.1% in the second quarter of 2024. Adoption has roughly tripled in two years, from a low base. Four out of five businesses still do not use AI in this way.

Measure	Figure	Source and release date
Businesses using AI, Canada, Q2 2026	19.2%	StatCan CSBC, May 27, 2026
Same measure, Q2 2025	12.2%	StatCan analysis, June 11, 2026
Same measure, Q2 2024	6.1%	StatCan analysis, June 11, 2026
Businesses using AI, Nova Scotia, Q2 2026	15.7%	NS Finance Daily Stats (CSBC), May 27, 2026
Say AI is not relevant, Canada	40.0%	StatCan analysis, June 11, 2026
Say AI is not relevant, Nova Scotia	48.5%	NS Finance Daily Stats, May 27, 2026
Urban vs rural businesses using AI, Canada	21.0% vs 9.9%	StatCan analysis, June 11, 2026

Are small businesses using AI?

Yes, and the smallest firms are not far behind the average. The June 2026 analysis reports that 19.9% of businesses with 1 to 4 employees used AI, against 27.8% of businesses with 100 or more employees. The analysis text does not give a usage rate for the 5 to 19 or 20 to 99 size groups; those sit in StatCan table 33-10-1167-01.

The bigger gap is in attitude. The share saying AI is not relevant to their business was:

• 41.4% for businesses with 1 to 4 employees
• 41.0% for 5 to 19 employees
• 34.3% for 20 to 99 employees
• 21.3% for 100 or more employees

So among firms the size of most of our clients, about four in ten have decided AI does not apply to them. Some of them are right. A business whose work is mostly physical and whose admin load is light may have little to gain this year.

How does Nova Scotia compare?

Nova Scotia is behind the national rate. The province's Department of Finance summary of the Q2 2026 survey, dated May 27, 2026, reports that 15.7% of Nova Scotia businesses used AI tools, against 19.2% across Canada. It also reports that AI was not relevant for 48.5% of Nova Scotia businesses, compared with 40.0% nationally.

Nova Scotia firms named cybersecurity and privacy concerns (16.1%) and uncertainty about the benefits (11.6%) as their most common obstacles. Cost was cited by 6.3%. Almost six in ten Nova Scotia businesses using AI (59.1%) made no training or staffing changes as a result.

The national analysis also shows a wide urban and rural gap: 21.0% of urban businesses used AI compared with 9.9% of rural businesses. Much of Nova Scotia's business base is rural, which may explain part of the provincial gap. The survey does not test that directly, so treat it as a likely factor rather than a finding.

Which industries use AI the most in Canada?

Knowledge-work industries lead and hands-on industries trail. From the June 2026 analysis:

• Highest: information and cultural industries (42.3%), finance and insurance (40.4%), professional, scientific and technical services (32.4%)
• Lowest: agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting (4.5%), wholesale trade (7.9%), construction (9.2%)

Among businesses using AI, the most common uses were data analytics (36.6%), text analytics (34.5%), virtual agents or chatbots (28.2%), natural language processing (27.0%) and large language models (24.8%).

What is stopping businesses from using AI?

Privacy and security worries come first, then cost. Nationally, 13.4% of businesses named cybersecurity or privacy concerns as a barrier and 10.6% named cost. For businesses with 5 to 19 employees, 9.8% cited cost. Concern about privacy rises with size: 11.6% of businesses with 1 to 4 employees cited it, compared with 30.0% of those with 100 or more.

The privacy concern is reasonable. Most of the risk comes from staff pasting client details into free consumer tools with no policy in place. We cover that in whether it's safe to put client information into ChatGPT.

Is AI replacing jobs in Canadian businesses?

Not in the survey data so far. In the 2025 analysis released June 16, 2025, 89.4% of businesses that used AI reported no change in their employment levels after putting it in place. The 2026 analysis says the effect of AI on employment "remains unclear."

What the 2026 data does show is change in how people are trained. 44.4% of AI-using businesses changed their training or staffing practices, most often by training existing employees (32.0%). Large firms did much more of this than small ones: 68.1% of businesses with 100 or more employees trained staff on AI, compared with 24.0% of businesses with 1 to 4 employees.

What is the federal AI adoption target?

Ottawa wants 60% of Canadian businesses using AI by 2034. Prime Minister Carney launched the national AI strategy, "AI for All", on June 4, 2026. The strategy page sets the goal to "increase Canada's business adoption of AI from 12 percent today to 60 percent by 2034." The 12% matches StatCan's 2025 figure, not the 19.2% published a week before the launch. The page also says only about 8% of Canadian SMEs have adopted AI, without naming the source of that number.

For a small business, the target matters mainly because money follows it. The strategy points to BDC's LIFT financing and an expanded Regional Artificial Intelligence Initiative delivered through agencies such as ACOA. Most of these supports are loans or have high minimums. Our guide to AI funding in Nova Scotia lists what is open and who qualifies.

What this means for a 10 to 30 person business

You are not late. Roughly four in five Canadian businesses, and more than four in five in Nova Scotia, are not using AI to deliver their work. There is no reason to rush into a tool because of a headline.

The firms that do use it are concentrated in work that runs on documents, email and data. If your team spends hours a week writing proposals, answering the same questions or summarizing files, you look more like professional services (32.4% using AI) or finance and insurance (40.4%) than like the average business.

Example: a 14-person engineering consultancy in Truro is in "professional, scientific and technical services," where 32.4% of businesses already use AI. Its competitors bidding on the same municipal work are likely using it to draft proposal sections and summarize tender documents. The useful question for the owner is narrower than "should we adopt AI": which two or three tasks take the most staff hours, and could a tool the firm already pays for, such as Copilot or Gemini, take some of that time back with a person checking the output?

The survey also suggests where small firms fall short. They are far less likely than large ones to train staff on AI, so tools get bought and then used by one or two people. Training is usually the cheaper fix.

What to do next

1. List the five tasks that take your team the most hours each week. Mark the ones that are mostly reading or writing.
2. Check which AI features are already in the software you pay for before buying anything new.
3. Write a one-page rule on what client information may and may not go into AI tools.
4. Pick one task, try it for 30 days, and measure the hours saved. Our guide on how to tell whether an AI project worked has a simple template.
5. Check these numbers again when StatCan publishes the second-quarter 2027 survey.

If you want help choosing the first task and getting your team using the tools you already have, that is what our AI adoption and team training work covers.