Canada’s largest industries, including financial services and energy, will also be those most disrupted by artificial intelligence, putting pressure on the country’s traditionally conservative businesses to become early adopters, according to a new report.by consulting firm Accenture says generative artificial intelligence – the latest iteration of AI tools that are capable of creating original works, such as ChatGPT and DALL-E – will forever change how we work.
Investing in technological adoption at this relatively early stage of development is somewhat out of character for Canadian businesses. According to the Conference Board of Canada’s latest, which was last published in June of 2021, the country scored a C in its economy’s overall innovation, and ranked 11th among the 16 countries analyzed.
That sentiment is echoed by Dr. Stephen Thomas, a professor of management analytics at the Smith School of Business at Queen’s University in Kingston, who also sees Canadian businesses in those most affected sectors moving uncharacteristically fast to adopt AI.