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Carney's "AI for All": What Canada's New AI Strategy Means for Business

Writer: Jim Crocker
Jim Crocker
Jun 4
4 min read

On June 4, the federal government put real money behind artificial intelligence. Prime Minister Mark Carney launched a national AI strategy called 'AI for All'. It is backed by more than $2 billion in funding and a set of specific promises:


  • $200 billion in additional economic growth and 250,000 new AI-related jobs over five years

  • Up to 90,000 AI-related jobs and work placements aimed at young Canadians

  • A free national AI literacy program, plus access to AI tools for every post-secondary student

  • Support for small and mid-sized firms to adopt AI

  • A public AI supercomputer to build out Canadian computing capacity


One business target sits at the center: lifting Canadian business AI adoption from just over 12% today to 60% by 2034.


AI adoption of only 12% seems surprisingly low so I took a closer look. It's a little more complicated story than the headline suggests. To judge whether the strategy will actually help your business, you have to start with where Canadian business stands today.


How quickly are Canadian businesses adopting AI?

The 12% adoption rate comes from Statistics Canada. In the second quarter of 2025, 12.2% of businesses said they had used AI to produce goods or deliver services in the previous year. That had doubled from 6.1% a year earlier. By this measure, adoption is genuinely low, and Canada is among the slower G7 countries to put AI to work at scale.


The measure is a narrow one though. It only counts AI built into how a company makes its product or delivers its service, and plenty of real use falls outside that. Viewed more broadly the numbers climb fast. KPMG found 93% of business leaders say their organization uses AI in some form. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business put it at 45% of firms using generative AI for tasks, and roughly half of working Canadians say they use it on the job.


So here's the question - which is it, 12% or 93%?


It turns out both are accurate. The gap between them is this: lots of businesses are experimenting with AI. Far fewer have made it part of how they operate.


What's also interesting is the adoption rate between industries. It is very uneven. Information and cultural industries lead at about 36%, with professional services and finance above 30%. At the other end, accommodation, food, agriculture and transportation all sit under 2%(!!). In other words, a business in a top sector is more than twenty times as likely to use AI as one at the bottom. The 12% national figure is an average of industries that are nowhere near each other.


Almost no one is seeing a return — yet

Another figure I keep coming back to is this - in the same KPMG survey, only 2% of leaders said their organization is actually seeing a return on its AI investment. A separate Business Development Bank finding points the other way: 97% of small firms that have adopted AI report tangible benefits.


Read together, they suggest the problem isn't whether AI can pay off. It's that most companies haven't yet connected adoption to strategically planned and measurable outputs.


Is Carney's plan good for Canadian business?

The diagnosis behind the strategy seems fair. Canada is adopting slowly, and falling behind has a cost. The part I find most useful is the focus on literacy and training, because that targets the actual bottleneck. Only about a quarter of Canadian employees have had any AI training, and the bigger barrier most owners describe isn't the technology, it's not being able to picture where it fits. Free training and AI tools in the hands of students and workers speak directly to that.


Where I'd hold back is on the headline math. Going from 12% to 60% is more ambition than forecast and the strategy for getting there is a little thin. It also leans on the low adoption number to make the case for spending, while quietly treating adoption and value as the same thing. With only 2% of leaders seeing AI ROI, they clearly are not!


My Takeaway: Don't Wait for the Program!

My takeaway for a business owner is simpler than the strategy. Don't wait for the program to arrive. The companies getting value from AI right now aren't the ones with the most tools. They're the ones that have chosen a real, specific opportunity/problem, applied AI to it, and measured whether it actually worked. The gap between using AI and getting something from it is the one you can close yourself this year, regardless of what Ottawa funds.


Sources


Jim Crocker is an AI governance consultant and board director. He writes about what boards and senior executives need to know about AI at jimcrockerai.com.

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