Key points
- AI use among Canadian businesses went from 6.1% in 2024 to 19.2% in 2026, according to Statistics Canada.
- The tools change faster than any training plan. Major providers can retire a model on about 60 days’ notice.
- There is no kill switch coming. The firms that do well will be the ones that build a habit of learning, not a one-time rollout.
I have been in the AI space for about seven years, and the AI pace of change has never been faster. One of the first chatbots I played with was Jasper AI, if anyone remembers that. Back then it felt like magic that a tool could write a half-decent product description. Today that same task is a rounding error inside tools that can read a contract, build a spreadsheet and draft the email about it in one go.
I have said this for a while now: the genie is out of the bottle. Some people still hope for a kill switch, a moment when regulators or the big labs pause everything and give the rest of us time to catch up. I don’t think that moment is coming. The better plan is to learn, and then keep learning, because the AI pace of change is not going to slow down for anyone.
What does the AI pace of change look like for Canadian businesses?
The AI pace of change is faster than most leaders I talk to assume. Statistics Canada’s Canadian Survey on Business Conditions found that 19.2% of businesses used AI to produce goods or deliver services in the 12 months before the second quarter of 2026. A year earlier the figure was 12.2%. In the second quarter of 2024 it was 6.1%. That is a tripling in two years.
The same survey shows the mix of tools shifting too. Among businesses using AI, the share using large language models rose from 19.1% to 24.8% in a year, and decision-making systems based on AI went from 5.7% to 13.7%. And in the third quarter of 2026, one quarter of businesses said they plan to use AI over the next 12 months. I unpacked what the end of that StatCan series means for small firms in this look at the final business conditions survey.
From my first chatbot to now: a short timeline
- About 2019 I start working in AI. Chatbots are scripted and brittle.
- Early 2020s Writing tools like Jasper AI show small teams what generated text can do.
- Nov 30, 2022 OpenAI releases ChatGPT as a free research preview.
- Q2 2024 6.1% of Canadian businesses use AI.
- Q2 2025 12.2% use AI.
- Q2 2026 19.2% use AI. Large language model use among adopters hits 24.8%.
- Q3 2026 One quarter of businesses plan to use AI in the next 12 months.
Sources: Statistics Canada, Canadian Survey on Business Conditions (Q2 2024 to Q3 2026); OpenAI, “Introducing ChatGPT” (Nov 30, 2022). The first two entries are from my own experience.
Why won’t there be an AI kill switch?
Because the tools are already spread too wide. They run inside the software you pay for, on the phones your staff carry and on open models anyone can download. Even if one country slowed things down, your competitors, suppliers and customers in other markets would keep going.
The providers themselves are not slowing down either. Anthropic’s model deprecation policy promises customers at least 60 days’ notice before a publicly released model is retired. Think about what that means. The model your team learned in the spring can be gone by the fall, replaced by one that behaves differently. That is not a reason to panic. It is a reason to stop treating AI as a project with an end date. I wrote about the upkeep side of this in my column on AI agent maintenance.
What should business leaders do instead of waiting?
Build learning into the week, the same way you build in a sales meeting. Here is what I suggest to teams:
- Book one hour a week. Each person tries one AI tool on one real task and shares what worked and what failed.
- Keep a short log. Note which model or version you used. When it changes, you will know what to retest.
- Pick tasks, not tools. Start from the work that eats your time. The brand name matters less than people think, as we argued in ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini is the wrong first question.
- Train the junior people too. The entry-level roles are changing first. Our piece on entry-level hiring and AI in Canada covers why.
- Review every quarter. Ask what you stopped doing by hand, what broke and what is new since last time.
None of this needs a big budget. It needs someone who owns it and a calendar that protects it.
Is it too late to start learning AI in 2026?
No. Four in five Canadian businesses still are not using AI to produce goods or deliver services, based on the StatCan figure above. That means most of your peers are still early. The gap is real, but it is still small enough to close if you start now and keep going.
When I look back at that first Jasper session, the lesson was not that one tool was amazing. It was that the next one would be better, and the one after that better again. The people who kept learning through each jump are the ones getting real value today. I share more of what I am seeing on my website, aiwithzak.com.
Keeping up is part of my job, so I keep my finger on the pulse every week. There is a lot of noise out there. I filter it through my own lens and turn it into something like digital field notes: what changed, what it means and what an organization should actually do about it. If that would help you and your team, subscribe to my newsletter at ainewsletter.ca.
FAQ
How many 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 of 2026, up from 6.1% in 2024, according to Statistics Canada.
How often do AI models get retired?
It varies by provider. Anthropic commits to at least 60 days’ notice before retiring a publicly released model, so teams should expect the tools they use to change several times a year.
Is there going to be an AI kill switch?
In my view, no. AI is already built into common business software and open models, so the practical answer is to keep learning rather than wait for a pause.
Disclosure: ZAK is the founder of ORKA AI; aiwithzak.com is his website. This column mentions his own projects. It is analysis and opinion.
