Canada trails Europe, U.S. when adopting tech: Amazon

Canadian businesses are slower to adopt new technology than their European and American counterparts, according to Canada’s head of Amazon Web Services.

The e-commerce giant has noticed it takes more education and convincing to get Canadian firms to embrace the industry’s latest advancements, Eric Gales, country manager of Amazon’s cloud-computing subsidiary AWS told The Canadian Press.

“The U.K. is very competitive because the whole country is just that much more dense, so that has a function in driving things like adoptions,” said Gales, who moved to Canada in 2006 from the U.K. and spent 13 years working for Microsoft before joining Amazon. “Here, we find adoption rates of new technologies are generally a bit slower.”

He’s noticed that by the time a typical business in Canada adopts a product, the next version or feature with enhanced capabilities is already available because someone else pushed for it previously.

The disparity stems in part from what Gales considers to be an “old model” of business, where quick adoption was mainly the privilege of companies who could afford to make large investments in platforms and features that would grow their business and help them beat competitors.

As technology gets cheaper, more companies can afford to indulge in the latest gadgets and software, breaking down the gap between the “haves and have-nots.”