Canadian firms rank last in AI study

MONTREAL • In spite of Canada’s reputation as a hotbed of artificial intelligence, AI deployment has not yet been a “real success” for the country’s companies, a new report has found.

Canada ranked last out of 10 countries, with just 31 per cent of adopters of the technology claiming successful AI deployment, compared with 59 per cent in India and 58 per cent in Germany, according to the study by Forbes Insights.

Canadian companies also came last for full deployment throughout their firm, and encountered the most resistance from employees due to concerns about job security, the report states.

An ethics-first approach, classic Canadian caution and “humility among executives” help explain the low numbers, said Jodie Wallis, head of AI in Canada for Accenture, one of three firms that commissioned the study.

“In a lot of countries, the organizations are jumping to deploy without being thoughtful about how we’re going to deal with ethics,” Wallis said. “Canadian organizations tend to do the opposite: ‘Let’s think about all the ethics, and then we’ll deploy.’”

Nearly three-quarters of Canadian firms have AI ethics committees, the highest proportion of all countries surveyed, according to the report.

Some characteristic Canadian self-effacement may have tamped down the survey figures, Wallis added. “I think Canadian executives tend to be humble in their self-assessment.”

Canada has become a hot spot for big data analytics over the last few years, with Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Adobe and GM announcing millions of dollars in investment in AI research hubs in Quebec, Ontario and Alberta.

The labs, often working in conjunction with universities and still relatively new, function as test beds that focus on experimentation, with any exhaustive business model overhauls likely still a ways off, Wallis said.

“They’re working on algorithmic advancement that is kind of five years out, from a consumer standpoint. They’re not working on solutions that get deployed tomorrow,” Wallis said of Facebook’s one-year-old lab in Montreal.

Steve Holder, who heads analytics strategy at SAS Canada, stressed “the Canadian conservatism coming around” in the survey’s low success numbers around AI deployment. “We want to make sure that we’ve got the right technology and the right use cases to make it successful in our organization, as opposed to adopting technology wildly.”

Ethical issues include consent, transparency, bias and job impact, Wallis said, citing telecoms as an example.

“Do I really want to go out and say, ‘Hey, I’ve been reading all of your data and I see that you would benefit from a new plan?’ How far do we go before we start to sound creepy or stalker-ish?”