Infographic: Insights and Challenges of AI Adoption in Canadian Workspaces

KEY FINDINGS OF THE STUDY

CDW commissioned a comprehensive survey in collaboration with Angus Reid of Canadian office workers to understand their relationship with AI tools and how AI technologies are reshaping Canadian workplaces. Here are some of the key findings of the report.

Employees are driving AI adoption

47%

of business/professional services organizations reported that remote/hybrid work has heightened their security risk.

73%

of employees are learning how to use unregulated AI tools through trial and error or informal methods, rather than with structured training programs.

74%

of unregulated use occurs once a month or more often.

75%

who use unapproved AI tools at work use public natural language processing and interaction tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.

Organizational implementation is lagging

36%

of the surveyed organizations are in the planning stage of implementing AI tools, 30% have no plans to do it and only 35% of them have fully or partially implemented these tools.

64%

of organizations who have implemented AI tools have offered training, but the majority of this training is in a limited capacity.

61%

of Canadian employees feel most comfortable about AI use in the workplace when tools have been implemented formally by their organizations.

31%

of employees at workplaces that have implemented AI tools have not used these tools.

Comprehensive training can help overcome barriers

61%

of respondents have personally hesitated to use AI tools. The most common reasons were the reliability and accuracy of the output as well as ethical implications.

40%

of users are infrequently utilizing AI tools. The main cited reason was that they didn’t find AI tools relevant to their specific job task.

50%

of those who received comprehensive training reported using AI tools on a daily basis.

Small businesses are not as comfortable with AI use

38%

of small businesses expressed being comfortable with AI tools (compared to 49% of medium-sized organizations and 45% of enterprise organizations).

54%

of small businesses have not implemented AI.