89% of businesses are already using AI. Only 11% have redesigned the roles around it. For Canadian HR leaders, that gap is either a warning sign or a head start.
Hayden Alge
Sr Director, Solution Consulting
Workday
The workforce of tomorrow is here now.
Business leaders have spent years looking ahead to a day when humans and AI agents would operate side by side, unlocking new possibilities for productivity and innovation. Well, the wait is over: Workday’s research for the C-Suite Indicator Report found that 89% of businesses are now using AI tools. At the same time, 62% of leaders report that their people, processes, and technology do not work together very effectively.
Generally speaking, AI has arrived faster than the infrastructure to support it. Many businesses are scrambling to adapt to an entirely new paradigm. In a way, this puts those in Canada, where AI adoption lags behind (just 19.2% of businesses reported using AI to produce goods or deliver services in the latest data from StatCan), at a relative advantage.
There’s still runway to get this right before AI-augmented workforces fully take hold across the country. Now is the time for HR leaders to take proactive steps and get ahead of the curve.
“Generally speaking, AI has arrived faster than the infrastructure to support it. Many businesses are scrambling to adapt to an entirely new paradigm. In a way, this puts those in Canada, where AI adoption lags behind, at a relative advantage.”
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In a sense, blended workforces had already become normalised even before AI’s widespread adoption. Contingent talent is an increasingly integral part of workforce strategy: gig workers, contractors, freelancers, and so on. People leaders have been grappling for years with figuring out the best ways to align external and full-time forces.
AI is merely a new entrant to this arena, albeit one that adds a dimension of complexity. The prevailing reality: a blended workforce only works when it's managed as one workforce, not several parallel ones.
Gig and contingent work is a case in point: Statistics Canada data shows the share of gig workers in Canada's labour force climbed from 5.5% in 2005 to 8.2% by 2016, and by 2022, a national survey conducted for the Future Skills Centre found that figure had grown to roughly 21% of Canada's labour force. That's a fourfold increase in less than two decades, playing out well before most HR functions had built the infrastructure to manage it well.
AI agents represent the newest, fastest-moving version of that same challenge.
“The prevailing reality: a blended workforce only works when it's managed as one workforce, not several parallel ones.”
StatCan’s study on AI adoption and productivity in Canadian firms found that overall, AI adopters show a 16.8% productivity premium. Here’s the critical nuance, though: that figure falls to 10.2% controlling for pre-existing productivity, and to a statistically insignificant 5.1% once complementary capabilities (data analytics, cloud, ICT training) are controlled for.
“This underscores that the productivity premium observed earlier may not be attributable to AI alone,” said researchers Jiang Li and Huju Liu. “Instead, it reflects the critical role of complementary investments in enabling AI’s productivity-enhancing potential.”
I mentioned earlier that nearly two-thirds of business leaders report a lack of cohesion between their people, processes, and tech. Dig deeper into the data and you start to find some culprits: In most organisations (89%), fewer than half of roles have been updated to reflect AI capabilities. Meanwhile, 37% of time saved by AI is being offset by time spent on rework, and 1.5 weeks’ worth of employee time per year is spent fixing AI outputs. You can easily see where that productivity premium is being lost.
Overcoming this all-too-common pitfall requires a thoughtful approach designed to diagnose and address three critical gaps:
66% of leaders cite skills training as a top priority, but only 37% of employees experiencing the highest rework say they're getting access to it.
These disconnects all tie back to one root cause: organisations have treated AI adoption as a technology decision instead of a workforce decision. Roles, skills, and governance are people questions, meaning they were never IT's to solve alone, and they're not solvable through better tooling by itself either.
And that is where the CHRO's mandate begins.
Up until now, the core obstacle to managing a blended, AI-augmented workforce has been simple. Most organisations couldn't actually see all their AI agents in one place — who built them, who owns them, what they're doing, or whether they're delivering value. That's begun to change, as platforms extend the same discipline long applied to managing people and money to the agents now working alongside them.
When agents are visible, governed, and measured the same way employees are, the role gap, the skills gap, and the governance gap all become much easier to close. Leaders are finally looking at one workforce instead of guessing at several.
The window is open. By and large, Canadian organisations aren't behind the curve on this. They're early on it, with more runway than most global peers to build the proper underlying systems before adoption catches up.
The 89% of businesses already using AI tools didn't wait for that infrastructure to be ready. Canada still has the chance to build it first.
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