AI Adoption by Canadian Small Businesses: 2026 Data

Key takeaways

• 19.2% of Canadian businesses used AI to produce goods or deliver services in the year before spring 2026. That is up from 12.2% in 2025 and 6.1% in 2024 (Statistics Canada).
• The smallest firms are keeping up. 19.9% of businesses with 1 to 4 employees used AI, compared with 14.9% of those with 5 to 19.
• Construction (9.2%), transportation (9.8%) and agriculture (4.5%) have the lowest adoption. Accommodation and food services jumped from 1.5% to 12.7% in a single year.
• The top reason for not using AI is not cost. 40% of businesses say AI is not relevant to them. Privacy and security concerns come second (13.4%).
• 25.2% of businesses say they plan to use AI over the next 12 months.

Search for "AI adoption in Canada" and you will find plenty of vendor surveys with big, round numbers. This post uses one source instead: Statistics Canada's Canadian Survey on Business Conditions. It asked businesses the same AI question in the spring of 2024, 2025 and 2026, so the trend is comparable year to year.

Every figure below comes from a published StatCan table. The table numbers are listed at the end.

How many Canadian businesses use AI in 2026?

Adoption has roughly tripled in two years, from about one business in 16 to about one in 5.

Two details matter when you quote this number:

• It covers all businesses and organizations, including government agencies and non-profits. For private-sector businesses alone, the 2026 figure is 19.0%.
• It measures AI used to produce goods or deliver services. It may not capture an employee who occasionally drafts an email with a chatbot. It is a measure of AI in the work the business actually sells.

AI adoption by business size

In 2024, size made almost no difference. By 2026, larger firms had pulled ahead, but the smallest businesses kept pace with the national average. The group falling behind is the middle: businesses with 5 to 19 employees, at 14.9%.

One plausible reason is that a very small business can adopt a tool the day the owner decides to. A 15-person business has more people, processes and existing software to change. The survey does not ask why, so treat that as a reading of the data, not a finding.

StatCan counts employees as people who receive a T4. Owners and contractors are not counted, so a "1 to 4 employee" business may have more people working in it.

AI adoption by industry

Knowledge industries still lead, which is no surprise. The more interesting story is in the customer-facing industries, which moved the most in the past year:

• Accommodation and food services: 1.5% to 12.7%
• Retail: 6.6% to 19.2%
• Health care and social assistance: 17.4% to 30.0%
• Other services (repair shops, salons and similar): 7.3% to 17.2%

At the bottom, fewer than one construction business in ten uses AI. Manufacturing was flat at 13.1%, and wholesale slipped. Industry estimates carry sampling error, so treat small year-to-year moves with caution. The large jumps above are well outside that range.

AI adoption by province

British Columbia leads by a clear margin. Ontario, home to the largest number of businesses, sits just below the national average.

Location matters even more than province. 21.0% of urban businesses used AI in 2026, compared with 9.9% of rural businesses. The gap was there in all three survey years.

Business age matters too. Firms that are 3 to 10 years old had the highest adoption (25.0%). Businesses more than 20 years old had the lowest (15.0%).

What Canadian businesses use AI for

Among businesses that used AI in 2026, these were the most common types. Businesses could pick more than one, so the categories overlap.

The pattern is practical. Most use is about reading, writing, analysing and answering: summarising data, handling text, and talking to customers through chat or voice. Industry mixes differ. In health care, 43.8% of AI users use speech or voice recognition, possibly for clinical notes and phone intake.

What is stopping the rest?

StatCan also asked every business what limits its use of AI. Businesses could choose several answers.

The biggest barrier is not money or skills. It is relevance. Two in five businesses do not see where AI fits. For many of them that is a fair call: a landscaping crew or a dental lab may have no use for a chatbot.

Among the concrete worries, privacy and security ranks first. Cost comes after it, cited by only about one business in ten.

What's next: plans for the next 12 months

The summer 2026 round of the survey (collected July 2 to August 6, 2026) asked about the year ahead.

• 25.2% of businesses plan to use AI over the next 12 months.
• 52.7% do not plan to.
• 22.1% don't know yet.

By size, 25.6% of businesses with 1 to 4 employees plan to use AI, compared with 21.0% of those with 5 to 19. In construction, 18.3% plan to.

Among businesses that plan to use AI, the most common plans are data analytics (41.7%), large language models (39.3%), virtual agents or chatbots (31.8%) and text analytics (29.0%).

Among those that don't plan to, 79.1% say AI is not relevant to what they produce or deliver. Smaller shares cite privacy or security (10.8%), not knowing what AI can do (9.9%), the technology not being mature enough (9.2%) and cost (4.4%).

The planning figure and the usage figure come from different survey rounds and ask about different periods. Don't read the gap between 25.2% and 19.2% as a forecast.

What this means for a small business owner

1. "Not relevant" is often the right answer, until a specific task makes it relevant. Don't start with AI. Start with a job that eats your week: missed calls, quote follow-ups, invoice entry, answering the same five questions. If no task like that exists, you can skip AI for now.

2. The common uses are unglamorous. The national data points to analytics, text and customer conversations, not robots. Those are also the cheapest places to start and the easiest to measure.

3. Ask about privacy first. It is the top concrete concern for a reason. Before you sign up for any AI tool, ask where your data and your customers' data are stored, whether Canadian hosting is available, and whether your data is used to train the vendor's models.

4. Measure one thing before and after. Choose a single number, such as calls answered, hours spent on admin or time to send a quote. Check it after 30 days. If it didn't move, stop.

5. If you are in the trades, you are early. Construction adoption is 9.2%. That means fewer competitors are using it, and simple uses like answering every call can still set you apart. Our guide to AI answering services for contractors covers costs, setup and testing.

For the policy side, including Ottawa's adoption target, see our post on what Canada's new AI strategy gets right.

At Via6 we build voice and chat agents for small businesses, with Canadian hosting available. If you want to know whether AI fits a specific task in your business, book a free AI audit. We will tell you if it doesn't.

About the data

• Source: Statistics Canada, Canadian Survey on Business Conditions.
• Usage figures come from the second-quarter survey each year. The 2026 round was collected April 1 to May 6, 2026. Businesses reported on the previous 12 months.
• Planning figures come from the third-quarter 2026 survey, collected July 2 to August 6, 2026.
• Denominators: percentages are of all businesses and organizations in each group. There are two exceptions: types of AI used are a share of AI users, and reasons for not planning are a share of businesses with no plans.
• Quality: StatCan rates every estimate from A (excellent) to F (too unreliable to publish). All figures quoted here are rated A, B or C.

Tables:

• Table 33-10-0825-01: AI use, second quarter of 2024
• Table 33-10-1004-01: AI use, second quarter of 2025
• Table 33-10-1167-01: AI use, second quarter of 2026
• Table 33-10-1169-01: Barriers to AI use, second quarter of 2026
• Table 33-10-1207-01: Planned AI use, third quarter of 2026
• Table 33-10-1208-01: Reasons for not planning to use AI, third quarter of 2026