One national number, and a very uneven map underneath it.
Short answer
19.2% of Canadian businesses reported using AI to produce goods or deliver services in the 12 months before Statistics Canada's second-quarter 2026 survey — a figure that has tripled from 6.1% just two years earlier. That average hides a wide range: from under 5% in some industries to over 40% in others.
The figure comes from Statistics Canada’s Canadian Survey on Business Conditions, collected between 1 April and 6 May 2026 from a sample of 21,105 businesses, with 9,251 responding. Statistics Canada reports: “In the second quarter of 2026, 19.2% of businesses reported using AI to produce goods or deliver services over the 12 months preceding the survey”, adding that “This proportion has tripled since the second quarter of 2024 (6.1%)”. Meanwhile, 40.0% of businesses said AI use “is not relevant to the business” at all.
The national figure blends very different realities. By industry, information and cultural industries (42.3%), finance and insurance (40.4%) and professional, scientific and technical services (32.4%) lead, against agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting (4.5%), wholesale trade (7.9%) and construction (9.2%) at the other end — all per the same release. Urban businesses reported 21.0% use versus 9.9% for rural businesses. By size, 27.8% of businesses with 100 or more employees reported using AI, compared with 19.9% of businesses with 1 to 4 employees — a smaller gap than many would expect, given how differently the two groups are resourced to adopt it.
The 19.2% spans a wide range of activity. Among AI-using businesses, the most common applications are data analytics (36.6%), text analytics (34.5%) and virtual agents or chatbots (28.2%) — so the figure covers everything from a small business leaning on a chatbot to a finance firm running a dedicated analytics model, not one uniform kind of use. See how Canadian businesses actually use AI for that breakdown in full, or whether this growth is a passing trend for the trajectory behind the number.
The national figure is a starting point. Your sector's line is the one that actually matters.
