Old field, young business habit — and mixing the two up is where most of the confusion starts.
Short answer
Artificial intelligence as an academic field is roughly seven decades old, and Canada has been part of that story since the 1980s. What most people actually mean when they ask this — the AI showing up in day-to-day business use — is much younger: Statistics Canada's own data shows the share of Canadian businesses using it has tripled in just the last two years.
The building blocks go back further than most people expect. In 1943, neuroscientist Warren S. McCulloch and logician Walter Pitts sketched a theoretical design for an “artificial neuron”, and in 1950 Alan Turing proposed what he called the “imitation game” — now known as the Turing Test — as a way to ask whether a machine could be mistaken for a person in conversation, according to The Canadian Encyclopedia. The field got its name and its founding moment in the summer of 1956, when a group of researchers gathered at Dartmouth College — among them John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon, Allen Newell and Herbert Simon — to, in the words of their own proposal, “find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves”. That is close to seventy years before anyone in a Canadian business asked a chatbot to draft an email.
Canadian AI research is also older than the current wave suggests. The University of Toronto hired Geoffrey E. Hinton, a pioneer of the deep-learning techniques behind today’s generative tools, in 1987; the Université de Montréal hired Yoshua Bengio in 1993; and the University of Alberta hired Richard Sutton, a pioneer in reinforcement learning, in 2003 — all per The Canadian Encyclopedia’s account. Hinton went on to share the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for that work. None of this is a coincidence of timing: it is decades of academic groundwork that happened to become commercially visible all at once.
The genuinely recent development is adoption, not invention. Statistics Canada’s Canadian Survey on Business Conditions found that 19.2% of Canadian businesses reported using AI to produce goods or deliver services in the 12 months before its second-quarter 2026 survey. “This proportion has tripled since the second quarter of 2024 (6.1%),” the agency notes. So when someone asks whether AI is old or new, the honest answer has two parts: the science is old enough that the researchers who built it have already won Nobel Prizes, and the business habit is young enough that most of it happened in the last two survey cycles.
If you’re deciding what to do about that recent shift rather than the seventy-year backstory, Treadstone’s AI Strategy & Roadmapping hub is about the decision itself, not the history. And if the question behind this one is really “is this a fad”, see whether AI is a passing trend, or for the current national number on its own, how many Canadian businesses use AI.
The history is settled. The decision about your business isn't — that's a strategy question, not a trivia question.
