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How new AI tools are changing jobs: the upside, and what to watch

Published October 28, 2026

AI tools have moved from novelty to everyday work: writing assistants, coding assistants, meeting summaries, and "agents" that carry out multi-step tasks. They're changing what many jobs look like. The picture is more mixed, and more hopeful, than most headlines suggest, so here's what the evidence says on both sides.

How much is AI actually being used in Canada?

Less than the hype implies, but growing fast.

  • In a Statistics Canada survey from mid-2025, 12.2% of Canadian businesses said they had used AI to produce goods or deliver services in the past year, double the 6.1% a year earlier. (Statistics Canada, 2025)
  • Use is much higher in knowledge work: roughly one in three businesses in professional, scientific and technical services, and in finance and insurance.
  • About 9 in 10 businesses that adopted AI reported no change in how many people they employ. About 6% reported fewer staff, and 4% more.

The upside

People get more done, especially newer workers. A large study of more than 5,000 customer support agents found an AI assistant raised the number of issues resolved per hour by 14% on average, and by 34% for newer and less experienced agents. The tool helped spread the know-how of the best agents to everyone else. (Brynjolfsson, Li & Raymond, NBER)

Some tasks get much faster. In a small controlled experiment (95 developers, one programming task) run by researchers at GitHub and Microsoft, those using GitHub Copilot finished about 56% faster than those without it. (Peng et al., 2023) One task in a lab isn't a whole job, but it shows the size of the gains on well-defined work.

So far, Canadian employment has kept growing. Statistics Canada compared jobs by how exposed they are to AI. From November 2022 to December 2025, employment grew whether jobs were highly exposed to AI or not, and growth in the most exposed jobs wasn't significantly different. (Statistics Canada, January 2026)

New kinds of jobs are appearing. The World Economic Forum's employer survey expects about 170 million jobs to be created and 92 million displaced worldwide by 2030, a net gain of 78 million. That covers all the big forces at once, including technology, the energy transition and demographics, not AI alone. (World Economic Forum, 2025)

You can see the shift in job postings too. More roles now list AI tools as part of the work itself: designers working with image and video tools, analysts building automations, operations teams running AI-assisted workflows. That's what our Using AI lane collects.

What to watch

Entry-level roles may be getting squeezed. A Stanford study of US payroll data, updated in August 2026, found that employment for workers aged 22 to 25 in the jobs most exposed to AI was about 19% below where it would have been had it kept pace with their peers in less exposed jobs. Experienced workers showed no similar gap. The gap comes mainly from fewer young people being hired, not layoffs, and the authors found no broad, economy-wide job losses. (Brynjolfsson, Chandar & Chen, Stanford Digital Economy Lab) It's US data, the pattern weakens once education is taken into account, and the authors present it as an early warning sign rather than proof that AI caused it.

In Canada, younger and less-educated workers have gained less. The same Statistics Canada study found employment for workers aged 15 to 29 grew about 5% over three years, against about 10% for ages 30 to 49. Workers with a high school diploma or a college credential below a bachelor's degree saw little to no growth, while those with a degree gained 10% to 20%. Trades certificate holders did well too, except in the jobs most exposed to AI. The authors are careful to say this may reflect other forces, such as post-pandemic adjustments, rapid population growth and trade tensions, not AI alone.

Gains aren't automatic. In the customer support study, the most experienced agents got little speed benefit and a slight drop in quality. AI helps most when people know when to trust it and when to check it.

AI is screening applicants too. Many employers use software to sort résumés. Ontario now requires many employers to say in their postings whether AI is used to screen, assess or select applicants. NorthPath shows that on every job. Here's how to read it.

What this means if you're job hunting

  1. Learn the AI tools your field actually uses, and be ready to show a result ("cut report prep from a day to an hour"), not just list the tool's name.
  2. Look for roles where AI is part of the job, not just a line in the company description. The Using AI lane is a good place to start.
  3. Lean into what AI is weakest at: judgement, relationships, hands-on skill and responsibility for outcomes.
  4. If you're early in your career, look for employers that still invest in training and mentoring. They're worth more than a slightly higher starting salary.
  5. Consider AI-resilient paths if hands-on work appeals to you. Here's what they are, and the trade-offs.

NorthPath summarises published research and what job postings say. It isn't career advice. Studies are linked above; several are early working papers, and findings may change as more data comes in.