Prepared in partnership with the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii), this report draws on interviews with Canadian employers across diverse sectors to understand how AI is changing workforce skills needs. We find that while adoption remains uneven and largely experimental, a clear pattern is emerging: AI is not changing who organizations hire. It’s changing what they expect workers to do.
Understanding AI Skills Needs: A Changing Landscape
We conducted a scan of 49 organizations’ activities and interviewed 21 employers about their AI strategies, adoption, use, and associated skills needs and training plans.
Through this investigation, we find that AI is not creating an entirely new set of skills demands. Rather, it’s intensifying the importance of a hybrid skillset that combines foundational technical and non-technical skills, with higher-order human skills at the forefront. Across all sectors, employers are looking to use talent to both drive AI adoption and use AI effectively once adopted.
A Summary of our Findings
AI promises to transform many areas of the Canadian economy, but adoption currently remains both limited and uneven. The minority of organizations that are using AI are still largely in experimental and exploratory phases, without fully planned strategies or a clear view of how AI will generate ROI. Given this context, organizations thinking about their skills needs in the AI economy will want to distinguish between skills to drive and support AI adoption, on the one hand, and skills to use AI effectively and responsibly, on the other.
Building skills to drive adoption can help to advance AI adoption across the economy and allow more organizations to begin considering how AI might improve their operations. Building skills to use AI effectively can help organizations better integrate AI into their processes and workflows, and allow them to realize the productivity promises of AI.
The challenge for many organizations is still to recognize that they could benefit from AI in the first place, and to then take the steps needed to develop skills for adoption and effective use. Addressing these challenges will require coordinated action across employers, post-secondary institutions, and policymakers.
Employers will need to take a leading role in upskilling their workforce, while education systems must integrate AI fluency and applied learning across programs. Governments and system leaders have an opportunity to support this shift by strengthening partnerships and scaling models, such as WIL that enables workers to develop and apply AI skills in real-world contexts.