Canada’s growing investment in artificial intelligence infrastructure is not expected to deliver the same boost to economic growth seen in the United States, according to Royal Bank of Canada analysis reported by Global News.

The near-term effect on Canada’s gross domestic product has been net-neutral, the reporting says. But an economist studying technology adoption argues that larger productivity benefits could still emerge as businesses change how they operate.

RBC senior economist Claire Fan said Canadian investment is increasing, but much of the computer and peripheral equipment being purchased is manufactured abroad. Purchases rose 28 per cent in the first half of 2026, according to national accounts data cited in the report. Fan said 75 per cent of that equipment is imported.

Joël Blit, an economics professor at the University of Waterloo and co-founder and co-director of the Canadian AI Adoption Centre, told Global News that Canadian businesses are adopting AI more slowly than American businesses.

He agreed that infrastructure spending directly benefits the economies producing the equipment. However, he said the more important question is what businesses eventually do with the technology.

“Productivity, I expect, is gonna rise significantly,” Blit said, while cautioning that investments take time to translate into new ways of producing goods and services.

Blit described an initial stage in which businesses substitute new technology into existing workflows, yielding only modest improvements. More substantial gains, he said, come from rethinking the business itself. He contrasted Barnes & Noble’s use of the internet to improve inventory tracking with Amazon’s reinvention of bookselling.

Those changes also require worker retraining and redesigned processes, he said.

Public attitudes present a mixed picture. Angus Reid polling from the first half of the year, cited by Global News, found 43 per cent of Canadians viewed AI negatively and another 24 per cent were critical of it. Yet 41 per cent reported using AI more than once a week, while 30 per cent did not use it at all.

Blit said employee experimentation could help drive workplace adoption when organizations provide access and guardrails. He called for investment in AI literacy to help more Canadians explore practical uses for the tools.

Sources