Canada’s CEOs are harnessing artificial intelligence to boost productivity and cultivate resilience, according to “KPMG in Canada’s 2025 CEO Outlook” report.
Seventy-eight percent of Canadian CEOs listed AI as their leading investment priority, while “understanding and implementing AI” was the leading operational priority for the next three years. Seventy-three percent of Canadian CEOs expressed intent to allocate 10-20 percent of their budgets for AI in the next 12 months.
Nonetheless, just 17 percent of Canadian CEOs reported that their organizations were equipped to help employees maximize AI’s benefits. Thus, just 16 percent of CEOs were confident that employees could harness AI’s full potential.
“Canadian CEOs are turning to new tools to redefine success and transform their business at a time when stickhandling through heightened uncertainty becomes increasingly more difficult. The challenge is, being disciplined in their capital deployment to ensure AI aligns with their business strategy, implemented appropriately and integrated into their operations to ensure material productivity gains. This can’t be done without employee buy-in, training, and literacy,” said Benjie Thomas, KPMG in Canada’s chief executive officer and senior partner, in a statement.
Per Statistics Canada, labor productivity and overall business investment both dipped in the second quarter of 2025. Thomas said the productivity issue could not be addressed without tackling business investment; thus, CEOs’ decision to invest in AI tools that could address drops in productivity was encouraging.
KPMG in Canada’s Canadian managing partner for clients and markets, Timothy Prince, said successful AI integration begins with employees. He pointed out that proper AI implementation has changed supply chain resilience, managed cybersecurity risks, identified fraudulent activity, and customized customer experiences at scale. It has also been used to monitor carbon emissions and maximize data centers’ energy consumption.
“It’s a tough environment, with a lot of uncertainty for businesses whether it’s from trade relations to the next cyberattack to emerging technologies like AI and quantum computing to new regulations. The natural reaction to uncertainty is to pause investments but what we’re hearing from our clients and what the surveys bear out is that they are continuing to invest in areas that will make them stronger, more agile and ultimately more resilient,” Prince said.
KPMG’s report revealed that in the next three years, Canadian CEOs are investing more in cybersecurity and digital resilience, regulatory compliance and reporting, solution and technology innovation to open new markets or scale operations, AI integration, governance and ethics, and supply chain resilience and operational continuity.
The “2025 CEO Outlook” obtained responses from 1,350 CEOs between August 5 and September 10.