A company uses AI to wrap undecided companies
Published on Saturday, May 30, 2026 at 10am
Last month, I wrote about how 73% of Canadian small businesses aren’t thinking about AI yet. Several people contacted me and said they were surprised by the numbers. Some others said otherwise.
Google Cloud surveyed more than 3,400 senior business leaders this year and found that 74% of companies using AI are already seeing benefits, and 88% of companies were among the earliest adopters. The profit has already been recorded in the books.
Productivity is the first to see improvements, with 70% of organizations reporting significant improvements, followed by customer experience at 63% and direct business growth at 56%.
Of the companies reporting increased productivity, 39% said their employees were at least twice as productive as before, able to do the same work in about half the time.
For a trading company in Kelowna or a manufacturer in Penticton, this calculation is worth thinking about.
If estimators can get quotes twice as fast, they can win more bids.
When your management team stops spending their mornings tracking down information, that time can be put to better use.
For businesses in the Okanagan, where profit margins are tight, the restored work hours translate directly into capacity, which determines whether the next job is accepted or turned down.
When it comes to AI adoption, which we discussed last week, British Columbia’s construction industry remains near rock bottom.
The irony hasn’t improved much.
The industry that figured out how to build 40-story towers has yet to decide whether to try out software to organize documents. There’s no punch line, that’s the way it is.
Most executives I talk to have a trust question somewhere in the conversation, and it’s a fair question.
A PwC Canada study of 220 Canadian organizations released this year looked into this firsthand.
One-third of Canadian businesses have no plans to use AI responsibly, and 65% say the core problem is that no one is formally held accountable.
Unclear ownership is the real bottleneck and management problem that needs to be resolved.
The same study found that 71% of Canadian organizations expect positive financial returns from investing in AI governance.
Companies that build this foundation before scaling tend to move more quickly because when the unexpected happens, there are guardrails already in place and something always happens.
Companies that skip this step are for the wrong reasons, as you will read later.
The successful businesses I work with started out the same way.
They identified one problem that sacrificed real-time or cost, tried something specific about it, and measured what actually changed.
From there came clarity and the next steps followed.
The gap between companies leveraging AI and those still monitoring it is widening.
If you move now, you can still be ahead of everyone else.
The window is still open, but passing through it isn’t cheap.
Scott Jarvis runs an AI readiness and deployment consulting firm based in Vernon.
While the use of AI is part of this column, it is not used in news reporting by The Morning Star or Black Press Media.
