Canada has spent years building a globally recognized advantage in artificial intelligence. The question now is whether we can turn that advantage into economic power, and that question has become more urgent as the rules of the global economy change. Tariffs are again instruments of economic policy. Export controls increasingly determine access to critical technologies. Governments are competing for semiconductors, compute, energy, investment and talent. Supply chains once designed primarily for efficiency are being reconsidered through the lens of resilience and economic security.
For Canada, this is no longer simply a trade challenge. It is a technology competitiveness challenge. Canada has world-class AI research and talent, strong universities, innovative firms, abundant low-emission electricity in several provinces, and access to major markets. What we need now are measurable economic outcomes.
By 2030, Canada should pursue three concrete goals: scale hundreds, not tens, of Canadian technology companies globally; transform at least 10,000 Canadian SMEs through productivity-enhancing AI and automation; and reduce our most consequential technology dependencies.
First, technology must become central to Canada’s trade diversification strategy.
Diversification cannot simply mean selling more of the same products to different countries. Europe presents an immediate opportunity, including through continued negotiations toward a Canada-EU Digital Trade Agreement and a broader relationship encompassing AI, digital transformation, and cybersecurity.
But trade agreements do not create exporters. Canadian technology companies need regulatory and commercialization expertise, standards and certification support, cybersecurity readiness, IP strategies and access to international customers. Canada should establish a focused market-access initiative to help 500 high-potential Canadian AI and advanced-technology companies enter or materially expand in strategic international markets by 2030. Success should be measured by export revenues generated, international customers won, IP retained in Canada and Canadian companies successfully scaling, not by the number of firms receiving support.
Second, Canada must turn AI adoption into productivity. Statistics Canada reports that 19.2 per cent of Canadian businesses used AI to produce goods or deliver services in 2026, triple the rate two years earlier. Adoption is accelerating, but four out of five businesses still do not report using AI this way. More importantly, adoption alone is the wrong measure. AI’s greatest economic gains will not come from employees writing emails faster. They will come when businesses redesign production, automate processes, improve supply chains, and transform customer service and decision-making.
Canada should enable at least 10,000 SMEs by 2030 to implement AI and automation projects that demonstrate measurable productivity improvements. Public support should require businesses to identify operational problems, establish productivity baselines, invest alongside government, redesign workflows and train workers. That requires a workforce able to combine AI and digital fluency with industry expertise, commercial judgment, creativity, communication and responsible innovation. The objective is not to make everyone a technologist. It is to develop people capable of turning technology into economic and societal value.
Third, Canada needs to treat technology dependency as an economic-security issue. Modern economies depend on compute, cloud platforms, semiconductors, telecommunications, cybersecurity, data infrastructure and electricity, often supplied through highly concentrated global markets. Technological sovereignty does not mean building everything at home. It means knowing where dependence creates unacceptable economic risk and maintaining strategic options.
Government and industry should map Canada’s most critical technology dependencies, assessing their criticality, concentration, substitutability and consequences of disruption. Canada can then determine where to build domestic capacity, diversify suppliers, create redundancy or secure access through trusted allies.
Canada cannot compete with larger economies simply by matching their spending. We need to compete differently, and measure what matters. By 2030, success should be visible in Canadian technology companies scaling globally, SMEs producing more through AI, workers equipped to create value with new technologies, and critical technology dependencies being deliberately managed.
Canada has already invested in becoming an AI leader. The next chapter must be about converting that advantage into productivity, exports, resilient companies and economic power. The measure of Canada’s AI ambition should no longer be how much we invest in innovation, but how much economic value we create from it.
Namir Anani, President & CEO, Information and Communications Technology Council