Canada Is Paying to Close the AI Adoption Gap
A $162M investment puts 10,000 young AI-skilled Canadians inside businesses that want to put AI to work but lack the people to do it.
On September 25, 2026, the federal government announced up to $162 million over five years, starting in 2026–27, for Mitacs to co-fund 10,000 AI work placements. Students, recent graduates and post-doctoral fellows will be placed with Canadian businesses to help them adopt AI and innovate with it.
- 10,000: AI work placements
- $162M: Over five years
- 90,000: AI jobs & placements by 2031
The announcement is the latest piece of AI for All, Canada’s National Artificial Intelligence Strategy launched on June 4, 2026. The strategy aims to create up to 90,000 AI-related job and work placement opportunities for young Canadians by 2031.
The problem it is trying to solve
The government’s own framing is blunt: many small and medium-sized businesses can already see what AI could do for them. What they lack is the skills, the capacity and the support to actually put it to work. That is the same gap between experimentation and economic value that AI Summit Vancouver is built around.
Why this matters The bottleneck for most Canadian companies is no longer access to AI tools. It is having people who can scope a real use case, deploy it, and turn it into productivity.
Two streams: adopt, or build something new
The funding runs through the Mitacs AI Advantage program, which pairs businesses with academic researchers and talent through two complementary streams.
How the Mitacs AI Advantage streams connect talent to business outcomes.
- ADOPT: Placements focused on adoption, helping businesses of any size quickly test and deploy AI solutions across their organization.
- AI+X: Research placements that apply AI to specific business problems or new technologies, in fields such as agriculture and health care.
The network behind it
Mitacs already partners with more than 200 post-secondary institutions, 170 innovation incubators and 12,500 companies across Canada, and has supported more than 4,200 AI-related innovation projects since 2020. The same month, the government also launched a National AI Literacy Initiative with Amii to help Canadians understand AI and use it responsibly.
What to do with this
- Pick one workflow: Choose a single process where AI could save time or money, and define what success looks like before anyone writes code.
- Treat the placement as a project: Give the placement a clear scope, an owner on your team and access to the data it needs. Talent without access stalls.
- Plan for what happens after: Decide upfront who maintains the solution once the placement ends, so the pilot turns into lasting capability.