The competition for skilled artificial intelligence talent is heating up as more Canadian organizations seek to leverage the power of AI to grow their businesses and gain a competitive advantage. But both small and large enterprises say they’re facing unique challenges attracting the AI talent they need, highlighting the need for employee upskilling and strategic partnerships with AI institutes.

Canadian startups and larger enterprises are receiving hundreds of applicants for job postings that require AI skills, but often struggle to hire their ideal candidate, according to the Artificial Intelligence Talent in Canada report from the Vector Institute and the Conference Board of Canada, in partnership with the Future Skills Centre. The report analyzed job-posting data and interviews conducted with 46 business leaders in Canada and the U.S., including 16 AI-first Canadian companies and 15 AI-adjacent organizations, to get their perspective on AI hiring and talent trends.

Smaller companies and AI startups say they’re looking to hire more experienced talent to develop their AI solutions or leverage the use of AI in their businesses, often because they don’t have the capacity to train up junior talent. But those types of workers are in shorter supply than new graduates or early-career AI talent, and report respondents said they commonly lost out on experienced hires to U.S. companies, due to compensation. 

Meanwhile, larger organizations in AI-adjacent sectors were not facing the same talent attraction challenges, and reported building out training and rotational programs. However, when recruiting AI specialists, the higher salary ranges for these workers threw up internal barriers to hiring. 

The report also highlighted that a shift is underway in the skills being sought by companies. Between 2018 and 2023, demand for talent with “specialized, core” AI skills — including knowledge of generative AI, machine-learning operations, supervised learning and more — jumped 37 per cent. The need for workers with the sorts of peripheral AI skills that are key to the use of AI but can be used in other contexts, such as basic programming and data manipulation skills, dropped 46 per cent during the same period. That change, the report suggested, was due to companies’ increasing integration of advanced AI capabilities and systems into their operations.

“Companies are focused on hiring specialists with advanced AI experience and upskilling their existing workforce,” the report said. “For graduates and employees, it underscores the importance of developing specialized AI expertise.”

The report predicts that the demand for machine-learning and data scientists will continue to grow, as will the need for hires with data architecture and data engineering skills. Technical talent at the Ph.D. or master’s degree level is also now considered “table stakes” for enterprises looking to compete in the AI market.

The Vector Institute is at the centre of AI adoption and talent development in Canada, and its partnership opportunities help Canadian enterprises hire better and stay ahead. The institute’s home city of Toronto is now ranked the fourth best tech talent market in North America, according to a CBRE report from September 2024 — beating out other popular innovation hubs including Austin; Washington, D.C; and Boston — a ranking driven by the city’s concentration of AI talent. Toronto also added more tech jobs than any other city between 2018 and 2023, including Silicon Valley. And Vector is a major reason for that. 

Canadian businesses that partner with Vector gain access to one of the best AI ecosystems globally, to support them in using the technology to grow their businesses. Industry partners are able to consult with Vector’s expert researchers on specific AI-related business challenges and give their own employees access to a sandbox environment in which to test out new AI techniques. Partners can be invited to be part of collaborative projects made up of large enterprises, startups, AI researchers and policymakers to use AI to solve industry challenges.

Partners also gain direct access to sought-after skilled AI talent through the institute’s Talent Hub. Since 2019, more than 900 Vector alumni have been hired on with the institute’s industry sponsors. Canada’s financial services, professional services and technology sectors have been the largest beneficiaries of Vector’s talent pipeline.

To learn how the Vector Institute can accelerate your business’ AI impact, visit vectorinstitute.ai.