The Future is Now: How AI Will Reshape Canadian Businesses in 2025

As we bid goodbye to 2024, I have been reflecting on how generative AI has continued to evolve from a nascent technology into a powerful force driving real business value. In conversations with Canadian customers earlier this year, many were taking their first tentative steps, exploring how generative AI could impact their organizations through pilot projects and small-scale deployments.

But the landscape has shifted dramatically. Companies have moved beyond AI experimentation to full-scale deployments, transforming specific parts of their business. Many of these projects, while not always immediately noticeable to consumers, have focused on optimizing back-end processes or enhancing customer-facing platforms, yielding impressive cost savings and productivity improvements. Companies like TELUS and Dollarama are already reaping the rewards, and it's encouraging to see other Canadian businesses across all industries follow suit, establishing their own generative AI strategies.

This momentum positions 2025 as a pivotal year for generative AI adoption in Canada. As the technology matures and initial deployments demonstrate tangible value, executives will face the imperative to build winning AI strategies that fundamentally transform how their companies operate, compete, and innovate.

AI Trends to Watch in 2025

Our recent Economic Impact Report highlighted AI’s potential to boost Canada’s economy by $230 billion and save the average worker 175 hours per year. The scale of this opportunity demands that every business leader pay close attention to key AI trends in 2025. Here are a few that I believe will positively impact key industries in Canada and drive real productivity growth across the country:

• Companies will release more customer-facing AI products. AI-powered solutions will revolutionize the customer experience, enabling organizations to anticipate needs and forge stronger customer connections. Thomson Reuters, with the launch of Co-Counsel 2024, provided an early example. In 2025, organizations across all sectors will launch AI-powered products designed to increase revenue and efficiency, boost efficiency, and cultivate brand loyalty.
• AI agents will streamline workflows and empower employees. As AI agents become more sophisticated, they’ll manage complex workflows, automate business processes, and empower employees. Bell Canada, an early adopter, partnered with us to transform their contact center with AI, including with Conversational Agents and Agent Assist. Bell’s CEO recently described how this transformation improved the customer experience and generated $20 million in savings.
• Canadian startups will scale with AI. Canada is already home to successful AI startups like Cohere. Next year, we’ll see Canadian startups launch AI-powered products across a diverse array of sectors. We’re proud to work with many emerging startups in Canada -- like Viral Nation -- and can’t wait to see what they’ll accomplish in 2025.

Industry-Specific Predictions

Beyond these overarching predictions, I’m particularly excited about how different industries will continue to adopt generative AI and drive innovation for their customers, specifically in the following sectors:

• Financial services: Canadian banks are among the most active adopters of AI, with a recent study ranking all five of the major Canadian banks amongst the top 25 AI global adopters. Many have achieved early success using generative AI to boost productivity. For example, ATB Financial uses BigQuery and Google Cloud to build its modern data applications. Advanced AI and ML capabilities in BigQuery allow ATB to improve client care and client satisfaction by enabling personalized interactions and contextual recommendations.

2025 prediction: Financial institutions will leverage more advanced AI technologies to extract deeper value from their data. Intuitive search and AI agents will be key tools in analyzing vast amounts of data, providing instant access to essential insights, like new investment opportunities or a deeper understanding of customers’ goals and preferences.

• Telecommunications: The telecommunications industry is undergoing a technology transformation, driven in part by generative AI. Canada’s major telecommunications companies have all invested significantly in AI and are already seeing results -- we’ll only see this accelerate. For example, Bell and TELUS implemented Google Cloud’s Customer Engagement Suite and TELUS migrated more than 14 petabytes of data from siloed legacy systems to Google Cloud. This resulted in significant improvements in efficiency, improved customer service, and reductions in operating expenses.

2025 prediction: AI will move from beyond supporting roles and fully integrate into network operations. The next frontier is AI-native networks leveraging generative AI for full automation, moving beyond event-driven operations to machine-driven processes. These networks will help lower costs while enhancing scalability and responsiveness. Companies will also integrate network data with customer data to create a true customer 360 view, further enhancing customer service.

• Retail: In 2024, successful retail projects focused on delivering real value for both consumers and employees, particularly in customer service, marketing and digital commerce, where generative AI search and agents enhanced existing human capability. Dollarama, for example, successfully supported customer service agents with AI by analyzing and summarizing thousands of customer service calls, saving employees dozens of minutes per call, which allowed them to support more customers.

2025 prediction: AI will change shopping experiences, both online and offline. One example is the evolution of the drive-thru. We’ll see how natural language processing and voice recognition can improve the quick-service food industry for both customers and employees. Wendy’s began piloting this with Google Cloud in 2023, and as customer-facing AI applications proliferate, we expect to see drive-thrus and digital ordering revolutionized by AI.

• Healthcare: This year, healthcare organizations embarked on their generative AI journeys, focusing on use cases that enhance productivity and efficiency. The Government of Nova Scotia, for example, announced investments in AI technology, including natural language search functions for both patients and clinicians, and AI technology to help technicians accelerate x-ray diagnostics.

2025 prediction: More jurisdictions will use AI to improve health systems and accelerate patient care. This includes adopting multimodal AI models that analyze images, medical records and genomic data to personalize medicine and improve health outcomes. The adoption of AI in pharmacies will also support pharmacists in processing prescriptions with greater speed and accuracy.

Conclusion

2024 laid a strong foundation for the future of AI in Canada. 2025 will be a year of increased innovation, broader adoption, and even greater impact. Now is the time for leaders across all sectors to seize the AI opportunity. This means not just experimenting with the technology but actively developing comprehensive AI strategies that integrate this transformative technology into every facet of their operations. I, for one, am incredibly excited to witness the accomplishments that lie ahead.