Daily use of approved tools nearly doubled to 31%, while a third of staff still lack access
Fifty-eight percent of organizations surveyed in Canada have approved AI tools for work, up seven points from 2025 and 30 points from 2024.
According to CDW Canada's 2026 Canadian AI Workspace Trends report, daily use of workplace-approved tools nearly doubled to 31 percent, from 18 percent in 2025 and 15 percent in 2024.
Sixty-eight percent of Canadian office workers now describe themselves as at least somewhat comfortable with AI tools, up 15 points from 2025 and 23 points from 2024, while the share reporting discomfort fell from 32 percent to 18 percent.
One third of employees still have no approved AI tools available to them.
Among that group, 56 percent said they would be at least somewhat likely to use the tools if their organization approved them.
Among IT decision-makers, 18 percent said their organization's AI strategy is fully implemented and 55 percent said it is partially implemented, up from a combined 51 percent in 2025 and 35 percent in 2024.
Thirty-eight percent of organizations that have adopted AI now track specific measurable KPIs to determine return on investment, up 14 points from 24 percent in 2025 and the largest year-over-year movement of any metric in the study.
Thirty percent use soft KPIs such as employee feedback, 23 percent use no KPIs of any kind, and a further 23 percent do not know whether their organization uses them.
Perceived value rose across every measured area among employees with approved access.
Employee productivity was cited by 58 percent, up 11 points; improved quality of outputs by 54 percent, up 15 points; and acceleration of innovation by 48 percent, up 11 points.
The most commonly reported individual benefit was completing tasks faster or more efficiently, at 44 percent, followed by analyzing data more effectively at 30 percent.
Smaller shares reported faster decision-making (25 percent), a more manageable workload (24 percent), reduced stress (22 percent) and more time for creative and strategic work (21 percent).
Thirty-four percent of employees reported using agentic AI at work.
Among those users, 79 percent access agents included in other tools such as Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini, 31 percent said agents are being built in-house by their employer or fellow employees, and 9 percent have built agents themselves.
Seventy-seven percent of respondents reported at least some familiarity with agentic AI tools.
General purpose AI assistants and chatbots accessed through organizational accounts are the most widely approved tool type, at 64 percent.
Twenty-nine percent of organizations with approved AI permit employees to use public AI assistants through personal or non-organizational accounts.
Forty-two percent of organizations now have an AI policy in place, per the report.
Forty-six percent of employees who receive hands-on workshops are comfortable using AI at work, compared with 23 percent of those with no training.
Thirty-one percent of organizations are conducting hands-on workshops, up from 20 percent in 2025, and 29 percent have a formal training course or program, up from 20 percent.
Self-serve learning remains the most common form of support at 45 percent, down from 52 percent, while peer learning was cited by 37 percent and AI champions by 24 percent.
Eleven percent reported none of these supports, down from 22 percent.
CDW Canada found that 32 percent of IT decision-makers engaged third-party support to help implement AI strategies, double the proportion reported in 2025.
Their most-cited reasons were evaluating, recommending and choosing suitable AI (32 percent), advising on alignment with organizational goals and roadmap (28 percent), ensuring integration with existing processes (27 percent) and providing AI training and fostering AI literacy (26 percent).
Among daily users, data privacy or security concerns were cited by 32 percent and accuracy and reliability concerns by 31 percent.
Among weekly and monthly users, 31 percent said the tools are not relevant to their specific job tasks, 24 percent cited accuracy and reliability, and 22 percent cited poor performance for their use cases.
Among those not using AI tools at work, 43 percent cited accuracy and reliability and 41 percent cited irrelevance to their work.
Curiosity was the most commonly reported emotion toward workplace AI, at 42 percent among employees with work-approved tools and 40 percent among those without.
Worry was reported by 22 percent of the first group and 29 percent of the second.
Looking at the next one to two years, 33 percent of employees said increased AI adoption will bring about equal risks and benefits, 24 percent said somewhat more risks than benefits, and 16 percent said somewhat more benefits than risks.
Over the next decade, those figures were 26 percent, 24 percent and 16 percent.
