In June of this year, Statistics Canada released the figure most people in this industry had been waiting for.
In the second quarter of 2026, 19.2% of Canadian businesses said they had used AI to produce goods or deliver services over the previous year. Two years earlier, that number was 6.1%.
Further down the same release sat two figures that got less attention. 40% of businesses still said AI wasn’t relevant to them. And in construction, adoption was 9.2%.
The more useful question for 2027 is what happens after the purchase. Another study published in April by Jiang Li and Huju Liu found that AI adopters’ 16.8% productivity edge shrank to a statistically insignificant 5.1% once earlier productivity and complementary investments, such as staff training, were factored in.
The agency’s own summary concluded that adoption on its own is unlikely to deliver transformative gains.
The ten companies below were picked for one reason: each is working on a core part of the technology, putting AI inside document-heavy, regulated work where a wrong answer costs money, a client or a licence.
Law firms change how they read
McCarthy Tétrault has spent years testing AI vendors, and on October 7 it named another one. Altorney announced that the firm had deployed MARC, its document intelligence platform, across litigation, investigations, antitrust, tax and data-breach matters. The work runs through MT>3, the firm’s e-discovery division, where partner Susan Wortzman says the team uses it for relevance and privilege review, issue coding, and finding personal and confidential information.
Several details make this more than a vendor announcement, including that McCarthy has kept its data inside its own private environment. That matters because according to recent repots, Canada found cybersecurity and privacy concerns were the most-cited barrier to AI use, named by 30% of businesses with 100 or more employees. A national firm that can show clients both an audit trail and a hard data boundary sets a bar its competitors will be asked about in 2027.
At the other end of the profession, Clio builds for the solo practitioner and the ten-lawyer shop. The Burnaby company closed its Series G at a $5-billion valuation. In June it bought Jurisage, a Canadian legal AI company whose database covers more than 470,000 cases from over 40 courts, to bring its Clio Work platform to Canadian lawyers.
Professional services firms already report AI use at 32.4%. Whether Clio lifts that number among small firms is next year’s test.
The industries the curve left behind
Construction’s 9.2% is the most interesting number in the StatCan release, and Provision is aimed squarely at it. Luigi La Corte spent seven years as a civil engineer at Arup and a director at Plenary before co-founding the Toronto startup with Brendan Ardagh in 2022. Its co-pilot reads contracts, specifications and drawings so estimators catch scope gaps before a bid goes out, when fixing one still costs nothing.
In October 2025, Provision raised a $7-million seed round led by Cercano Management, with Y Combinator and One Way Ventures participating.
One Way Ventures, based in Boston, has backed only companies with at least one immigrant founder since 2017. Provision already works with EllisDon, PCL, Bird Construction, Acciona and Colas. If construction moves off single digits, it will be because tools like this fit inside an estimator’s existing routine.
Provision sells to the country’s biggest builders, while Billdr is after the contractor with a dozen employees and a laptop full of spreadsheets. The Montreal company began in 2020 as a home renovation marketplace. In January it raised a $3.2-million seed round led by White Star Capital, with Desjardins Capital, asterX, Formantera Capital and One Way Ventures, which also backs Provision. Its AI sits inside the paperwork.
An estimator drafts quotes from a contractor’s own plans, pricing and past jobs. A copilot answers questions across projects and finances, and a receptionist qualifies leads after hours. Billdr says more than 1,000 contractors use it. CEO Bertrand Nembot’s next move is money itself, with bill pay, corporate cards, lending and insurance on the roadmap. A company that already holds a contractor’s quotes and invoices is well placed to underwrite them.
Insurance has a different problem. Finance and insurance businesses report AI use at 40.4%, second only to information and cultural industries, yet much of their data still lives in policy and claims systems older than some of their employees. GFT Technologies Canada, led by CEO André Gagné, has been Beneva’s Guidewire partner for more than 12 years. In January, the two announced that GFT had converted Beneva’s auto insurance products to Guidewire’s Advanced Product Designer in eight weeks. Beneva had planned for about sixteen.
Health care, including telehealth platforms like those from QuickBlox, is about as regulated as work gets, and what it runs short of is specialists. The Fraser Institute puts the median wait for gynaecology at more than 40 weeks. Blair Health’s answer is to write the specialist’s judgment into software. The Toronto company was founded in 2024 by CEO Madge Rumman, formerly of Affirm, and Dr. Lindsay Shirreff, a fellowship-trained menopause subspecialist at Mount Sinai.
Specialists build its intake, diagnosis pathways, treatment protocols and escalation rules. Nurse practitioners and family physicians then deliver the care virtually. Blair says its menopause pathway performs at 98.7 per cent clinical accuracy and that a provider can be trained on it in under four hours. In September it announced a $4.24-million pre-seed round co-led by BDC’s Thrive Venture Fund, Accelia Capital and Ogaei Investments. Its employer channel went from near zero to roughly half of revenue in the first half of 2026. The four-hour training figure is the one to watch. StatCan’s productivity study suggests it is the complementary investment, not the software, that decides whether AI pays off.
The plumbing underneath
Cohere is Canada’s answer to a question governments and banks keep asking about where their data goes. On September 16, the Toronto company signed a definitive agreement to combine with Germany’s Aleph Alpha, creating one company headquartered in both Toronto and Berlin, with closing expected later this year. Integration will define its 2027. If it goes well, Cohere becomes a default option for regulated buyers on both sides of the Atlantic who want control over where sensitive data sits.
Float watches AI adoption from a vantage point most analysts lack: the corporate card statement. The Toronto fintech raised an $85-million Series C in June to build out Float Intelligence and expand into Western Canada and Quebec. Its September AI Spending Snapshot, drawn from more than 10,000 businesses, found monthly AI spending among a consistent cohort grew more than twelvefold between August 2024 and August 2026. About 77% of that spend is billed in U.S. dollars, and more than 70% of AI-buying businesses saw at least one month where spending jumped by over half. Volatile, usage-based, foreign-currency costs land on the finance team, and Float sells to the finance team.
CodeJobs is the one company on this list that isn’t Canadian, however it is expanding into the country. Founded in 2025 by Brazilians Cláudio Vinícius dos Santos and José Francisco da Silva and registered in Delaware, it matches Latin American developers with remote jobs at North American and European companies. The jobs pay in U.S. dollars and need no visa. Candidate screening runs through AI, including over WhatsApp.
Brazilian press reported in June that Kleiner Perkins had invested $40 million for a 48% stake. The company says it has more than 58,000 subscribers, about 70% of them Brazilian, and is negotiating contracts with Canadian organizations. For a Canadian firm that has bought the AI tools and now needs people to wire them into its systems, the developer pool is no longer just local.
1Password closes the list because every other company here creates its problem. As firms hand AI agents access to systems, someone has to govern which credentials those agents hold and for how long. The Toronto company launched Unified Access in March to track credentials across people, machines and agents, and in June brought in Apono to add just-in-time privileged access.
Its own research found 65% of developers are expected or encouraged to use AI agents, while only 33% say they have a secure way to do it. That gap is the market 1Password is selling into.
Disclosure: This article mentions a client of an Espacio portfolio company.
