This November 2025 P2P Conference presentation provides an overview of how AI is rapidly transforming how work is organized and who benefits from new opportunities. This session explores the impact of AI on newcomers and equity-deserving workers, using national labour market data to identify which groups are most affected by automation and digital task change.
Presenters and their topics:
Chaired by: Wendy Cukier – The Diversity Institute, Toronto Metropolitan University
The discussion focused on Artificial Intelligence (AI), newcomers, and the future of work in Canada, highlighting a significant "AI paradox" where Canada leads in AI research but lags in adoption, primarily due to the dominance of small-to-medium enterprises. Panelists explored the complex and uncertain impacts of generative AI, distinguishing it from traditional automation because of its potential to disrupt complex and cognitive tasks associated with higher-educated workers. A critical theme they focused on is the rapid pace of change in AI, which requires people and organizations to adapt through improved literacy, reskilling, and a willingness to question "yesterday's logic." The discussion emphasized both the potential of AI to bridge divides for newcomers in areas like job preparation, along with the urgent need for ethical and responsible adoption to mitigate risks like embedded bias, privacy concerns, and new forms of digital inequity.
AI-generated transcript:
good morning everyone i realize it's very early for um some of you and later for others my name is Wendy Sukar and I will be the moderator today i see we still have some folks joining uh we're up to 71 participants um so I think we should probably get started um as I noted my name is Wendy Sukur lead the diversity institute at Toronto Metropolitan University i'm also the academic research lead for the future skills center as well as a co-investigator on the bridging divides projects so lots of interest lots of work uh related to the topic today um one of the things that we found is uh that Canada really is in the midst of what we refer to as an AI paradox on the one hand um Jeffrey Hinton won a Nobel Prize for his work uh we lead the world still in terms of AI um development and R&D but most of the research that we see shows that Canada is actually a lagard in terms of the adoption of AI and some of this has to do with the structure of the economy unlike the United States where half of uh private sector employment is with large businesses in Canada 90% of uh private sector employment is with smallmedium enterprises who don't have the capacity very often to drive the development and we know as well this is true with the nonprofit sector and and government so there's a big gap between the potential of the technology as well as its actual adoption we also know increasingly that there are a lot of risks associated with using technology and we do a lot of work for example looking at how bias can be embedded in in AI technologies and uh we are seeing based on recent surveys and I'll be interested in Tazin's comments on this but recent surveys we've done suggest that employees in many cases are getting ahead of employers so half of the people who report using AI at work have received no formal training there are no policies in place and this creates massive risks in terms of privacy or um intellectual property and and so on this is also all happening at a time when we are also seeing massive disruptions caused by international geopolitical events uh a tremendous and dramatic shift in attitudes to immigrants in this country which frankly and this is other work we've done I believe is very much connected to deliberate misinformation as well as spillover effects from the United States and we've done research that's been validated by Stats Canada that shows for example only 10% of the rise in housing prices can be attributed to immigrants nevertheless um the media has really been complicit in driving a narrative around um immigration being the source of all evils and so that's an important part of the context and then the the final thing that we're seeing is dramatic shifts in the nature of work the skills that are required and so on and we know based on the work that environics has done with us that um often immigrants are actually uh early adopters of technology they're using technology in innovative ways they have the skills that are needed by employers and there's massive opportunities to use artificial intelligence to improve services whether it's navigating uh career opportunities whether it's language learning whether it's digital skills and so on so we're really at in my view a sort of inflection point where we can sit still or we can think about how to harness the potential of the technology while managing the risks and today to um to uh guide us through this discussion we have three really interesting presenters with very different perspectives on the issue so Tazen Medi is a senior research economist at Stats Canada he's part of the um economic and social analysis and modeling division of Stats Canada he's a former OECD economist and he does a lot of research related to labor productivity and the impact of emerging technologies um along with Tasin is Mark Patterson the executive director of Magnet and many of you know Mark from his efforts in advancing workforce innovation building partnerships to drive skills development and inclusive growth and Magnet is um really a a platform for driving um connections between workforce and employers um and also its leading work in thinking about uh technology integration and development as part of the future skill center and Mark is really considered a a thought leader globally and his travel agenda shows that very clearly uh our third presenter is Alicia Barata who is the continuous discovering lead with Peace Geeks and she heads up the um UX UI research for the welcome to Canada website various other products that are technology enabled she's also an expert in AI integration and designs tools to leverage AI to solve real pain points for newcomers uh Alicia is really focused on newcomer perspectives on what they need and how to design tools to support them and uh she has been an immigrant across three continents uh learning new languages and this has really shaped her perspectives on these issues so we'll have presentations uh hopefully 10 to 12 minutes by each of our panelists and then we'll have some time for questions and comments from the audience as well as from me so over to you Tasin yep perfect thanks i'm going to start sharing my screen and please let me know if you can see the uh my slides perfect all right uh thanks a lot Wendy um so hi everyone my name is Tassen Medi uh I'm a labor economist uh from Statistics Canada uh my work largely focuses on uh looking at the potential impacts of emerging technologies as Wendy uh uh mentioned um on the workforce there are a lot of disruptive forces uh taking shape right now but the one that's perhaps getting the most attention is the of course the advent of generative artificial intelligence gen AI which as the name suggests is a type of AI that's capable of uh creating um new content uh so AI it has the potential to transform how we all work by possibly reducing certain types of tasks and changing existing workflows uh AI um is not new though by any means the term AI was actually coined um back in the 1950s but what's new now is the rapid pace of progression and adoption this is exciting but it's something that's also fueling a lot of concerns about the scale of disruption um it could cause and with that of course comes fears of um large-scale job losses we have gone through countless periods of technological shifts in the past uh before AI what everyone was concerned with was uh automation which refers to the use of technologies or machines to perform simple and repetitive tasks like what many of the machines do in uh certain factories although people use the terms interchangeably uh AI is not automation ai is the really the use of technologies to perform complex and cognitive tasks um historically automation has tended to sort of replace or displace jobs of uh less educated workers uh but a given AI's sort of growing capabilities to code draft reports uh do translations all examples of tasks often associated with higher educated workers uh there are concerns now that AI could impact a broader segment of the workforce uh than automation did in the past um but right now is AI replacing jobs or isn't it it has sort of become a somewhat of a contentious issue uh with really no clear answer right now because it may be too early um and this of course is further complicated by the fact that we have competing economic forces right now to contend with from immigration to the lingering effects from the pandemic and of course to more recently US tariffs so it's hard to really isolate the potential impact of new technologies like AI from everything else that's kind of happening in the in the economy sort of around us so right now all we can say about AI is it really is a mix of uncertainty and opportunity we don't know what it means in the long term yet uh we don't know how different groups of workers might be impacted but we did release a study last year at Statan where we look at the potential impact of AI across uh different uh demographic groups but sort of before we get into the potential labor impacts let's take a pulse of the labor market first first immigrants um face apecially challenging sort of labor market they historically have higher rates of unemployment uh than Canadian born for several reasons including um possibly the lack of Canadian experience credentials language barriers as well as the lack of uh network to really gain entry into certain professions and this is true whether you're a prime working age individual or younger youth unemployment obviously is something that's getting a lot of interest attention right now um it has gone up ever since we were coming out of the pandemic um and there does seem to be this uh sort of story out there that it's AI might be taking over some jobs some entry-level jobs well that could very well be true but the reality is much more nuanced a big part of it has to do with the fact that the number of job vacancies have come back down to preandemic levels so the pandemic was such an sort of anomaly when we look at historical trends uh during the height of the pandemic there was a substantial rise in job vacancies in fact a record number of vacancies at least um in over the last decade uh as employers coming out of lockdowns were looking to fill jobs across many industries but after 2022 or so uh we started seeing vacancies go back down to precoid levels so what we might be seeing right now is a post-pandemic sort of labor market adjustment process playing out where during the pandemic employers may have overhired and now the demand for workers might have fallen as a result also what is happening is that people are getting more educated at an increasing rate but the number of vacancies requiring those high skills have really not kept pace uh just to give you an idea there are about 350,000 unemployed people with a bachelor's degree or higher right now um with 200,000 of them being immigrants but less than 100,000 vacancies requiring those skills so even if all those highly skilled individuals highly skilled immigrants unemployed fill those vacancies there would still be a 100,000 highly skilled unemployed immigrants not to mention the 150,000 highly skilled Canadian-born unemployed of course whether or not uh these people have the right expertise these employers are looking for that's another sort of issue another question but that's more of a skill alignment or mismatch issue uh so it doesn't actually matter the type of job since 2022 uh all kinds of job vacancies are returning to their preandemic levels um so during the pandemic we saw lots of vacancies for sales and service jobs uh but we also saw lots of vacancies for coding jobs like software engineers um chat GPT was publicly released around November of 2022 which falls on the fourth quarter of 2022 so if we measure job vacancies sort of relative to that quarter do we really see any action um not really as you can see yes there was a drop in coding job vacancies but that drop is actually no different than the drop in vacancies for trades or sales and service jobs so remember that there were multiple factors at play during the tail end of 2022 so we had not just the mass availability of Gen AI but we also had increases in immigration we had a labor market uh sort of uh reverberations from the pandemic era and lots of really macroeconomic factors so recent immigrants so that is immigrants who landed within the past 5 years are sort of increasingly more likely to go into these coding professions coding jobs like software engineering if they landed between 2011 and 2016 4% of them of that cohort became a coder by 2016 if they landed between 2016 and 2021 almost 8% became a coder by 2021 uh which is double the rate over just a 5-year period uh this perhaps of course reflects the job market conditions at the time uh the tech sector uh does tend to run in cycles and vacancies and tech jobs did surge uh during the pandemic and AI adoption rate right among Canadian businesses uh this is from our data our surveys uh it has doubled over the past couple of years uh certain sectors like information professional scientific services finance um tend to use or deploy AI uh more than other sectors around a third of firms in the information sector reported using AI recently however AI adoption doesn't necessarily translate to job losses right uh the red bars you're seeing here represent the proportion of firms which reported replacing workers with AI it shows that no matter the industry the overwhelming majority of firms seems to um which are using AI did not replace workers on a at least on a large scale um in fact almost equal share seem to have reportedly increased their hiring as a result of adopting AI but uh what these uh business surveys don't tell us is who's losing their jobs uh so the likely demographics and so on so at Stats 10 we did release a couple of studies last year looking at the potential labor impacts of AI uh we use what's called the complimentarity adjusted uh AI occupational exposure index or C AIOE for short and this was developed by the IMF a couple of years ago what this measure does is group different occupations according to their potential exposure to AI and their the jobs complmentariness with AI so the entire left half of this uh graph are what's called uh low exposure jobs meaning that these are probably out of AI's reach for the moment uh like the trades which require more physical labor uh the right half shows jobs which might be more exposed uh to AI uh but that necessarily isn't a bad thing some jobs like the ones you're seeing on the top right blue quadrant are predicted by the measure to be highly what's called complimentary with AI so the tasks they do in their jobs could be done by AI but some might be too important to hand over to new technologies such as those performed by sort of doctors nurses teachers so the human element will still be needed in some of these jobs so the bottom right red quadrant are what's called the low complimentary jobs meaning that they could be replaced by AI potentially in the future or aspects of the jobs could be uh significantly transformed in the future and I guess this is the group everyone's sort of worried about your atrisisk group so this group has a wide range of jobs from data entry clerks and clerical occupations to software engineers web designers authors all jobs which people might think of as being replaceable by AI uh so these are a very diverse group of jobs with differential trends um jobs like data entry clerks have actually been on the decline well before AI and jobs like software engineers have been on the rise on the other hand uh of course AI exposure varies depending across industries with automation the concern was it wiping out the manufacturing jobs if with AI it's a bit different uh it's not so much manufacturing jobs while that's still impacted by automation AI is slated to have more of an impact on industries like finance professional scientific services and information uh so recent immigrants are more likely to hold jobs potentially replaceable by AI so for Canadian born the share of workers in these jobs remain stable at around 29% in 2016 and 2021 why those years because we're using census data here uh and we can of course update it once the new census releases um but for recent immigrants the share actually went up from 29 to 37% in potentially uh less complimentary jobs and part of it has to do with the fact that recent immigrants might be more likely to go into clerical or sales occupations as well as tech jobs which are potentially more susceptible uh potentially to AI and when we do this across racialized groups Chinese and South Asian immigrants tend to be in jobs which are potentially more conducive to AI replacement again this could be because of their over representation in tech jobs but is this necessarily a bad thing not at all like these are wellpaying these might be well-paying highquality jobs in the tech sector and right now there's uh we don't see in the data any evidence that they're being replaced on a large scale at least uh well there are like certain cases uh case studies that show them being replaced but we haven't seen detected it yet on a large scale uh but these are just potential right so we're talking about the potential impact we don't know the actual impact yet so AI is still playing out and I will just wrap it up here so there's obviously a lot of uncertainty about AI our data here is simply there to inform discussions nothing is cast in stone so this is by mean um this is by no means any fi a final word on AI uh we are planning to release a report on tracking employment trends like an AI tracker for jobs potentially more more vulnerable to AI that'll likely come out in January um something I like to emphasize whenever talking about labor impacts of new technologies that the is that these are based on human assessment of what AI can and can't do just because a task can in theory be done by AI doesn't necessarily mean that it will because at the end of the day employers face financial legal and institutional constraints uh research so far shows that AI adoption isn't having any significant short-term effect on productivity labor productivity so it's not doesn't seem to be a silver bullet at the moment and that may be due to perhaps AI not being used to its maximum potential or it could be that legacy business processes just haven't caught up uh to new technologies um that said AI can of course have uh broader impacts uh such as skill erosion it can um also lower the barrier for entry into certain professions um and I will sort of leave it at that and uh yeah thanks a lot just uh that was terrific Taz and thank you so very much and I know that the jury is kind of out on what the impacts of AI will be on jobs because there are so more so many variables and and you probably remember when Osburn and Frey in 2014 said 47% of US jobs are in jeopardy and you know I was sitting there going haha the jobs are still here i have kind of shifted my view especially based on some of the leading edge work I've seen with physical AI and agentic AI and um the the pace of change but you're absolutely right there are a lot of things that are that are coming into play so thank you very very much for kicking us off and now I'd like to hand it over to Mark Patterson great thank you very much um that was a great overview um and so I think I'll be able to reduce a few of my slides um but definitely want to also reinforce what's already been mentioned that there are many forces that are happening right now uh we're specifically talking about technological transformation AI automation and digital uh technologies but we are facing many many challenges as has already been mids said one of the things that we see when we're um meeting with leaders not only across Canada but also globally is I think um that most people's intuition is off about the rate of change that's happening with AI and if you are tracking some of the tools um even for me I spend a few hours a day trying to keep up on what's happening but from one week to the next to see the advancements of some of the new releases so if you're paying attention to some of the image models released in the last week like Nano Banana Pro or Gemini 3 or Opus 4.5 the advances over the last version are really quite astounding in their ability to do uh the different work so again um we think about how things are changing we hear the term you know exponential change but we don't really intuit it what that means and AI um is changing at a very very rapid rate so that is one thing to keep in mind and we'll talk about it a little bit later in the presentation but I think a lot of our sensing mechanisms are off and the speed to feedback on on what is happening now all of this as has already been mentioned um you know uh technology advancement without adoption is not driving innovation and it's not going to drive some of the the labor market impacts but one thing to keep in mind as well is that uh this is uneven there's a a quote that's often used now by a famous science fiction writer but said the future is already here it's just not evenly distributed so some of the things we think about are there are companies that are making rapid advancements in the implementation and adoption of AI and you could think of some of those think Amazon think a lot of the big companies um they're at the forefront of the development of the technology and maybe the disconnect between the rest of economy Wendy mentioned and so on and we know the capacity challenges they have in adopting technologies we spent a lot of time even during co uh helping companies get websites uh believe it or not so we do know that there is an uneven adoption um and this is something that I think will play out in the labor market but it is also um potentially a challenge where more and more concentration of power and economic activities to some of the larger uh companies so just wanted to remind you there was a quote that I often um talk about one of the senior policy adviserss to the Trump administration said that during the period of the Trump administration AI will become a million times more powerful um now that seems like a really big number why could that be potentially possible it's advancements in the algorithms the training algorithms advancement uh in the GPUs so you hear about Nvidia and the graphic processing units or GPUs that are used to compute um AI and then also the buildout of the data centers so we're seeing right now massive investments being made in the buildout of data centers so massive in fact that some people are saying uh we're on the kind of edge of of a bubble um with the massive investment if you're following the news um because that ma massive investment is going to require um a return and that return would be in the form of um you know AI doing more productive um activities in the economy and that um would by its nature potentially talk about more disruption in the labor market so it's just something to keep in mind um as T hasn't said you know the story is yet to be written we're not 100% sure we can't separate all the impacts but one thing that is sure is that when we see across the country and talking to a lot of people is that there is concern there was a recent um uh poll by one of our national pollsters um um at Abacus data David KTO who says that Canadians have kind of um settled into what he calls are terms of procarity mindset um and in that procarity mindset there are certain things that play out and Wendy mentioned already some um immigration backlash and other things for different reasons um I think it is something we'll talk about in a few slides that we need to keep an eye on for sure so again technology we always tend to overestimate the impact of technology in the short term and underestimate the impact of technology in the long term and it really does depend on what we're talking about as T hasn't already already mentioned most of the discussion right now has been around generative AI it's important when you're reading stories or understanding in the news what are we actually talking about it was already mentioned that artificial was kind of the field of science that started in the ' 50s but we've had machine learning for many many years um we've been subject to it in our social media feeds and in many other aspects of society and industry deep learning really evolved in the early uh 2010s um a lot of that advancements um in the labs at uft with Jeffrey Hinton and Ilas Suskyver who Wendy already mentioned and the recent wave um that we're all talking about really came out in late November 2022 with the launch of Chat GBT 3.5 as was already mentioned so um but since then we've started talking about Agentic AI um which is uh having significant impact on not just automating tasks but automating processes and also Wendy alluded to physical AI um which is AI embodied in robotics um and so we'll talk a little bit about that but the thing to remember is that it's not just chat GBT or the chatbot that you're using in work ai is actually has the potential and is impacting almost every technology in every single industry and every single process in every single industry and so um that is really important to realize and we see a lot of people talk to a lot of people where their perspective is simply you know chat GPT um and they're asking you know how could that be affecting but it really is every single technology in every single industry and it's different forms of AI that are driving these changes so we can see some amazing technologies come out i'm not sure if you saw recently but if two people have AirPods you can talk to each other in your own language and you can be understood think of the implications of that um for service delivery for doing business across u uh you know languages across regions and so on um really significant there's massive advancements in some of the core tools like Excel um with new AI agents um rapidly enhancing and automating work uh in Excel which you know hundreds of millions if not billions of workers use Excel on a daily basis there's new uh incredibly new if you want to look up uh Google uh project called Astra new learning uh tools multimodal learning tools and agents that are designed to help uh everything from how to fix your bicycle to complex um master's level and PhD level um study and there's massive advancements in generative uh images and video um which I'm sure you've seen flooding the internet so lots of impacts this is a a video if you want to um Google on YouTube won't show for the sake of time today uh but figure three uh this is a six-minute video that shows mass absolutely massive advancements i was using figure two um videos and presentations for for a few months um and this came out about 4 weeks ago uh and the advancements are really uh incredible so again um you know if you dip into it and you see oh wow that's pretty impressive but you know it's not really there um come back even a few weeks later and there's been significant advancements in its potential to impact um and um impact work and also other things so I think the really important thing for individuals for newcomers for you for your organization for your immigration settlement organization that's supporting people at this time and and I think this is really important is that the greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence but it's to act with yesterday's logic so um and we know the companies and organizations this is a quote from Clayton Christensen fail because they continue to do what made them successful in the past so I think really uh questioning and checking um and sensing what is happening and realigning your skills to that and I'll talk about that in a minute is really really important both individually and organizationally so AI in the labor market I won't go into this um we've heard and had an amazing overview already um but one of the things I want to emphasize is that I think we're having the wrong discussion people being worried about whether AI is creating more jobs or destroying more jobs than it creates is the wrong discussion we do know that we'll change jobs um and so the question really is how we adapt how we are able to be augmented or supported by the technology and how the roles will fundamentally change we're stuck in a a period right now where a lot of people are focused on automating or thinking about how AI can change the current process when I think we should be thinking especially in how we do service delivery how we could do it completely differently uh with the advent and progression of AI um it was already mentioned youth unemployment is absolutely a big topic um it is causing a lot of concern uh with people and families and again if this isn't separated or understood um to the point it's not uh not just AI u there are many uh impacts as I've already been mentioned but again if it's misunderstood it can cause u backlash um and um potentially anti-immigration sentiment uh if we're not able to sus it out I believe we will have a future where roles will change significantly but we're also still going to have um jobs without people and then we will have as well people without jobs as we've been dealing with for for many years and just the potential for that to be accelerated i would say that um something that's interesting this was a KPMG study that looked at AI um uh basically AI um literacy and trust um you can look at the study um can find it fairly easily uh but it was interesting to note out of 47 countries Canada ranked 44th um and you may note here that a lot of other countries countries we'd normally be very happy to be in rankings with um are all kind of at the bottom and I think uh it's interesting you could draw a number of different um uh conclusions from this um in some sense um not having full trust in AI systems is a positive we do need to have um a measured approach but also we have to ask the question if there's a bit of a leaprog and I do believe that AI literacy and building trust and building it through ethical responsible adoption and use of AI is going to be critically important not only uh for uh working in the labor market but also for our society and even I would go as far as saying our democracy so you know AI literacy it's not just about basic AI literacy we do need and will continue to need mid-level skills and deep technical skills um we hear a lot today about the push to parents telling their children that they all need to go into the trades um I think we still need both um both deep technical uh skills we certainly need people in the trades but I think we need to keep a balanced approach um to how we're educating and supporting um and uh accepting talent as well into the country so I talk a lot about adaptive human potential i think we need better mechanisms to build awareness of signals so we need better sensing mechanisms um and I think uh immigration settlement organizations and frontline organizations like those of you on the call have an ability to um sense what is happening uh in the labor market fairly quickly if you're running programs you know what is or isn't working um and sharing and working collaboratively on that we need to be able to realign kind of our skills and skills pathways and systems to match emerging needs more quickly we need to be more adaptive we've been hearing about this at a personal level it's also the same at an organizational level we need to be able to execute obviously it's very hard i can tell you um you know even for ourselves at Magnet changing to a more uh AI um included um inclusive uh organization reskilling upskilling our own staff it's still a challenge we live the challenges and so adoption is not easy uh but we need to learn how to be able to execute and adopt in an ethical responsible way and we need to work together i think it's going to be really important to collaborate uh build trust and inclusion embed ethical use transparency and equity across the system um and we can talk maybe a little bit more about that in the Q&A but I'll I'll stop there for now and thank you uh to the conference and to Wendy for the invitation well thanks so much Mark really appreciate it as always and uh you know the work we're doing together around uh AI literacy and upskilling reskilling looking at adoption I think is is is important not just to employers but as you said to the sector as well i also you know two uh two points I wanted to add one is Mark and I were both at a conference last week where the deputy trade commissioner not sure from the UK and and the Canadian who was interviewing him got into a bit of a tussle over who Jeffrey Hinton really belonged to because as all of you know Jeffrey Hinton uh is an immigrant so uh I think that we uh we often forget that immigrants built this country from the railroads to the houses to the businesses and uh we really need to uh uh to uh push back in any way we can the other thing that I just wanted to underscore with with respect to Mark's point which is often missed which is the the point about jobs being um uh basically gone and we're seeing that with a lot of entry level uh computer programming pro jobs service delivery jobs and so on jobs being changed or augmented and I think it's everything you know people thought the trades were were sacrosanked they ain't you know we're seeing some amazing stuff with robotics and prefab housing and so on but um the skills to actually create new jobs um and entrepreneurship and innovation skills to me are the um the untapped potential that we really haven't thought about as intentionally as we need to and often entrepreneurship's viewed as kind of a oh you can't get a job so maybe you can be self-employed as opposed to you know entrepreneurs are going to drive the development of the economy and it's no secret to folks on the call that immigrants are more likely to be entrepreneurs immigrants also are a competitive advantage when it comes to entering new markets so as the prime minister is running around the world trying to take advantage of our free trade agreements and drive more trade deals with other countries guess who he needs to have next to him are people from those countries with um deep knowledge of those markets so I do think especially in this sector really embracing the opportunities around entrepreneurship and how we think about creating jobs and leveraging AI to uh drive innovation should be an important part of the discussion and with that not to um downplay the risks or the the the need for cautionary tales um I will hand it over to Alicia thank you so much um Wendy i'm so happy to be part of this uh panel and yeah I hope what I what I say today resonates with folks um so starting off I think it's really important to acknowledge the environmental impact as we're having these discussions um I think it's important to balance our excitement for the potential of generative AI with the reality of the environmental impacts so for sure tech enthusiasts would say that um the potential for AI to make systems more efficient and thus um consume less resources is unlimited that's very exciting hopefully the way that we um yeah the way that we get energy and power our world is a problem that will be addressed um by generative AI but in the meantime there are real environmental impacts of increased carbon dioxide emissions increased fresh water usage and really importantly for us in this room environmental inequity across the globe so for countries that already have infrastructure to have cleaner power like Finland um 97% of their AI usage is carbon-f free energy as opposed to many data centers in Asia um which don't have these systems in place and uh we're talking more like 4 to 18% uh of clean energy so that's just something to keep in mind so I want to contextualize this to say well we've been here before if anyone recalls a thing called the internet and when it it came to be and I want to just take a moment to um bring down the intimidation and say okay we've done this uh we remember in 1999 we some of us were asking Jeves um where can I find a restaurant near me that serves Italian food now all we have to do is go to Google Maps uh and type E T A L and then I see all of the Italian restaurants near me um So both the systems around us have gotten much smarter of course and so have we um this is an example of prompt engineering so in other words we have learned how to best talk to the robot um over time so I'm hopeful that even for folks who feel really intimidated by um doing anything having to do with AI that um in fact we can do it and here's what's really different this time so echoing um my fellow uh presenters um first the the scale it's happening way faster of course than internet adoption um but also newcomers aren't 20 years behind so AI is new for everyone the newcomers who are on the ground and across the globe are kind of being exposed and coming in at the same time as all of us um of course generative AI is free and accessible for now as long as you have internet um which most of us do uh the barrier to use generative AI is to know how to ask questions and that's it you don't have to be an expert in technology you don't even have to speak English you can type in your language um and do anything as you know um and then I want to just also say that the jump from the analog world so using paper to switching everything over to be digital um was a larger chasm than what we're looking at now as far as usability wise so again the ask for say a newcomer who has um who is new to this world or new to Canada um yeah the jump between using paper and using a computer is much bigger than um people who already know uh how to use technology and then how to use generative AI so I want to just center um the moment that we're in and um and to say that the problems that Geni AI could solve for newcomers depend on whether we uh the people who care about newcomers and diverse folks um build equity into these systems now while they're still being shaped so we are definitely always asking how can AI harm and how can it be used to create more equitable pathways so this is my one of my minor call to actions let's equip ourselves to be part of this um so as as my presenter my fellow presenters said um on the advocacy level it's definitely needed um to fight for more inclusive design and AI tools so we know that all technology pretty much was created by white men in Silicon Valley and their biases and worldviews are just completely baked into every tool that we have um so arguing for uh more inclusivity at on the onset in this moment is really important and of course legislation to regulate AI usage as well for decision makers or leaders at the organizational level um recognizing that every workplace whether it's settlement sector or not uh need to be building in workplace applicable AI literacy for staff um again easier said than done for sure um and then building AI literacy into programming for newcomers because we can't pretend that it's not here and it's not um inundating all of us and then for everyone um for us to learn how to efficiently use these tools while they're still free um who knows what that's going to look like in in a year or two uh and to start small but to start now again before systems are embedded and harder to change so the prelim preliminary data from the national technology working groups national sector survey um showed that only 5% of settlement organizations are using AI as a component of service delivery and we all understand why that would be lots of restrictions really important to know what we're getting ourselves into um but about 50% are interested in doing so and using AI so I want to think about how we um in the digital room and the physical room are everyone here and how we can be both equipping ourselves and newcomers uh to be part of the conversation so a couple small bite-sized pieces of uh what we can be doing because we know that we can't guide clients and newcomers through this landscape if we haven't experienced it ourselves so if anyone's interested in dipping their toe who hasn't already um this week you could talk to your clients uh about where they're using AI and you may be surprised of what's working for them um and you might also be surprised they might say "I'm not at all." and you know well you are because every tool right now is incorporating AI so making sure that they understand um and cautioning against the copy and paste using content verbatim um making sure folks know that um there is a very obvious pattern uh when people just copy and paste AI um in cover letters or in any communication so this month you could work on getting familiar um so using AI for just one task uh as Mark was saying there's definitely that need and temptation to kind of revolutionize our workflows everything we're doing uh but if we don't pick just one place to start we will be overwhelmed uh myself included by this so um think of how you could use it in one way um so maybe you have lots of resources for different clients maybe you can be um taking notes on that um research for your own purposes brainstorming workshop ideas um making sure that any thing you say to AI is anonymized and um you're not using it um you're not giving it of course um confidential client data but there are many other ways that you can use it without kind of going there and understanding it as it's your coworker it's your thought partner it's not a content creator and then next year you could aim to kind of actually weave it in um so help newcomers identify transferable skills um or AI skills um and consider guiding them towards AI friendly roles not AI proof but AI enhanced so I want to jump over to to chat about newcomers and what we have been hearing so two years ago when chat GPT was a baby not this baby but the the actual um chat GPT um we started doing research at peace geeks uh with newcomers to understand how they were already uh approaching the job market so already and this was when Chacht was less than a year old we were already hearing newcomers were using it to fill out job applications and cover letters they were using speech AI to build confidence um speaking English this wasn't even English- speakaking apps that was like a an AI friend you could talk to or or whatever and that's the purpose that they were using it for to practice for job interviews as well and then asking questions about immigration and Canadian workplace culture like what's going on why haven't I gotten a response um but definitely lacked an understanding of how it works and why it was um and still is hallucinating many times um so I want to point out that it's an opportunity for newcomers so we know from a recent survey that 56% of Canadians do want to switch careers um and so do newcomers so the folks we were talking to um were people who came to Canada with no prior professional experience maybe they were like 19 when they came didn't have any experience in their home countries maybe they took a career path in their home country just due to the placement test that they were taking it wasn't due to actually what they want to do and now that they're in Canada it's a new chance for them or they're in a survival job here in Canada and they want to upgrade so these are just different types of uh users we can consider besides people who are like trying to get back in their profession which is also a huge chunk of newcomers for sure but we just have to remember um that it is it's a ripe opportunity this is the moment for reinvention um because as I said everyone here every industry is figuring out AI right now so you could help newcomers who are totally looking to start over uh to pivot or shift a bit more to more AI adjacent careers so instead of kind of asking um you know are these taking our jobs let's look at okay how can I pivot what I do know and what skills I have to um ensure that I will still have a job even if uh my my current job no longer exists so translators and interpreters I personally don't think that uh a live interpreter that provides such emotional support um would ever fully be replaced for sure by AI i would really hope not but um yeah lots of translators would find themselves uh out of a job by now but if they can shift their skill set to say "Yeah I know lots of languages and I'm also really good at understanding um localization and cultural AI." They could be looking for jobs where they're actually shaping multilingual content or the cultural nuance that comes out i know in our data on welcome to Canada that's translated in 11 different languages it was really helpful to have um people who spoke who were native speakers of those languages look over um what our content and make sure that it um yeah it's making sense on many levels another example if there's an accountant from another country um they could shift to looking at AI operations they have the skill sets of attention to details of finding errors and inconsistencies um and they could be shifting that to work uh yeah more specifically with AI so this is just an option it doesn't mean we have to scramble to get all newcomers to change roles to AI focused roles right um we need to at least equip the newcomers who aren't already doing this which again we know many are we know that um they're on the forefront of using technology But for the newcomers who aren't we just need to make sure we're equipping them um with info on how to use what is out there so an example uh of jobs that um I think won't change but we can uh use AI to to be smarter which I'm sure many of you are already doing this dipping your toe into it um so a social worker who is using AI to organize case work notes will have more time with their clients an employment counselor who uses AI to reach um sorry to research credential pathways um has better advice or more wholesome advice at least to start with um that they can share with newcomers and then settlement workers uh who are able to use AI to draft program reports which may sound familiar um means less screen time which is really important for all of us of course so I'll just pivot to share um you know we do have a product it's definitely not the answer but it's one way uh to dip both um settlement workers toes into using generative AI and also for newcomers as well um so it's an AI powered platform tailored for newcomers by immigrants at Peace Geeks it's self-directed job tools that simulate job prep and workplace experiences and what's important to note is we have prompted and designed it in a way um where it's a it's a safe practice zone with guard rails in place um so it helps narrow down what the questions that newcomers are asking and helps guide them to get to that information faster that they need to know um instead of just going to chat GPT and typing openly like "How do I find a job in Canada?" Right we want to make sure that people are starting um from a place that's already a bit further and that um that the system already knows like okay you're talking to a newcomer and you need to focus on these points and um yeah don't hallucinate don't go too uh too far out there um and that is related for sure to tie back to my point in the beginning about the environmental impacts so um we need to consider mindful consumption and yeah let's not litter the earth with AI slop um very trendy uh phrase um but if we are learning and teaching newcomers how to use AI more efficiently it means getting to the point faster and it means consuming fewer resources so I know of course my AI literacy in the past three years has gone way higher i understand now um how to ask the right questions how to use an AI to help me craft the right questions to then ask another AI and I end up yeah getting to the point faster and consuming fewer resources um so as the ask jeves and Google example showed um as systems get more efficient we will as well and it's something we can start doing in learning now um and that's all from me thank you wow thanks for that uh really um balanced out the uh the range of of panelists i think at this point I'm looking in the Q&A um and I'll I'll bring forward a couple of the questions that are there and then I have some questions for each of the um each of the panelists so anonymous attendees it's always very ominous to me um says adopting a technology depends on how we emotionally resist it or embrace it how much of how much is using the label artificial intelligence with the human attribute intelligence to rever refer to a large language model affecting the relationship we're having to AI so that's um that's kind of an interesting uh way of looking at the issue and maybe Mark you can you can start oh I think um I think it absolutely could be I think there are many barriers so one of the things we do with um when we're we're looking at AI literacy for example is really focus on a behavioral insights approach to really understand uh the learner um and customize the learning whether it's role specific or um specific to the context and so I think that is uh critically important a lot of the general AI literacy training that's available right now um from large even large vendor training is not people don't see themselves in it um and so they're not engaging in it and I think in a very similar way really understanding some of those barriers you know language matters so I would agree with it I'm not sure that we're going to get a lot of momentum to change change what it's how it's termed but but I do think all of those things are factors for sure um I I think if you listen to a lot of you know if you're to listen to Jeffrey Hinton or others it's a very different type of intelligence than human intelligence um it has lots of different attributes so um I I think it's an interesting point for sure and I noticed uh maybe I'll pick up but Wendy just dropped her internet must have died so I'll be the interimm moderator just for for fun but Alicia do you have any comments on that or Tassen okay so well maybe we'll go to the next question um besides solutions focused on reskilling and digital literacy do you think governments need to adopt new social safety nets guaranteed basic income to build more trust and support uh for adoption of these tools tassen I'll throw that one to you yeah good question so like obviously at Statscan I can't speak to any policy recommendations as our role is really to inform these discussions with data uh but I'll say that local governments do already provide support systems to help unemployed or displaced workers transition and reskill and different uh sort of uh municipalities regions had do have very different or not very different very slightly different approaches to these things uh with AI um I don't know will we see tailored approaches to you know dealing with this that's it's a good question but yeah I'm not really sure what the right answer is what the optimal solution is maybe a a comment or two I think uh you know it a lot of this will depend the tools will depend or the the uh interventions will depend on potentially the scale of the of the impact or disruption um and I think again just like I was saying about whether individually or organizationally um I think the government is going to have to be more adaptive i think it's really hard um for all the reasons we've been talking about to predict um right now what the right approach is but I do think you know it it does question even some of our core fundamental economic models taxation a lot of different things but I think uh you know again the story is yet to be told so Wendy's back so I'm going to give up my interm moderator role hand it back to Wendy um I'm not sure Alicia before I do if you had any comment on the on the we're just finishing the the next question in the queue Wendy on u uh universal basic income etc yeah I did just want to add that um I think that's a great point but I do think it's really part of a bigger conversation around capitalism and human rights and I think that if um the powers that be cared at all about humanity and that um yeah then we'd be talking about universal basic income so yeah I think it's needed from a much bigger scale um regardless of AI wendy yeah I think um yeah we might uh I work in a business school so we might disagree on uh the the evils of capitalism but I do think that in the current environment we do have to be very prepared for um tremendous uh disruption and you know I think the next question um is interesting because Jessica Davidson is asking "Do you think that the potential for AI to represent marginalized groups can be beneficial in establishing equity to others who have more privilege and power are we giving up something here?" And if I can just start by saying um that's one of the real paradoxes because uh you know AI generative AI in particular is sort of the English major's revenge so after all those years of being told coding coding coding teach coding you know in utero so that babies hatch being able to code we're now going oh those coding jobs they're disappearing we have to have um social and emotional intelligence and value human skills and so on so I do think there's potential for AI to bridge the digital divide but there's also tremendous um potential for it to exacerbate it given what we know about people's access to the highspeed internet the affordability of highspeed internet and the skills associated with highspeed internet so that's that's me on my soap box but um I wonder Alicia if you wanted to add to this kick us off with this question yeah well I'm just thinking you know my context is I was working in a settlement org uh when COVID hit right and I remember how much even before COVID there was a need to use WhatsApp to contact people um but it it wasn't it wasn't approved by IRCC right there was a huge lag for sure um and I know that so many orgs did a lot of work to look at more secure digital messaging and um getting it kind of approved so I think that with adoption of new technology um I think it starts happening on the ground before it becomes official i think there is a a back and forth of kind of figuring out how things might work um and then policy can respond a bit more ircc could definitely require this to be uh to be part of applications just like we have to talk about protected bee status and um and things like that but I I do think there yeah there will be a moment where we're figuring it out before it becomes official thanks so much and and Mark anything that you'd like to add on the digital divide question yeah I think the so it's really interesting there are a lot of open-source openw weights models that can be downloaded right now and even run on a local computer that um have incredible potential to deal with some of the challenges we're talking about and that changes a lot of the not to go too deep on this but um you know that changes a lot of the pieces so one may ask why is all of the build out of the data centers etc etc um my concern on the digital digital divide is we'll have all of the existing digital divides but we actually looking at new digital divides which will be based around access to energy and compute um so setting aside obviously the concerns on the environment which are real and should be we should be discussing but in the near future um access to energy and compute will be um a significant barrier for the more kind of leading edge applications right so I think it depends on what problem we're talking about or trying to solve um but that is something that at the national level as a country we definitely need to be thinking and I still think we have to struggle with all of the current and existing you know if again a base foundation is if if uh you know northern rural remote community or or even you know um you know studies you've often quoted Wendy of you know young people in Toronto not having access at home to internet right so there's many different ways to look at I think we have all the existing challenges and there are new ones emerging that actually could create digital divid ides between countries and and Tasen um I don't you know I know there are a lot of people in stats Canada but do you have any um as part of your work have you done anything looking at digital divide internet access and so on that you would like to to share for insight on this question yeah we do run a a few surveys that actually look at this issue uh my colleagues uh I'm not an expert on the sort of digital divide with at as it relates to previous past technology like the internet and whatnot but my colleagues have in couple of years ago now maybe 3 years ago did look at these sorts of who's more likely to be proficient in these technologies who's likely to lag behind and what they found was it it is there is a difference uh gap between younger and older individuals So when it comes to using mobile or digital tech but that gap has closed over time so older people are getting approaching that proficiency level they're just as good as uh getting just as good as uh younger people so that is a interesting finding but with AI I don't know what that gap will be yet uh between uh what the the sort of dominant and the lagger groups would be well as the mom and the boomer on the panel um I mean like I'm old enough to be all of your mothers i can say that I the research we've done on the aging population does suggest that the gap is narrowing but it's not that narrow like there's a big difference between digital digital natives as they're referred to and me who you know every time I get a bot I type give me a human give me a human give me a human shrieking as loud as I can um so I but but when we think about newcomers in particular we know that often with economic class immigrants you have the person who is the wage earner in the workplace and you may have someone who is at home taking care of children you may have grandparents so making sure that we when we're looking at the specific situation with immigrants we're recognizing multigenerational um perspectives and just you know Mark alluded to the research we did during co which I still find horrifying as you know Alicia mentioned everything's shifted to the internet including remote schooling and we found that there's not a perfect intersection between being racialized and being an immigrant but there is a lot of overlap we found 42% of racialized children in the greater Toronto area uh were doing their homework on iPhones because they couldn't you know the family couldn't afford internet or there was one computer or or or or and the affordability issues around u internet access I think are something that we overlook and I was pleased to see that you know we're seeing more investments in for example libraries and and other kind of public sites but it is something we can't uh we can't overlook mark you wanted to add yeah I would just say it is important to note a trend like the and I think this was mentioned already by Alicia but the technology is making a whole swath of things more accessible at the at least at the entry level so think uh an example of this would be think uh Photoshop right to modify a photo even a couple of years ago you'd have to understand Photoshop and and man I've tried and horrible results every time I've ever used Photoshop and trying to modify a photo now I can just speak to it and I I mean the advancements just in the last uh the nano banana the Google uh version nano banana pro you can take a whole report and just put it in and say uh and there's Wendy putting on her uh but you could take a whole report put it in and say create a conceptual diagram or infographic on this and it is incredible the advancement just over what you could have done last week right to this week um so it's making a lot more accessible i still have a graphic designer because for the higher ran stuff and it's so it's kind of the same way i can buy code now i'm not really a coder but I can b code but to build something I still need a dev team um right but I can do basic so it's making things a lot more accessible and older older people um they may think somebody's on the other end of the line but they can talk to it right um and get an answer so it is it is really changing I think the technology the complicated user interfaces and Alicia may have a com but they're disappearing the technology is becoming more accessible it's going to change um all the systems all the interfaces we're used to using so I I think it's a very interesting trend Sorry you're on mute Wendy i'm having so many tech problems today um it just shows PhD and it those who can talk and those who can't do so it's uh or those who can do and those who can't get PhDs but um Mo Casari has um a question and he says the situation is as if with AI um employees and experts will need fewer and fewer skills and that the technology will free up more time for relations and human interaction what are some of the emotional skills that you think would be needed and and any comments on on his observation maybe uh Alicia do you want to kick us off yeah well I think that's the part that can help all of us in the room breathe a little easier is that you all have all of those skills right um it's great news for me not as great news for my partner who is a computer scientist right um yeah so I think um being able to focus on those but uh I do think having an idea of what's going on with AI will always be important right um even as you're a specialist um in in human interaction and I realize that we are almost at time um so rapid fire if you wanted to say something to the audience in terms of what they should be thinking about in the next 6 months to a year what are your recommendations start with you Tazin uh I would say that uh there's still a lot of uncertainty with new technologies that's really the takeaway here um it's uh it's a rapidly evolving labor market we have competing economic forces so AI is just happens to be one of them right now so I think that would be the main takeaway um yeah and Mark yeah I would say given that uncertainty each of us should take responsibility accountability and agency in trying to sense and understand what is happening and stay up on the trends that are impacting our particular work um take some uh basic AI literacy take responsibility even whether it's around your role in immigration or personally um have discussions with those around you find five other people in your life and share in a meaningful intentional way real learning not just hype or or or other things because I'll just give you one example like we you know a lot of people in my uh family etc still don't know that seeing is no longer believing right so like having conversations in your family with other people in your organization and staying up on the trends is a responsibility so you need to you have better sensing you need to take responsibility for how your skills will realign a credential is no longer just a checkbox for a job and um build trusted systems be ethical and responsible in your use of the tools um uh but that's what I would say you need to take agency it is happening things are changing we don't know the outcome yet as has been clear um but things are changing and there is no question in that so how you'll do your work in a few years will be different than how you do it today last word to you Alicia uh there's no stupid questions so even my techsavvy 19-year-old sister-in-law has been fooled uh by some videos that turn out they are AI so don't feel afraid to really ask questions be like "Sorry I don't understand what's going on i don't understand what this means." Um it's okay it's a discussion and we're all having it we're all part of it and I just want to mention I did respond to a question about any training on how to use AI I would recommend i will stick that at the end of my slide um but Anthropic has such good really bite-size courses that you can take yeah and there's there's we actually have a a playbook around uh where the training is because it's changing so rapidly listen it was an amazing discussion different perspectives but I think all leading in the same direction we know it's coming uh we need to make sure that adoption is responsible and we need I think all of us in terms of our individual behavior but also our organizations to really embrace innovation become resilient and adaptive and and accept that change is coming and the best thing we can do is is position ourselves for whatever may come so thank you very very
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