Paul Acerbi: AI, friend or foe?
As artificial intelligence gets its own minister and the federal government turns to it for service efficiencies, Canadians have their worries.
By: Paul Acerbi
Imagine a future where government services are just a click away, as seamless and efficient as ordering a coffee on your favourite app. This is a future that governments around the world, including Canada’s, are promising. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly positioned as the Holy Grail of technological developments. But this promise comes with its share of apprehension — especially in Canada.
AI adoption faces legitimate hurdles, including safety concerns, privacy issues, unequal access, and workforce disruption. We've been here before. In the 1990s, critics voiced similar concerns about the Internet, some of which did materialize. Yet today, with the benefits outweighing the costs, almost no one is advocating for the dismantling of the World Wide Web. Our wisest path forward with AI isn't resistance but strategic adaptation; our leaders recognize this and are focusing not on halting progress, but on (safely) harnessing its potential.
According to G7 leaders, AI has the potential to grow prosperity, benefit societies, address pressing global challenges, drive efficiency in our public sector, better serve citizens, and enable “decent work” while addressing challenges for our labour markets. That is a long list that falls under the catch all phrase of “pressing global challenges.” A phrase so broad that we will never know if it was achieved. This may have been the reason it was included in the G7 AI Communique.
It doesn’t get any clearer when we examine specific claims. Take the communique's nod to labour market challenges. While AI may indeed be reshaping how some of us work, its current incarnation offers no meaningful solution to our most urgent workforce dilemmas such as skills shortages.
Different issues arise when looking at the desire to drive efficiency in our public sector by “accelerating adoption of AI in the public sector to enhance the quality of public services for both citizens and businesses and increase government efficiency while respecting human rights and privacy, as well as promoting transparency, fairness, and accountability.”
On the one hand, this vision is aligned with what Canadians are demanding. By a 2-to-1 margin, Canadians prefer digital over in-person services. No surprise there. We live in a world where everything from shopping to banking happens instantly on our phones. So why wouldn’t governments follow suit? For those looking to ensure gender and age balance in the world of digital government services, the history of tech adoption has shown us that the early lead for young men (which exists today) will quickly evaporate once the services become more commonplace.
However, despite all this momentum, the move to AI-driven public services will not be without its challenges. And it is not a given that if they build it, Canadians will endorse it.
The future could bring more headwinds than tailwinds for Mark Carney, AI Minister Evan Solomon and other advocates for AI in government. We are witnessing a decline in public trust and perception of government efficacy. To this, there are multiple signals pointing to a decline in overall enthusiasm for all things tech. Ipsos’ “Next 2024” Study, which was done late in 2024, saw a notable decline in the number of Canadians who could be described as “digital enthusiasts.” From a peak of 51 per cent in 2022, today only 38 per cent could be identified as technology enthusiasts. The Ipsos 2025 AI Monitor Study also revealed that among 30 global markets surveyed, Canada ranks as one of the most apprehensive and the least (30th of 30 countries) enthusiastic nation regarding artificial intelligence.
It will be within this context that governments need to prove to Canadians that AI delivered services will be a good thing. When asked whether AI will one day decide who gets government support programs like unemployment insurance, 57 per cent said that this is likely to happen within the next 10 years. However, more saw this as a negative (57 per cent) than a positive (43 per cent) for Canadians. Similarly, 40 per cent felt that AI will be deciding things like who can immigrate to Canada with roughly half seeing this as a negative (53) and the other half seeing this as a positive (47). Yet complete automation is far from desirabl; 78 per cent of Canadians insist on maintaining the right to a human-override of AI decisions; creating an inescapable reality: when citizens don't get satisfactory results from automated systems, they'll demand human intervention for explanations and solutions.
Despite the worries and drawbacks, AI should make internal operations more efficient, communications and information flow faster and information should be more accurate and up to date. For example, if the government were to apply AI to the Access to Information (ATIP) process, the results would be greater efficiency, driving greater transparency and ultimately greater trust.
AI may not reduce the overall cost of government, but if done well, it could lead to entirely new services for individuals and businesses. All levels of government have a wealth of behavioural information, on everything from health outcomes to travel practices to weather patterns, to draw on. If government can anonymize this information, organize it, relinquish control of it and allow individuals and business to use AI to mine this information, new business (i.e. revenue) opportunities would likely emerge.
Fast-forward to the G7 leaders' ideal scenario: AI-driven government gains public acceptance, delivering enhanced services with fewer staff. Canadians access government information effortlessly while policy decisions accelerate. The economy grows as AI creates new wealth-generating opportunities.
Done right, AI redistributes power — placing knowledge and decision-making directly in citizens' hands, stripping governments of their information monopoly, not only improving services and efficiency but providing Canadians a powerful tool to evaluate government performance. AI will fundamentally transform governance itself.
That qualifier — "done right" — is crucial. Government's primary challenge is building public trust that it can safely unlock AI's potential while addressing legitimate concerns. On this critical foundation, Canadians remain skeptical.
Paul Acerbi is SVP Client Organization and Ipsos Canada’s AI Adoption Lead
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Note to author Paul Acerbi: Canada is no longer a G7 country. Liberals made sure of that and are working hard on making sure we fall down ever further.
AI requires accurate and accessible data to be effective. I’m not sure we have that in most aspects of government, so even from a technical standpoint, I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves if we think this is some sort of saviour available to us in the next ten years. The government can’t even effectively implement a payroll system and we’re expected to believe they can to properly implement something a thousand times more complex?