Are Canadian shops and restaurants ready for AI? What StatCan says

Last year, 5.7% of Canadian retailers said they planned to use AI in the following 12 months. This year it is 16.0%. That is close to a threefold jump in one year, and it comes from Statistics Canada, not from a software vendor's brochure.

If you run a shop or a restaurant, that number can feel either alarming or irrelevant. It is neither. It is a plan, not a result, and the gap between the two is where most of the useful information sits.

Plans are jumping, but from a low start

Statistics Canada asks businesses a simple question each quarter: do you plan to use AI to produce goods or deliver services over the next 12 months? In the third quarter of 2026, 25.2% of all businesses said yes. In the same quarter of 2024 it was 10.6%.

Retail and food service look different from each other. Restaurants and hotels (the survey groups them as "accommodation and food services") were already moving last year. Retail was not, and has just caught up.

Read that chart carefully. Retail sat still for a year and then lurched forward. A sharp jump in one quarter's survey is a reason to watch, not proof of a trend. We would want to see the next two quarters before calling it a shift.

What businesses actually do with it

Plans are one thing. Use is another. In the 12 months to the second quarter of 2026, 19.2% of Canadian businesses used AI, up from 12.2% a year before and 6.1% the year before that. Statistics Canada did not publish a retail or restaurant figure on that page, so we cannot tell you how many shops are actually using it today.

What it does show is what AI-using businesses do with it:

• Data analytics, at 36.6% of those using AI.
• Text analytics, at 34.5%. That means software that reads and sorts written material such as emails and reviews.
• Virtual agents or chatbots, at 28.2%.

For a shop, those three headings translate into things like sorting sales data by product, summarizing customer reviews, and answering "are you open Sunday?" on your website. For a restaurant, it might be reading a month of reviews for patterns, or a chat window that handles hours, menu and allergy questions. None of this is exotic.

Being tiny is not a barrier

Here is the number that surprised us. Businesses with 1 to 4 employees reported 19.9% AI use, slightly above the 19.2% average for all businesses. Firms with 100 or more employees were at 27.8%.

On planned use, the pattern is more mixed: 25.6% for businesses with 1 to 4 employees, 21.0% for those with 5 to 19, 32.8% for 20 to 99, and 37.5% for 100 or more. The 5-to-19 group is the one lagging, and that is the size of many independent restaurants and shops.

We would not read much into the difference between 25.6% and 21.0%. These are survey estimates, and the report does not give us margins of error for them here. The safer reading is that company size is not a wall. A three-person shop can use AI, and about one in five businesses that size already does.

The opinion of owners is less enthusiastic

Statistics Canada counts businesses. A separate survey asks owners how it went. The 2026 Zensurance Small Business Confidence Index, reported by Retail Insider, polled 1,000 small business owners and self-employed people. The article does not describe the survey method or give a margin of error, so treat the figures as a rough read.

Only 9% credit AI with meaningful productivity gains or cost savings. And 7% say it has hurt their revenue or client base. Neither survey tells us which tools, which tasks or which businesses sit behind those answers.

Put the two sources together and a believable picture appears. More businesses are trying AI each year. Most of them have not yet found something that moves the needle. Adoption is running ahead of payoff.

Why some owners stay out

Statistics Canada also asks what holds businesses back. The top answers:

• 40.0% said AI is not relevant to their business. This is the largest reason by far.
• 13.4% cited cybersecurity or privacy concerns.
• 10.6% cited cost.

The Bank of Canada found something similar from the business side. In a survey of business leaders carried out in December 2025, 28% neither used AI nor planned to in 2026, often because they saw it as irrelevant to their work. It also lists accommodation and food among the industries with the highest adoption, though it gives no exact figure.

"Not relevant" is a fair answer for some. A one-chair barber with a full book does not need a chatbot. But it is worth checking that answer against your own week. If you spend an hour a day on the same reply to the same five questions, it is relevant.

What this means for a shop or restaurant

Three things stand out.

You are not behind. More than half of all businesses, 52.7%, say they are not planning to use AI in the next year. Another 22.1% are unsure. Nobody has won this yet.

The easy wins are in words, not in analytics. The most common uses are about reading and writing text and answering questions. Those carry the lowest risk if a person reviews the output. Do not start by handing it your till data or your customer list.

Privacy is a real cost, not paperwork. If a chatbot sees customer names, phone numbers or allergy notes, PIPEDA, the federal privacy law, applies to how you handle them. Check where a tool stores conversations and whether it trains on them, before a customer's details go in.

When should you not bother? If the task is rare, if mistakes would be costly and hard to spot, or if you cannot say what time it would save, wait. Starting without a number in mind makes it hard to tell whether it worked.

Where to start

1. Write down the three questions customers ask you most often, and the time you spend on them in a week.
2. Try one text task, such as drafting replies to reviews or summarizing a month of them, using a tool whose privacy terms you have read. Check every output.
3. Come back in a month and count the hours. If it saved none, stop.

If you would like a second opinion on where AI fits in your business, you can book a call with Trimotech.