The Bank of Canada published remarks examining artificial intelligence as a possible driver of Canadian productivity growth, inflation dynamics, and future economic capacity.
The speech treated AI as more than a technology-sector story. The Bank said it follows AI because productivity affects how quickly the economy can grow without adding inflation pressure, and because new technology can change employment, investment, and business costs over time.
One striking detail was the scale of investment. The Bank said AI-related investment by leading U.S. technology companies was about US$200 billion in 2024 and doubled to roughly US$400 billion in 2025.
The remarks also placed AI in a longer historical arc. The underlying technology was described as the product of decades of development, with recent advances making AI systems more broadly usable by firms, workers, and public institutions.
For Canada, the central question is adoption. Productivity gains do not come only from inventing a technology; they depend on whether firms reorganize work, invest in complementary software and equipment, train workers, and use the technology in day-to-day production.
The Bank also said it uses machine-learning models alongside traditional models to help forecast inflation and economic activity. That point matters because AI is not only an external subject for monetary policy; it is also becoming part of the analytical toolkit used to understand the economy.
If AI raises productivity, it can affect wages, business investment, inflation pressure, and the size of the future tax base; if adoption disappoints, the fiscal and economic effects would be more limited.