As more Canadian companies appear to be replacing employees with AI, some experts say the tools aren’t always effective in boosting productivity.
BenchSci is an example of a recent Canadian company turning to artificial intelligence. The company uses AI to support preclinical organizations with biomedical experiments, but now it’s taking its commitment to embrace the technology to a whole new level.
Since May, BenchSci laid off 23 per cent of its workforce (83 workers) and has been using AI tools to perform their tasks, according to the Globe and Mail.
The decision comes a month after the company’s CEO Liran Belenzon announced on the company’s blog that the company made the decision to become “AI-first,” as its workers now use AI tools, including Google’s Gemini and NotebookLM, to boost productivity, while following ethical processes and taking accountability for their work.
The CEO also explained that AI is now being used in “areas where it can make the biggest impact,” which includes talent acquisition and internal communications.
Meanwhile, Belenzon also shared that he was encouraging employees to ramp up their AI expertise and utilize it to facilitate their daily tasks.
“We’re living through one of the greatest technological revolutions in history. As I often remind my team, those who fail to embrace AI risk being left behind—not by the technology itself but by peers who have mastered it,” he added.
Now Toronto reached out to BenchSci for a comment on its decision to boost AI integration, but has not received a response in time of publication.
OTHER COMPANIES EMBRACING AI
BenchSci joins a global trend of companies who have been using AI to replace laid off employees.
Earlier this year, popular language-learning app Duolingo announced it was going to become “AI-first,” gradually getting AI to take on the work of contractors and automating its internal processes.
“This isn’t about replacing Duos with AI. It’s about removing bottlenecks so we can do more with the outstanding Duos we already have. We want you to focus on creative work and real problems, not repetitive tasks,” Duolingo’s CEO Luis von Ahn said in a statement on LinkedIn.
Swedish company Klarna’s CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski also announced years ago that the organization had laid off nearly 700 employees and replaced them with AI in hopes of boosting productivity.
However, last year, Siemiatkowski publicly admitted that the move was an overstep, saying that customer dissatisfaction and decline in work quality had led the company to hire more human employees, according to media reports.
The transition comes as many Canadians face a hard job market, with an average unemployment rate of 6.9 per cent, according to Statistics Canada.
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CAN AI REPLACE HUMANS?
While the recent push for AI might lead to concerns over job security, TMU Economic Research Manager Viet Vu, who specializes in the use of AI in the labour market, says the current push towards AI is, for the most part, an attempt from companies to deal with revenue issues while impressing investors.
“Due to two main factors – overhiring and investment during the pandemic, and a high interest rate environment that makes borrowing much more expensive – tech companies have, for the past few years, experienced a recession of sorts. However, as leaders, you don’t want to blame a bad economy or bad company performance for layoff as that may scare off potential investors, and AI becomes a good scapegoat in these instances,” Vu told Now Toronto on Wednesday.
The expert explains that even though many employers claim that AI could boost their productivity, these tools are currently not equipped to substitute human work, often leading to a decline in efficiency and quality of work.
While there is a possibility that AI might evolve in the next five to ten years to effectively perform certain tasks, including frontline work such as customer service or telecommunications, Vu says he believes most industries will maintain productive human employees.
“We do have the labor market data for right now, and we do see the fact that adoption of AI technology doesn’t lead to productivity improvement and doesn’t lead to sort of labor reduction,” he said.
“The bigger issue becomes when companies don’t really innovate, don’t really adapt and don’t really adopt these new technologies to improve their productivity. What I am contesting, though, is that many of these announcements often follow a lot of fanfare, [but] aren’t such effective adoptions, because not all adoption is effective,” he added.
FINDING THE RIGHT BALANCE IS KEY
On the other hand, Executive Partner of Salopek HR Vanessa Salopek explains that many companies are in fact looking to expand their processes into AI, as these tools can sometimes in fact boost productivity and speed while allowing employees to focus on more complex tasks.
“This doesn’t always mean full job replacement, as it often starts with augmenting human work to increase efficiency. Forward-thinking organizations are framing AI adoption not as a cost-cutting measure, but as a tool to reallocate human talent to higher-value, more strategic work,” she told Now Toronto.
Despite this expansion in the use of AI, the HR expert explains that when the implementation of tools isn’t done properly it can in fact lead to poor work quality and erosion of company culture.
For these reasons, Salopek believes that rather than taking away jobs, AI is more likely to take on certain tasks, including financial processes, customer service, and certain administrative functions.
“Over-reliance on AI can create blind spots, and humans remain stronger in empathy, ethics, and nuanced judgment. The real challenge is to find the right balance between human and AI contributions rather than leaning too far in either direction,” she added.
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