Alberta Professionals Both Optimistic and Skeptical When It Comes to AI at Work

We learned recently from a Canadian analysis that businesses in Alberta may be lagging in terms of adopting generative artificial intelligence tools.

But how do employees feel?

Recent data released by Salesforce shed insight in to how Canadian professionals in marketing, sales, commerce, and customer service roles feel about AI in 2023.

Many think AI is a true game-changer, while almost as many consider the tech to be overblown smoke, the data suggest.

For their part, Albertans are at once optimistic and skeptical about the rapidly spreading and evolving technology.

For example, 70% of pros in the province believe Gen AI will “help their organization take better advantage of available data,” above the national average, according the Salesforce survey conducted in collaboration with Angus Reid. They also expect the tech to save them an average of up to five hours of work per week.

However, Albertans harbour doubts about the quality of current AI tech. More than 80% of workers in AB expect Gen AI to introduce new security risks, while a similar number agree that AI lacks human contextual knowledge, which can result in inaccurate or incomplete output. This wariness around AI is slightly above the national average.

Albertans, in other words, recognize with wide eyes what Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff calls the “trust gap.”

At Dreamforce in San Francisco, a major emphasis was on addressing AI’s “trust gap” problem. This includes a lack of trust in how data is being handled around AI, resulting in hesitancy in adoption, as well as the quality of data input so that AI output can be trustworthy.

Benioff believes closing these gaps in trust will be critical in maximizing AI adoption and usage.

Familiarizing professionals, technical or otherwise, with AI will be another step toward closing the trust gap. Canadians expect that, as AI takes over many verticals, their employers will implement related training.

However, only about one-quarter of marketing and commerce companies in Canada currently offer any form of AI upskilling, according to survey data.