TORONTO: Canadian businesses are spending roughly 12 times more on artificial intelligence than they were two years ago, according to new transaction data from Float, a Canadian financial technology company.
The findings, released in Float's inaugural "Canada's AI Spending Snapshot 2026," analyze anonymized transaction data from more than 10,000 Canadian businesses using the Float platform. Among a consistent cohort of businesses active on Float in both August 2024 and August 2026, monthly AI spending increased more than twelvefold.
Adoption also widened significantly. Forty-seven percent of those businesses now purchase at least one AI product, up from 27 percent two years earlier, with a median annual spend of $92 per employee.
"Companies aren't sitting on the sidelines waiting to see how AI plays out. They're trying tools, finding what works and, increasingly, spending more as they put those tools to work across their businesses," said Rob Khazzam, CEO and co-founder of Float.
Khazzam noted that the spending surge comes during a period of economic uncertainty for Canadian businesses, when discretionary spending typically slows.
"To call the past two years uncertain for Canadian business would be an understatement, and in a climate like this, discretionary spending usually slows," he said. "AI has done the opposite, a sign of how essential these tools have already become."
Spending Proves Volatile and Hard to Predict
Unlike traditional enterprise software, AI costs are increasingly tied to usage and consumption, making spending less predictable.
More than 70 percent of AI-buying businesses experienced at least one month in which spending spiked by more than 50 percent, according to the report. AI spending was approximately three times more volatile than Slack spending and roughly twice as volatile as Microsoft software spending.
Businesses Build Multi-Vendor AI Stacks
Rather than settling on a single provider, most businesses are assembling stacks of AI tools.
The average AI buyer purchased from 2.71 vendors over the past year, and the share buying from four or more vendors more than doubled. Among businesses paying for either ChatGPT or Claude, about 51 percent now pay for both, up from just 13 percent two years ago.
Currency Conversion Adds Financial Strain
The report also highlights administrative challenges accompanying the AI boom. Approximately 77 percent of AI spending among businesses on Float is billed in U.S. dollars, exposing the large majority of purchases to currency conversion fees.
"AI can be adopted by an individual employee or team almost overnight, but the financial implications quickly become much broader," Khazzam said. "As businesses scale their use of AI, finance teams need visibility into what they're buying, how costs convert to local currency and who is accountable for managing that spend."
Adoption Spreads Across Sectors and Provinces
While software companies remain the heaviest AI users, the report found meaningful adoption across education, finance, manufacturing, retail, construction and other sectors. AI purchasing increased in every province measured over the past year.
"This tells us that today, spending on AI tools is the new normal for Canadian businesses across all provinces and sectors," the report states.
Khazzam said the next phase of AI adoption will hinge on how effectively companies manage the technology.
"The next chapter of the AI story will not only be about what the technology can do," he said. "It will be about how Canadian businesses put AI to work, how they manage it, and whether it starts to separate the companies that master it from the ones that don't."
Canada's AI Spending Snapshot is Float's first report in what the company describes as an ongoing annual pulse check on how Canadian businesses are investing in AI.
