Only 19 percent of Americans use AI every day. Sixty one percent have used it at all in the past six months. That's from Menlo Ventures' own 2025 consumer AI survey, not a number somebody made up to make you feel better.
Not everyone.
Canada has its own number, and it's smaller. Statistics Canada found that 19.2 percent of Canadian businesses used AI to produce goods or deliver services in the twelve months to May 2026. That's triple what it was two years earlier, when it sat at 6.1 percent. Tripling sounds dramatic until you remember it's tripling off a small base.
Here's the part that surprised me. Businesses with one to four employees used AI at almost the same rate as businesses with a hundred employees or more. 19.9 percent versus 27.8 percent. If you run a small shop and assumed the big guys had a huge head start on you, the actual gap is closer to eight points.
Now look at the companies everyone assumes have this fully figured out. The ones the LinkedIn posts are actually about.
Camunda surveyed 1,150 senior decision makers in 2025, all at companies with a thousand employees or more, across the US, UK, France and Germany. Only 11 percent of their agentic AI projects reached production in the past year. Eighty percent said most of what they've built is still a chatbot that answers questions, not the orchestrated system from the demo. Almost half said their AI runs in silos, cut off from the rest of the business.
I don't have a Canadian version of that number. Nobody's surveyed Canadian companies specifically on how many of their AI pilots actually ship. If you're wondering how you compare to a Canadian enterprise doing this properly, I can't tell you, because that data doesn't exist yet.
A company with a thousand employees and a dedicated budget still can't get an AI agent past the pilot stage nine times out of ten. You comparing yourself to them was never a fair fight.
I hear the behind feeling on almost every call I take with a business owner. It's rarely phrased as a question. It's phrased like an apology, like they owe me an explanation for why they haven't done more yet. I don't think they owe anyone that.
So where does that leave a small business owner who feels behind.
Behind what, exactly. Behind a LinkedIn post. Behind a highlight reel. Behind a case study written by the one company in ten that got it working.
Not behind the actual, measured use of AI in Canada right now, which is about a fifth of businesses, most of them still figuring out what it's even for. Not behind the large companies either, who are stuck at roughly the same early stage as everyone else, just with more people in the room while they're stuck.
If you've used AI to draft an email, or clean up a report, or ask it something you didn't understand, you're already doing what most Canadian businesses using AI are doing with it. If you tried to get it to sound like you and it didn't, that's not you falling behind. That's the documented experience of almost everyone trying this right now, including companies with entire teams dedicated to getting it right.
The pressure to feel behind on AI isn't coming from the data. It's coming from a small, loud slice of the internet showing you their best day and calling it Tuesday.