Canadian AI Trends in HR: A Year in Review and Foreshadowing 2025

Key Points:

• AI has revolutionized HR recruitment and hiring in Canada by reducing the time-to-hire and enhancing the candidate experience

• Employee onboarding and learning management have been transformed with AI, streamlining manual tasks and enhancing personalization

• The year 2025 will see further developments in AI for HR in Canada, including enhanced Employee Experience (EX) management, balancing staffing and workload distribution, and challenging perceptions of trust in leadership

Why Do AI Trends Matter?

Looking back to understand AI trends may seem curious. By the fall of 2023, Chatbots were barely on the scene. Alas, in less than a year Artificial Intelligence (AI) has exploded in ways that have fundamentally changed the course of daily operations and growth strategies of organizations across virtually every industry around the world. The same holds particularly true for Human Resources (HR) in Canada.

Indeed, 2024 has been an important year in terms of AI transformation in HR. It's crucial to understand these trends because they highlight the evolving nature of the HR landscape. 2024's trends indicate where the industry is heading.

The HR world is often characterized as a manual world filled with time-consuming processes. Recruitment often involves hours screening resumes, onboarding relies on stacks of checklists, and performance management is limited to a frequency of reviews that can often miss the subtle nuances of an employee's growth. Employee engagement is often driven by surveys, and workforce planning requires significant data analysis efforts that rely on quickly antiquating methods.

Since AI entered the landscape this year, it has promised efficiency, scalability, and intelligent decision-making. The appeal of AI in the HR world are numerous, but the most significant tends to be reducing armchair swiveling, providing personalized insights, and positioning HR professionals to be strategic drivers of an organization - and no longer merely administrators. A survey of 2,900 HR leaders and executives across Canada and the United States found that AI adoption has become mainstream for HR teams with smaller companies even more reliant on the technology than their larger competitors.

Here are the top three AI in HR trends in Canada throughout 2024:

1. Recruitment and Hiring

 With the average time-to-hire being north of 36 days on average, recruitment is seeing the most visible transformation through AI and automation. In fact, 79 percent of organizations in North America are currently using AI and automation tools in recruitment. At the time of writing this Insight, there are 81 AI recruiting startups in Canada.

AI chatbots have been increasingly used this year in the area of HR to handle candidate engagement, manage application updates, conduct preliminary assessments, and help interviewers prepare for interviews. From AI-based video interviewing software conducting sentiment analysis to AI-driven employee matching, training, talent identification, and professional development, 2024 has been a busy year in terms of AI’s impact on the HR recruitment and hiring scene.

2. Employee Onboarding

The often cumbersome and paperwork-intensive process of onboarding has changed significantly because of AI. In the United States, 68 percent of organizations are already using AI in the onboarding process, with 41 percent of respondents in a recent study anticipating AI-driven onboarding by August 2025. In Canada, the stakes around AI use for onboarding are high.

Throughout the year, managers have reported that long hiring cycles are leading to high turnover due to heavy workloads, higher recruitment costs, losing top candidates to competitors, and delayed or cancelled projects. AI assists by means of streamlining manual tasks like document submission and compliance training while AI chatbots are playing a role in guiding new hires throughout the onboarding process. Chatbots are also assisting in the production of FAQs.

3. Learning and Development

Learning Management Systems (LMS) are familiar platforms to HR professionals. They can be tremendously useful in organizing, creating, and delivering training and educational content in ways that are insightful and easy to use for both HR and the workforce these platforms serve. A key transformation throughout 2024 is the onboarding of AI functionality into LMS. By the end of 2024, it is expected that 47 percent of all LMS tools will feature AI capabilities.  In Canada, technology-driven use in teaching and learning is expected to grow well into 2027 with GenAI being a potent driver for change. The continued demand for flexible learning and hybrid offerings is in part due to the impact of GenAI on educational industries, and so AI’s entrance into LMS this year was not a surprise.

We have already seen AI assist on LMS platforms by tailoring learning paths based on individual skills and growth goals and adapting to preferred learning styles as well. Moreover, AI is being positioned to reduce administrative support as well by automating enrollment, scheduling, and grading tasks. As we have seen in neighboring platforms, data-driven insights on learner progress and training program effectiveness are one of the many AI elements that are effectively transforming HR professionals into business leaders.

Foreshadowing AI-HR Trends in Canada for 2025

Trends in the United States, Europe, and the rest of world serve as important indicators of AI solution marketplace transformations likely to arrive in 2025. Here are three trends Canada can expect to see next year:

1. AI Intersecting with Employee Experience (EX)

Economic recovery priorities have quickly shifted organizations’ focus on cost reduction and efficiency boosts but at a considerable cost in terms of lost emphasis on inclusion, equity, mental health, and workplace schedule flexibility. To compensate for an increase in workplace challenges and an overall shift away from the quality of employee experience, AI is increasingly adopted by employees to recover their own workplace experience. As we published recently, AI that can come to the workplace in an employee’s pocket is an attractive assistant for getting through a difficult workday. This trend from 2024 will likely increase throughout 2025.

With Gartner reporting that 60 percent of HR leaders believing that their current technology stack hinders rather than improves employee experience, organizations will do well to critically reflect upon what role its own and its employees’ AI play in improving their experience at work. Given the impact AI is making in niche HR workflows already, expect to see more AI targeted toward employee mental wellness to predict burnout, measure morale, and isolate what aspects of the workplace culture are not working.

2. AI to Balance Staffing and Workload

More than half of organizations surveyed by SHRM in 2024 reported that their HR units are understaffed. With SHRC also reporting that only 19 percent of HR executives expect their HR unit size will increase next year and that 57 percent of HR professionals are reporting to work beyond normal capacity, AI-driven task automation will continue to offset HR labour shortages well into and beyond 2025.

As organizations determine which human inputs add the most impact and value against where they believe AI can fill in and even take the lead, we can also expect to see a sharper rise in the propagation of AI Agents. As our Co-Founder Christina Catenacci explains, AI Agents are expected to work without the need for human supervision. They will play a significant role in reframing the conversation that an organization will have about balancing staffing and workloads.

3. AI’s Role in Challenging and Promoting Trust of Leadership

Changes are stressful. Employees have been burning out and disconnecting at alarming rates throughout 2024. While EX will be a challenge to maintain and foster throughout 2025, leadership will also likely continue to face elevated pressure to maintain trust and transparency as well. Layoffs, economic uncertainty, global conflict, and the likelihood of political turmoil has created a global-reading sense of job insecurity for many workers. How leaders navigate these issues, particularly when the adoption of AI is often perceived as a barrier to trust, will certainly make the question of AI’s role in HR leadership a difficult one to answer.

46 percent of HR leaders believe AI boosts their analytics capabilities and 41 percent of business leaders expected to redesign business processes via AI in the next few years, AI will be implemented in more critical business lines and operations across more industries throughout 2025. This means that leadership must find ways to lead their workers with confidence.

Thought Leadership will play a critical role in shaping conversations, easing debates, and softening cynicism. It involves creating and distributing key content in the form of blogs, podcasts, videocasts, and newsletters that clarify what AI is versus what AI is not, how and why it is proven to improve workplace processes and productivity and is implemented without necessitated layoffs. In order to protect, foster, and maintain trust with employees, leaders need to exemplify themselves as commanders of AI, and not merely its passengers We expect to see a significant rise in AI-oriented Thought Leadership content generation throughout 2025.

2024 and 2025: a Period of Significant AI Transformation in HR

AI's influence on HR in Canada throughout 2024 has been nothing short of transformative. From streamlining recruitment and onboarding to tailoring employee learning experiences, AI has repositioned HR professionals to move beyond administrative tasking and take on  more strategic roles.

As we look toward 2025,  global trends will continue to shape the Canadian HR landscape, requiring leaders to adopt ethical and inclusive AI practices while maintaining a human-centered approach that reflects critically on what it means to be a trustworthy leader who understands and embraces AI. Organizations that embrace these technologies and lessons thoughtfully will be well-positioned to foster a more productive and engaging workplace in the years ahead.