The federal government is putting $162 million into a five-year program that will place 10,000 students and recent graduates inside Canadian businesses to help them adopt artificial intelligence, Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation Evan Solomon announced Sept. 25.
The money flows through Mitacs, the national research organization that already runs paid internship programs linking students with industry. The new initiative, called Mitacs AI Advantage, runs two streams: ADOPT, which places students with companies that have little or no in-house AI expertise, and AI+X, aimed at businesses further along in adopting the technology. Placements begin in the 2026-27 fiscal year and are open to post-secondary students, recent graduates and postdoctoral fellows, according to a Government of Canada release.
“That is 10,000 opportunities to move dollars from post-secondary institutions to the wider economy, 10,000 opportunities to gain access to the expertise they need to put AI to work in a practical, reliable state,” Solomon said, according to BetaKit.
The national push scales up a smaller pilot already running in Waterloo, Ont. Communitech, the regional tech hub, launched a program called AI@WORK this spring as part of the Waterloo Region AI Coalition, embedding University of Waterloo co-op students directly inside small and mid-sized construction and manufacturing firms to design custom AI tools and automate routine work, rather than simply following instructions from employers. “Our goal is to seed the region with the next generation of founders,” Communitech chief executive Sheldon McCormick said when that pilot launched in May. “When students realize they can build an AI solution for one company and scale it to thousands, that’s where new ventures come from.”
The Mitacs funding is one piece of Ottawa’s broader $2.3-billion AI for All strategy, which Prime Minister Mark Carney unveiled June 4 with a goal of helping create up to 250,000 jobs tied to AI adoption by 2031. Of the money announced that day, $700 million went to a Compute Access Fund that subsidizes AI processing costs for businesses and $500 million to a Canadian Tech Growth Fund, while the strategy separately set a target of raising business AI adoption from 12 per cent to 60 per cent by 2034.
That adoption gap is the problem the small-business half of the Mitacs program is meant to close. Smaller Canadian firms have consistently told researchers they lack the in-house talent to experiment with AI the way larger, better-resourced competitors can, and the ADOPT stream is designed to put that expertise on their payroll directly, rather than leaving it concentrated in universities or big-city tech firms.
Ottawa has not said how it will measure whether the placements lead to permanent hires or lasting productivity gains at the businesses involved, or how many of the 10,000 positions have been matched to employers so far. Mitacs is expected to open applications to businesses and students in the coming months.
