Opportunities are highly concentrated in tech hubs, but most postings offer location flexibility.
Job postings involving generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) represent a small but rapidly growing segment of the Canadian labour market. At the end of May 2024, 0.17% of Canadian job postings on Indeed included terms related to GenAI — including “ChatGPT,” and “large language models” etc. — in their job descriptions. The rise began from near-zero at the start of 2023 and has shown little signs of cooling in recent months, as just 0.11% of job postings in early January 2024 mentioned these GenAI-related terms.
Postings associated with GenAI are mainly for jobs in science and technology. These occupations accounted for 59% of all Canadian postings mentioning GenAI in May 2024, even though they represented just 6% of total job postings nationwide. Meanwhile, mentions of GenAI were relatively rare elsewhere, with a few exceptions like postings for content writers and marketers. This suggests many job postings mentioning GenAI are for positions involving the ongoing development of the technology itself, rather than jobs where GenAI can be used as a tool, which are widespread across the labour market.
The high concentration of GenAI-related postings in the tech sector is also apparent in their geographic location. Toronto stands out as Canada’s leader in GenAI jobs, where they accounted for 0.3% of postings in May. This share was above the near 0.2% of postings in Vancouver and Calgary, which rounded out the top three Canadian GenAI centres. Despite their reputations as tech hubs, Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge and Montreal ranked somewhat lower, while GenAI postings elsewhere in Canada were quite rare.
GenAI’s presence in Toronto’s labour market also ranks high when compared to most US metro areas. Among all North American metros analyzed, Canada’s largest city had the seventh highest share of its postings explicitly mentioning GenAI, above New York City and Washington, D.C., (though the latter two have more total GenAI postings due to their greater number of total postings). However, Toronto stands closer to the rest of the pack compared to the main North American GenAI hubs on the US West Coast, particularly San Jose, Seattle, and San Francisco.
The high concentration of GenAI jobs in major cities might be discouraging for those living elsewhere who are interested in these positions. However, for people with the right skills, employers in the sector appear quite open to finding candidates across the country. In May, 58% of Canadian GenAI-related job postings mentioned some form of remote or hybrid work, 4-times higher than the 14% economy-wide average, and higher than the 44% remote share among science and tech jobs more broadly.
Instead, the location of GenAI postings in major tech hubs more likely reflects where companies in the sector are situated, rather than specific requirements for job seekers. With the sector still in its infancy, casting as wide a net as possible in the candidate search appears paramount for companies looking for workers. This motivation is likely an important source of GenAI postings in Canada in the first place — several companies with the most GenAI postings in Canada are in fact headquartered in the US, including several tech giants and other companies in finance and legal industries applying GenAI to new areas of the economy.
It’s still early days for GenAI’s presence in the Canadian labour market and economy, and job postings mentioning the technology remain a small corner of the overall labour market. Nonetheless, the share has continued to grow steadily since it arrived on the scene just a year and a half ago. GenAI’s posting presence in certain Canadian cities, particularly Toronto, but also Vancouver and Calgary, also compares well to most US metros except for the Bay Area and Seattle, which are far ahead of the rest. Given the prevalence of remote work, as well as US-based companies hiring in Canada, the GenAI sector is evolving as a broader North American labour market, presenting opportunities for Canadians across the country to contribute to its development.
Methodology
The analysis involved extracting job postings directly related to Generative AI, using specific keywords found in job descriptions indicating its presence, such as “Generative AI,” “Large Language Models,” and “Chat GPT.”
