In May, residents of Markham, Ont., spotted small, box-shaped robots rolling down their sidewalks.
Pedestrians slowed to watch as the machines bumped over curbs, paused at intersections and navigated around dogs, strollers and cyclists.
The robots were part of a pilot program by food delivery service Skip the Dishes. They carried restaurant orders to pickup points, where customers unlocked insulated compartments with an app to collect their food. While accompanied by human guides, the robots were capable of operating independently.
The pilot offers a glimpse of how robots have the potential to reshape work in Canada. Currently, though, adoption remains limited.
“We don’t have a lot of adoption of robotics within Canada,” said Ajung Moon, director of a robotics ethics lab at McGill University and co-chair of the Canadian Robotics Council, a nonprofit that promotes the robotics sector nationally.
“I think the public perspective on robotics is really this doomsday ‘robots are taking away our jobs’ kind of a context.”
“Some of these industry actors actually find more clients outside of Canada than within, so it’s an export market industry, which also means that it’s very hard to survive here,” she added.
AI robots in Canada
AI-powered robots are poised to be the next wave of automation.
Citigroup, a global investment bank, predicts that more than a billion AI-powered robots will be in use worldwide by 2035. This includes the use of humanoid machines designed to mimic human tasks.
Some countries, including South Korea, Singapore, China and Germany, already use robots extensively.
Canada has played an outsized role in the development of robotics, thanks to strong university research, early investment in AI and government funding.
But domestic adoption has lagged behind other countries.
“We have very strong robotics researchers across the universities,” said Moon. “But that’s very different from looking at places like South Korea, where … [the] deployment context for these kind of robots, or uptake within their domestic market, is much stronger.”
Goldie Nejat, director of the Autonomous Systems and Biomechatronics Laboratory at the University of Toronto, agrees. Countries in Asia and much of Europe have integrated robots widely, in everything from private homes to hospitals.
“We’re more conservative with our use of technology here than other parts,” she said.
Where robots are used in Canada, they tend to work alongside humans. And so far, they have been primarily used in blue-collar sectors facing labour shortages.
Manufacturers are using robotic arms in factories, and farmers are using automated tractors and harvesters. Some transport companies are using robots to move people or packages, and a few retailers are testing them for warehouse logistics.
‘Around the edges’
Nejat says robots are starting to be used in some white-collar sectors as well, although their use in these settings is limited.
In hospitals, robots already assist surgeons in some operating rooms. And socially assistive robots are being used to guide hospital and long-term care patients through their routines.
These robots do not physically touch patients, diagnose conditions or determine treatments. Instead, Nejat says, they are embedded “around the edges” of care roles, handling low-value, repetitive tasks.
“The robots are really there to help with the mundane, repetitive tasks, to take off some of the workload of caregivers,” said Nejat.
That can include reminding people to eat, take medication or brush their teeth, and guiding them through each step — tasks robots can perform endlessly, without fatigue. “Why have someone stand there and just repeat themselves?” said Nejat. “It’s really not a good use of their time.”
At the same time, robots remain largely absent from emotionally intense, high-stakes and ethically charged work. They are not replacing caregivers, providing therapy or making clinical decisions.
“When you need care, you need that emotional support, that cognitive support,” said Nejat. “The assessments … the treatment and therapies … those decisions have to be made by health-care professionals.”
Experts say these limits reflect a mix of technological maturity, ethical concerns and social values. Nejat says wider adoption will require more investment and longer term research.
“Our studies right now are at most two months,” she said. “We’d love them to be a year to see what happens.”
Scott Schieman, a University of Toronto sociologist who studies perceptions of AI and automation, sees risks and opportunities for Canadian workers in the mass adoption of robots.
He worries about them displacing Canadian workers entirely. “If employers can get rid of workers and replace workers with robots, they’ll do that,” he said. “They’ll get richer … and the rest of us will just be scraping by.”
But he is also cautiously optimistic that increasing automation could prompt a re-evaluation of what is uniquely human about work. He says a best-case scenario would be robots taking over repetitive, drudge work while humans retain the meaningful, purposeful parts of their jobs.
“Maybe all of this will actually make us step back and think about what makes work more human for people,” he said.
