The long reach of AI

The long reach of AI

How AI and other emerging technologies are poised to change our productivity, physical wellness and power grids in 2025.


While the sheer number of new innovations has been dazzling us for decades, the adoption of AI has greatly accelerated the pace of change. With 2025’s rate of innovation set to stun, we reached out to four experts for their forecasts on the tech trends that will influence the way we work, the care we receive and how we will power it all in the year ahead.

AI could help us out at work

John Trougakos is a professor of organizational behaviour and human resource management at the University of Toronto Scarborough.

“I’m seeing big shifts into AI, particularly in recruitment, payroll and benefit processes. Organizations are using AI to scan resumes and do a lot of labour-intensive work. When employees are looking at benefits, often it’s done through an AI chat system and a lot of the information that they’re getting is AI-generated. Some of the big tech organizations are now looking at ways to administer and run a lot of their HR systems through AI.

“A lot of organizations are really trying to understand productivity from an employee perspective, and what productivity means. There are upticks in technologies that track productivity and provide feedback to employees and organizations with a focus on critical outcomes and not overburdening employees.

“Certain apps are helping employees manage their day-to-day work more productively and balance what they’re doing, manage their well being, and look for ways to keep them healthy in the workplace. An example is Produce8, a Canadian app that helps employees and organizations track how employees are utilizing their workday. It’s interesting because apps are gamifying the way employee productivity and work behaviours are being captured. It provides an interactive component, helping employees set targets and goals, tracking different kinds of interactions and behaviours.”

AI is on a power trip

Jon Dogterom is an experienced founder, executive and board member of private and public ventures in energy, mobility and alternative fuels. He is the MaRS senior advisor on cleantech.

“We’re witnessing astonishing growth in data centres as the demand for compute power increases. When you do a search on ChatGPT — just one search — you’re using 10 times the amount of power of a Google search and the equivalent of your phone use for a 24-hour period.

“That growing demand is too much for the electrical grid. In some of the predictions I’ve seen for 2030, as much as 9 percent of U.S. power consumption will go to data centres — that’s the equivalent of Mexico’s power consumption. You see Google, Microsoft and Amazon saying, ‘We’re going to do renewable energy for our data centres.’ I think they want to do it because it’s the right thing to do, but they also need to do it.

“The other thing for us to think about is that only a little over half of the total energy used at data centres is going toward computing — because of all the heat generated, 30 to 40 percent of the energy is used to cool the centres. Not only are we going to see more microgrids as well as new technologies and service providers to help power data centres, we’re also going to see some unique innovations around how you extract heat from the computing equipment and convert that into electricity.

“One venture that I think is really interesting is Extract Energy. They have the ability to take low-grade waste heat and generate electricity from it, which could then be put back into the data centre. I think innovations like that will start to play a bigger role in data centre design and construction. And in terms of the efficiency of computing, there’s a company called Ranovus that does innovative things to try to improve the speed and efficiency of operations. There’s a big opportunity for Canada to think about how to meet this demand.”

AI and other immersive tech will help you feel better faster

Zayna Khayat is adjunct faculty and executive in residence at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, a growth advisor at Teladoc Health and the health futurist in residence at Deloitte.

“The biggest deal in healthcare, probably since insulin, is AI. Six and a half million Canadians don’t have access to primary care. Most people wait months for elective surgery. Youth with mental illness are waiting 18 months to see a psychiatrist. All of that is caused by constrained labour supply and technology. AI allows you to democratize that labour pool.

“I’m on an advisory group for a new AI medical agent called Qu, [a clinical AI assistant that can perform routine tasks and patient interactions to support physicians], that just got launched a few weeks ago by Quadrivia, out of the U.K. We’ve been testing the agent, throwing every possible clinical use case at it. I could take a youth mental health issue, run it through Qu, and it can take care of 70 to 80 percent of what currently uses clinicians’ capacity. Then you and your clinician could spend your time resolving, confirming the potential diagnosis or the treatment path. For people who will never have access to a human clinician, it’s good enough.

“My estimate is that there are probably 2,500 of these AI medical agents in development. The big one is Agent Hospital in China, which is just coming out of beta. They were able to run 10,000 patients through a hospital flow in two days. You know how long that would take in Canada? Four years.

“The second trend I’m seeing is the shift to intelligence-based healthcare. An intelligence-based model is real-time multimodal data inputs — including any data exhaust coming from your wearables, what you searched on Google, your genome that you did at 23andme.com — to inform smarter choices about intervention, diagnoses and the whole value chain of health.

“Number three is virtual reality or immersive technology or what’s now being called spatial computing. It’s not just VR, it’s three-dimensional interfaces. In healthcare, this is huge for two areas. One is as a therapeutic, so we call these immersive therapeutics or digital therapeutics. This is as potent — if not better — than a lot of drugs for things like mental health, dementia, pain management, and it has zero side effects and a one-one-millionth the cost to develop.

“Then the other application of VR in medicine that’s a game changer is for training and education: point-of-care training and upskilling. For instance, a nurse can now upskill very quickly to be able to do tasks a doctor used to do without having to make them go to medical school for nine years. It could help training a lifeguard to become a phlebotomist, or a family caregiver to do dialysis.”

Canada will need to maintain its AI advantage

Frank Rudzicz is an associate professor at Dalhousie University, faculty member at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, status professor at the University of Toronto, Killam Memorial Chair and CIFAR Chair in Artificial Intelligence.

“Canada was at the forefront of AI and a lot of this had to do with our research. The universities from Ontario and Quebec and out west really did some of the main foundational work in AI and that attracted a lot of the smartest grad students here. Even though the Canadian federal government announced a renewal of the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy, it’s yet to be determined what that’s going to be and there’s some concern about whether Canadian governments will really adhere to it. I think a lot of people are in a bit of a waiting period now.

“I’m concerned that as time passes, the promise of AI seems to be unfulfilled. Some governments will just say, ‘Well, forget this. Google has an offering, Amazon has an offering, so we’ll just rent some service from those companies and call it a day.’ If we just rely on other countries’ expertise, then, we’re going to miss the boat, right? I’m worried about taxpayer money that’s basically flowing out of the country and going into the pockets of big, American-based, mostly, companies. Canada had a huge advantage initially in terms of AI mindshare. We should keep it.”

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Photo illustration: Stephen Gregory; Photos: Unsplash