Your oldest employee is your best AI hire

Matt Symes

Oct 2

7 min read

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Quick note: If you're reading this from outside Atlantic Canada, don't stop here. The numbers are ours. The recommendation applies to your business too.

The Atlantic Economic Panel recently released Bolder Ambitions: Greater Prosperity for All.

Don Mills and seven business leaders spent close to a year on it, with the Atlantic Economic Council behind them and hundreds of owners, operators and citizens feeding in. I sat on the Expert Advisory Council.

It was a privilege, and the result is the most serious statement of ambition this region has produced in my working life.

Read it. It is worth your time. Full report

Then notice something.

Six of the seven recommendations belong to governments and institutions.

One Atlantic Canada. Faster project decisions. An integrated electricity system. Natural resources. Winning the competition for talent. A $1 billion prosperity fund.

They are the right moves, the right people are behind them, and they will take years. That is fine. That is what structural change looks like.

One recommendation belongs to you.

Recommendation 6: develop a business growth mindset driven by productivity and AI.

I'd call it Recommendation Zero.

Why zero

Because it is the only one on the list that a business owner can act on without waiting for anyone. No memorandum between premiers. No regulator. No fund to stand up. It needs one decision, made by one CEO, and it can be made this week.

And because it comes first in a practical sense.

A business that learns to use AI well gets better at everything else on the list. It sells into a bigger regional market faster. It delivers more with the workforce it has while the big projects get built. It brings every newcomer and new hire up to speed sooner. Recommendation Zero is the multiplier on the other six.

The tools exist today. The cost is decimal dust. The barrier is not technology. It is a decision.

Where we actually are

Only 15.6% of Atlantic firms with 10 or more employees have “adopted AI.”

I certainly hope that means more than having a subscription and writing more complex emails. That is about 3,600 businesses. The Panel's target is 80% by 2035. A five-fold increase.

Meanwhile, labour productivity in this region fell from 87% to 82% of the national average between 2016 and 2024.

That climb to 80% AI Adoption does not happen if it starts late. And it does not happen in Ottawa or Halifax or Fredericton or Charlottetown or St. John’s. It happens one firm at a time, when an owner decides to reimagine their workflows and redesign their workforce plan with AI.

What it is not

Not a license purchase.

Not a lunch-and-learn with no change to the work.

Not a pilot running in a corner while the real business carries on as before.

The report names the two conditions that make this work, and they are exactly right.

Leaders must own the deployment.
And firms must get past pilots and put AI into everyday workflows.

I’ll add that those reengineered workflows must be done WITH people not to People.

You see AI will not replace people. But it does allow those people to do create more value per hour.

This is a leadership decision, not an IT rollout. You own it because it changes how the business creates value. HR manages it because it changes how people work. IT enables it with the right security and privacy posture. That order matters.

What to do this week

Pick one workflow that is costing you. Quoting. Scheduling. Collections. Onboarding. Month-end. Something that slows your team down, caps your capacity or gets between you and a customer. One. Not a transformation program.

Put the people who know that work best in the room. Not the youngest or the most tech-curious. The ones who know what good looks like. More on why below.

Baseline it, then rebuild it with AI in the flow. What are the metrics of success at the process level? How long does it take today? What does it cost? Then redesign the work with AI doing the parts it is good at and your people leading, directing, checking, and deciding.

Measure in the right order. Return on investment first: hard dollars saved or earned against what you spent on tools, training and redesign.

Here are the terrifying stats:

52% of workers use AI at work (66% have used shadow AI - an unapproved tool)
76% of workers say they are getting results
36% of leaders say they can measure the improved results.
Only 7% can count the cash, and can see the ROI.

Productivity is a simple measure of the value we create per hour worked. If it does not create a return, it is not creating true value. Time saved on its own is a false positive. Saved hours get absorbed unless you deliberately turn them into more output.

The silver tsunami is the asset, not the problem

This is the part I think gets missed, so I want to be direct about it.

Atlantic Canada has the most rapidly aging workforce in the country. The Panel estimates a gap of about 270,000 workers by 2035.

Every conversation about that gap turns to the same levers: immigration, participation, bringing people home. The report rightly looks to youth, women, Indigenous peoples, people with disabilities and newcomers. Those levers matter.

There is one group the region keeps framing as the problem. Older workers participate at 32% here, against 35% nationally. The word people reach for is tsunami. Wave of retirements, knowledge walking out the door, nobody coming behind.

With AI, that same group is the advantage.

AI is fast at producing work and poor at judging it. Someone has to direct it, catch its errors and know where the output matters. That is mastery.

Your 58-year-old estimator who knows when a quote looks wrong. The nurse manager who knows which shift pattern is about to break. The plant supervisor who knows which small warning precedes the big problem.

Atlantic Canada has decades of that judgment, and it is concentrated in exactly the people we've been treating as a retirement risk.

Give them AI and three things happen.

They produce more. Early research found AI lifted novices most on routine tasks. That is the floor, not the ceiling. On complex, judgment-heavy work, the person who knows the craft gets more from the tool because they know what good looks like. The smart and experienced get better results quicker.

They stay longer. Work that used to mean grinding through the mechanical parts becomes directing and deciding. That is a job a 62-year-old wants to keep doing for a few more years.

They pass it on before they leave. Redesigning a workflow with AI forces the expert to make their judgment explicit. What to check, what to reject, what matters. That knowledge gets built into how the work is done instead of leaving in a retirement party.

The catch: experienced workers are the least likely to adopt AI on their own. But the best at using it.

The asset is sitting right there. Connecting that experience to AI and increased productivity today (and resiliency tomorrow with all that knowledged easily mapped with AI) changes the whole game.

And it is your job, not theirs, to make this happen. The future success of your business relies on it.

The labour gap you can close yourself

Here is where this connects to the hiring problem.

76% of Atlantic businesses say hiring is hard, and in a lot of places, rural New Brunswick, the Northern Peninsula, the Island outside Charlottetown, the people you need are simply not there to hire. You can post the job for a year.

You cannot immigrate your way out of that by next quarter. You can redesign the work.

The Panel wants 100,000 workers, managers, and business leaders trained. If each returns two hours a week into productive work, that is 200,000 hours a week. Roughly 5,000 full-time equivalents.

No housing, no settlement, no recruiting, no waiting on a permit. It is an illustration, not a forecast, and it only counts if firms redesign the work so those hours become output. But it tells you the scale of the capacity already sitting inside businesses that exist today, in communities where a new hire is not coming.

This isn’t theory. We just finished a project that accomplished exactly this. A 25m Rural Atlantic Canadian firm. An estimating and forecasting process that required all of their institutional memory. We mapped the process, with their help. We drafted the SOP (Creating the institutional memory). We then stood up a bespoke software designed around their process (and then one of their potential retirees said they might now stay longer).

For a 20-person firm that has been carrying two open roles for a year, that is not an abstraction. That is the difference between turning work away and turning it into increased revenue per employee - the definition of productivity.

The move we need every business owner in the region to own.

The region has a plan. Governments of all levels have their six structural changes - we need to support those. And you now have yours.

Recommendation Zero does not need to wait.

If you know workflows that you need to produce more results for you, reply and tell me which one.

Someone from our team (might even be me) will jump on a call unpack that opportunity with you even further. No charge.

Matt

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