More than a third of workers say they will walk away from their jobs if employers fail to provide AI training
The calendar may have flipped to 2026, but for employers, this isn’t just another year. Rather, it’s the start of what Randstad Canada's Patrick Poulin calls “a new era,” where AI is fast becoming the new currency of work and mastery of AI tools is now a baseline expectation for employees.
According to Poulin, last year, companies and workers scrambled to understand what AI could do. As for this year, they’ll face a harder question: what happens to those who don't keep up?
The president and managing director at Randstad Canada argues that the labour market is being reshaped on two fronts all at once between technology and people. A new generation is entering the workforce with very different expectations, and the pace of change is accelerating. For employers, he suggests the challenge is managing AI adoption while also meeting these new expectations around how and where work gets done.
“The new generation, the first thing that they expect in a job is to see what's further ahead of them. They’re asking, ‘What's in it for me?’ ‘What's ahead of me?’ ‘What can I do in this company?’ They want to know more in advance and what's ahead of them and as an employer, I need to provide not only the outlook of how that could look like but also what I'm going to give you to get there. And AI became super important,” explained Poulin, while also highlighting recent data from Randstad that found more than a third of workers said they will walk away from their jobs if employers fail to provide AI training.
“If I'm an employer today, it's a no brainer that we need to really invest into the training and development of our people with AI,” he said.
If employers don’t have an AI strategy, he suggests it’s time to change that, even for smaller firms without dedicated tech or marketing teams, he noted. The priority, in his view, is to embrace the shift and actively encourage employees to experiment with AI rather than ignore it.
He draws another sharp generational contrast as Gen Z is already using AI informally “for their own training,” and he believes companies should “continue to push in this direction.”
While older workers, especially Gen X and baby boomers, often see AI as a threat to their jobs, he frames it as part of a long trend of automation and digitization that is changing how work is done and not eliminating the need for people.
What worries him, however, is the pressure on entry-level roles. After analyzing global job postings, he noted that openings at the bottom rung have “decreased quite significantly with the entry level positions,” he said.
Even if AI isn’t the only cause, he sees a clear risk: as AI takes over administrative tasks, companies still haven’t solved “how do we train those new people and how do we make them learn and develop them to do their job when AI is there,” he said.
Poulin argues that companies shouldn’t lock AI down or leave it completely unchecked but rather set clear boundaries and then actively encourage experimentation inside them.
He suggests organizations to “define a sandbox on how to play with AI,” – where it can be used, for what purposes and with what safeguards - while still allowing employees and employers alike to test it and ensure that everyone is experimenting properly.
According to Poulin, other business leaders are rethinking what they should realistically expect from employees in a transformed workplace. After talking with other presidents, he sees two competing models emerging in the market, especially around flexibility. For younger workers, he argues, the issue is no longer just location.
“I think it's more than just where to work, but when to work,” he said, highlighting the real questions now are about core hours and how effectively companies use technology - AI, automation and broader digitization - to support that flexibility.
The goal, in his view, is to “maximize the tool that could create even more flexibility.”
He also pushes back on rigid policies, adding that he’s skeptical a uniform approach will work across today’s workforce. He believes employers “need to adapt a little bit more to the new generations that we have in the businesses that we're managing,” he said.
For him, the real value of AI is in efficiency and reshaping how people think about their daily work, not in blind trust. Companies should give workers autonomy to “be real entrepreneurs with AI at the end.” At the same time, he stresses the need for caution, underscoring that anything put into AI tools can potentially end up in the open, and the outputs are not always accurate or complete.
“AI is a big thing but let's not forget that the human element remains important here,” asserted Poulin.
