Digital Labour’s Human Touch

Canada’s burgeoning digital labour movement is about to have a moment. Success depends on our collective ability to keep humans at the centre of the change — even as agentic AI and digital employees redefine the delivery ecosystem.

In brief

• Human‑centred leaders align purpose, culture and incentives so people can adopt new technology with confidence and deliver better outcomes.
• Organizations that design around customers and employees improve trust, loyalty and speed to value while reducing change fatigue.
• Treat AI as augmentation for people by strengthening skills governance and measurement so teams can scale impact responsibly.

When leading Canadian tax directors gathered in a Montréal ballroom last spring, the buzz around digital labour was already making serious noise. Only 19% of those in the room — travelling from across the country to attend the annual EY Tax Leaders Forum — said AI was up and running at scale across their business. The vast majority remained at the earliest stages of AI consideration or targeted use. Even fewer had begun exploring agentic AI.

That didn’t dim their enthusiasm.

“Change management has to be number one,” Sobolewski explains. “You need talent to understand what’s in [digital labour] for them. Organizations need to take a very employee-centric approach to digital labour, keeping people at the centre, solving for their needs and wants first and foremost.”

Research carried out jointly by the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford and EY has repeatedly shown a similarly adaptive, people-centred view makes transformation programs, such as the move towards an increasingly digital workforce, more likely to succeed.

For example, 96% of transformation programs overall experience challenges that generate a turning point when the program has, or will, go off track. Navigating those moments by placing humans at the centre can double the likelihood that a transformation overperforms its KPIs (1.9×) and goals for speed (2.1×) of progress. In fact, grounding plans around people can significantly boost the chances of a transformation succeeding, improving performance by up to 12 times.

That human-focused strategy is key to cultivating a workforce and workplace culture capable of supporting AI adoption. In December 2025, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce reported that AI itself is becoming a “skills story,” with the link between education and AI adoption growing stronger over the course of the last 12 months.

That means gains will concentrate where talent is available. The Chamber’s Business Insights Quarterly analysis, based on survey responses from 15,000 Canadian employers, also showed retooling outweighs retrenchment. So far, firms in Canada cite AI-related workflow changes and training far more often than job losses.

But that’s only one piece of the puzzle. Organizations need to think beyond adopting AI and create a digital delivery ecosystem in which people feel comfortable working seamlessly with digital employees that stand in for humans co-workers. That’s what digital labour is all about.

“Businesses across Canada will need to get this initial transition right,” explains Massimo Marinelli, former EY Canada Managing Partner, Talent, who led the firm’s overarching talent strategy for more than 8,000 multidisciplinary employees. “This takes a now, next, beyond approach. While companies must help their people embrace advanced technology like AI today, they must simultaneously prepare the workforce and culture to incorporate this newer concept of digital employees.”

That will become even more important as easy-to-use platforms increasingly enable people with low to no development experience learn to create intelligent chatbots, agentic workflows and more.

“What does it mean to empower the democratization of technology, where teams start developing their own agents?” adds Marinelli. “Fostering that potential will take a business-driven conversation in partnership with HR. Organizations will need to consider capabilities, responsible use of tech and empowering employees as part of a bigger, workforce where humans and digital employees interact effectively in a trust-based culture.”

As the workforce transforms, he suggests we’ll also need to reframe agents as a new type of employee with their own set of nuanced needs. “Just like we take a lot of care and recruitment in onboarding, digital labour will require us to think about AI agent or digital employee onboarding and similar experiences to tee the entire team up for success.”

Of course, the widespread uptake of digital labour will likely reshape the definition of productivity and performance at work. Employers will need to explore beyond the more obvious impacts like AI-compressed timelines and faster task delivery times to reframe productivity outside of volume or speed.

For instance, how well are humans and machines collaborating to create meaningful, sustainable value? What could this mean for pacing, prioritization and performance expectations? And how can we support people in not only absorbing this change but in remaining engaged over the longer term?

These challenges feature prominently in the EY Work Reimagined 2025 survey. The report shows nearly 9 out of 10 employees now use AI at work, but only 28% of organizations are positioned to turn AI deployment into high-value outcomes. Why is that? When new technology lands on fragile talent foundations — weak culture, insufficient learning, misaligned rewards — productivity benefits lag by over 40%.

“In these cases, employees may be saving a bit of time, but without fundamental changes to how work gets done or how the business performs, the benefits tend to end there,” says Rich Skippon.

An EY Partner, Skippon leads the firm’s Workforce Advisory practice nationally. He says leading organizations don’t choose between AI and people. They prioritize both. “Leaders orchestrate five strategic capabilities to amplify each other. They lean into tech tension that laggards tend to avoid and address them proactively.”

To that end, the EY survey shows organizations achieving transformational results drill down to:

1. Create the right approach to recruiting and retaining talent.
2. Drive AI adoption at scale.
3. Build continuous learning into daily operations.
4. Reshape culture and workplace norms.
5. Align rewards with new behaviours and outcomes.

“It’s the culmination of those efforts that strengthens advanced technology and strong human foundations in tandem. That’s how you start to build a sustainable advantage in an agentic enterprise that supports human and digital employees to succeed,” Skippon adds.

By bringing people into change in this way, digital employees can help transcend even the most ambitious goals.

“The organizations that win with digital labour won’t be the ones that automate the most,” Sobolewski adds. “They’ll be the ones that redesign work, so humans and agents amplify each other — responsibly and at scale. It’s tech plus people that can create this incredibly powerful outcome.”

Summary

Sustained performance starts with people. Human‑centred strategy aligns purpose, culture and incentives so teams can adopt technology with confidence and deliver better outcomes.

Designing around customer and employee journeys builds trust and reduces change fatigue. Treating AI as augmentation, backed by skills, governance and measurement, helps scale impact responsibly.