U.S., Canada dominate global AI talent: report

The U.S. operates in a tier of its own. Canada leads every other country, but its score of 58.345 against the U.S. perfect 100 reflects a gap that shapes hiring competition, compensation benchmarks and talent retention pressure for Canadian organizations daily.

Why the U.S. sits in a league of its own

The U.S. scored a perfect 100 on all three measures behind the Ataraxis index composite, which weights absolute workforce capacity at 40%, capacity density relative to population at 35% and service-delivery readiness at 25%. Nobody else comes close to that sweep. India’s absolute capacity score of 81.9 is the highest outside the U.S., but its density score of 6.6 drags its total down, and Canada’s 39.9 on density still trails the U.S. mark by more than 60 points.

The U.S. also posted the only perfect score in any of the six fields the index measured, and it finished first in AI, healthcare, finance and legal services. It placed second in IT and software, behind Germany, and in customer support, behind the Philippines.

Hiring data points the same way. Commercial real estate firm CBRE reported in its 2026 Scoring Tech Talent report that the number of AI-skilled tech workers across the U.S. and Canada rose 45% year-over-year to 751,000 as of June 2026, though CBRE said job additions in the biggest markets came from both new positions and existing jobs converted to AI-skilled roles. AI-related roles made up 31% of U.S. tech job listings that month, up from 11% in 2022.

“There’s no denying that AI is reshaping the tech industry and job growth in general,” said Colin Yasukochi, Executive Director of CBRE’s Tech Insights Center in San Francisco, in a news release. “Growth of AI jobs in the U.S. far outpaced the broader tech-talent category, which expanded by 1.8% last year even as the tech industry cut some non-AI jobs.”