Written by Danish Yusuf, founder and CEO of Zensurance, a Canadian insurtech and commercial insurance brokerage that helps small business owners, contractors and self-employed professionals across B.C. and Canada.
October is Small Business Month in B.C. It’s also Cyber Security Awareness Month across Canada. Most years those two calendars don’t have much to say to each other. This year they do.
Here’s why. Our annual Small Business Confidence Index asked 1,000 Canadian owners, entrepreneurs and self-employed professionals how artificial intelligence has changed their businesses. The answer from most of them: it hasn’t. Nearly one in three (32 per cent) say AI has had little or no impact. Another 27 per cent aren’t sure how it applies to what they do. Only one in four report a positive effect, and just nine per cent credit it with productivity gains or savings.
I’m not going to tell those owners they’re wrong. Most are making a rational call with limited time and money. Only 15 per cent plan to learn about or invest in AI this year. Handed a hypothetical $10,000 grant, 26 per cent would set it aside for cash flow and 20 per cent would pay down debt. Seven per cent would put it toward AI.
That’s the fundamentals first. And in B.C., the fundamentals are under real strain.
Owners in B.C. are more likely than the national average to report higher operating expenses (75 versus 71 per cent) and lower revenues than the first half of 2025 (49 versus 43 per cent). Fifty-seven per cent have seriously considered closing permanently this year, the highest share in the country. Only 26 per cent say they’d make no major changes if conditions worsen, the lowest share in the country. B.C. owners adapt. It’s one of the things I admire most about this province’s business community.
You don’t need to use AI for AI to affect your business. The scammer targeting you is already using it. In a separate survey of 1,000 owners we ran in 2025, more than half (53 per cent) said they’d been hit, most often by phishing (46 per cent), malware (23 per cent) or fraudulent transfers (19 per cent).
The Business Development Bank of Canada puts it higher: 73 per cent of small businesses have experienced a cybersecurity incident. Yet when the Insurance Bureau of Canada asked owners, fewer than half said they were ready for a cyberattack or data breach (47 per cent) or had any cyber defense in place (48 per cent), and only 22 per cent had cyber insurance.
Here’s where AI comes in. The phishing email reads like a real person wrote it, the supplier invoice is perfect except for the bank account number, and the voicemail asking for a rush payment sounds like your bookkeeper. None of it took skill. Somebody typed a prompt. The 27 per cent of owners who aren’t sure how AI applies to their business should know one thing: someone else has already figured out how it applies to them.
B.C. is not a bystander here. Statistics Canada counted 423 police-reported cybercrimes per 100,000 people in this province in 2024, the highest rate in the country and nearly double the national figure of 225.
Owners know the risk is real. In B.C., cyberattacks and data breaches are the third most-cited business risk in our survey (9 per cent). Nationally, they’re second (14 per cent), behind only customers refusing to pay for completed work. Yet 61 per cent of B.C. respondents operate with no business insurance at all. None.
That’s the gap. Owners are hyper-aware of the risks they can’t control, like inflation and the economy, and oddly unprotected against the ones they can.
The theme of this year’s Cyber Security Awareness Month, from the Government of Canada’s Get Cyber Safe campaign, is “Your best defence is you.” I’d take that literally. Three things worth doing before the month is out:
First, turn on multi-factor authentication for email, banking and any software that touches client data, and keep that software updated. It’s free, and it shuts one of the easiest doors an attacker has.
Second, make one rule and tell everyone who works with you: any request to change payment details gets confirmed by a phone call to a number you already have. Never the number in the email.
Third, find out what would happen if you got hit. Who pays to restore your systems, notify your clients and cover the income you lose while you’re down? For most small businesses, that’s what cyber liability insurance is for. Getting a quote costs nothing and takes minutes. Recovering a compromised inbox doesn’t.
Small Business Month is a good time to recognize how much B.C. owners are carrying, and to put one more fundamental back on the list: cybersecurity. Not because AI is coming for your business. Because the fraudsters using it already are. An hour this month changes the odds.
