Wagepoint just wrapped a live webinar with CIO Alex Yohn and Community Manager Bianca Mueller, and instead of a straight presentation, they turned it into an interactive activity. Attendees voted in real time on where AI should lead and where a human should — across ten specific payroll tasks, from reconciliation to fraud detection to onboarding.
Here’s the twist: Bianca had previously run a similar version of this activity at the National Payroll Institute conference, in June 2026. So there were two independent groups of Canadian payroll professionals, weighing in on the same questions, with no idea or preconceived notion of what the other audience had said.
How do you feel about AI’s involvement in payroll?
The session opened with a simple prompt: what’s the first word that comes to mind when you think about AI’s role in payroll?
The two words that came up most often were the ones you’d expect from a room full of bookkeepers and accountants supporting small to medium size employers — efficiency and automation. Right alongside them, just as prominent, was scary, fear, and uncertainty. That’s not a room full of skeptics dismissing the technology. It’s a room full of people who take payroll seriously enough to be excited about what AI can do and careful about what it shouldn’t. That combination — curious and cautious — set up everything that followed.
How do you currently use AI in your firm?
It also lined up with how attendees said they’re actually using AI in their firms today. Communications work led by a wide margin, with the vast majority already using AI for things like marketing, customer, and employee messaging. Data analysis and interpretation, along with formatting documents and images, were both mid-pack. Task management came in lower, and compliance review — arguably the highest-stakes use case on the list — was the least common by far. In other words, the tasks people are most comfortable handing to AI right now are the ones furthest from CRA exposure.
What stays human in payroll?
Then came the ten payroll-tasks vote on where AI should take the lead and where humans should remain at the helm. If you want to see how the room landed on Human vs AI with each task, be sure to check out the on-demand recording.
Where is AI in payroll headed?
The webinar wrapped up with a real conversation on practical territory: the difference between AI and machine learning, how to prompt for source citations so you can actually verify what a tool tells you, what to check before trusting a tool with client data, and where free versus paid AI tools genuinely differ in output quality.
The conversation also touched on what’s coming next. Announced today: Wagepoint customers can now catch payroll anomalies before they leave a pay run, with a new AI-powered payroll summary that flags them automatically for review.
The biggest takeaway any employer or payroll service provider needs to remember is that regardless of which payroll task you’re leaning into AI for — when the CRA comes asking, the answer will be your name, not the AI tools you used.
Watch the full recording
The full breakdown is available to watch in our full library of CPD eligible on-demand recordings in Canada’s Payroll Collective.
If you’re not in the Collective yet, it’s a free community for Canadian bookkeepers, accountants, and payroll professionals.
