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Nearly Half of Canadian Workers Feel Guilty Using AI at Work, New Employment Hero Research Finds

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More than half (56%) of Gen Z workers feel guilty using AI at work Almost half of all workers (43%) feel guilty and 39% say using AI feels like cheating34% are hiding AI usage from their employer

TORONTO, July 7, 2026 /CNW/ – Today, Employment Hero, the global AI-powered employment platform, released new data pointing to a growing workplace paradox: AI is quickly becoming an essential skill, yet many Canadian workers continue to associate its use with guilt, uncertainty and even cheating.

Employment Hero’s newly released AI Paradox Report found that 43% of Canadian workers feel guilty using AI to produce work, rising to 56% among Gen Z workers.. Nearly four in ten (39%) believe using AI to complete parts of their job feels like cheating, while more than one-third (34%) admit hiding their AI use from their employer. Furthermore, almost half of businesses (45%) believe employees are using personal AI accounts at work – highlighting the growing challenge of “shadow AI.”

The findings suggest Canada’s AI challenge is no longer simply whether employees will adopt the technology. It is whether organizations can create workplace cultures where employees feel confident using AI openly, responsibly and effectively.

The research suggests the issue isn’t a lack of willingness to adopt AI – it’s a lack of confidence and support. Only 41% of Canadian workers believe their AI skills are sufficient for an AI-driven labour market, while 60% rate their AI competence as low to average. More than half (51%) say their employer does little or nothing to develop AI skills, leaving many workers to educate themselves. In fact, 58% have learned AI skills through social media.

The findings come as the federal government looks to improve AI literacy and adoption through its AI for All strategy, underscoring the role employers will need to play in helping workers build confidence and capability.

Chris Pinkerton, Managing Director at Employment Hero Canada, says AI guilt highlights a workplace challenge that businesses have an opportunity to solve.

“This research shows that Canada’s challenge isn’t AI adoption – it’s AI confidence,” said Pinkerton. “Workers already recognize AI is becoming an essential workplace skill, but many still feel they need to hide using it because they don’t have clear guidance or confidence in what’s acceptable. The organizations that will succeed won’t simply be the ones adopting AI fastest–they’ll be the ones that create a culture where employees feel empowered to use it responsibly, transparently, and confidently.”

To help Canadian businesses turn AI guilt into AI confidence, Employment Hero has developed practical guidance for both employers and employees.

For employers:

Be clear about where AI is encouraged. Remove uncertainty by setting clear expectations around which tasks AI can support, where human judgement is essential and which tools employees are approved to use.Normalize talking about AI. Encourage employees to openly discuss when and how they’ve used AI, making transparency part of everyday work rather than something to hide.Invest in AI literacy. As AI becomes an essential workplace skill, give employees the training, guidance and policies they need to use it confidently, responsibly and securely.Create room to experiment. Give employees opportunities to safely test AI on low-risk tasks so they can build confidence without compromising quality or sensitive information.Position AI as a career skill. Frame AI as a capability that strengthens productivity and future employability, not as a shortcut or a replacement for human expertise.

For employees:

Ask where AI fits into your role. Have conversations with your manager about when AI is appropriate, where additional review is needed and what responsible use looks like.Be transparent about AI use. If AI helped shape a draft, brainstorm ideas or summarize information, explain how it supported your work to help build trust.Always apply human judgement. Treat AI as a starting point rather than a finished product. Check facts, context and tone before sharing your work.Protect confidential information. Only use approved AI tools and never upload sensitive customer, commercial or personal information into unauthorized platforms.Keep building your AI skills. AI literacy is becoming an increasingly valuable career skill. Take advantage of training opportunities and continue developing your knowledge as the technology evolves.

As Canada accelerates its focus on AI adoption and workforce readiness, Employment Hero says businesses have an opportunity to ensure employees develop one of today’s most valuable workplace skills openly rather than in the shadows.

Media Contact
Sean Benmor
NATIONAL Public Relations
sbenmor@national.ca
416-676-6482

Megan Felsing
Communications Lead, Employment Hero
megan.felsing@employmenthero.com
587-575-5273

About Employment Hero

Employment Hero is the global authority on employment, offering a world-leading Employment Operating System (eOS) that simplifies and optimizes every stage of the employment process. Its award-winning platform combines HR, payroll, recruitment, and employee engagement tools with the groundbreaking employment superapp, EH Work, which integrates career management and financial wellbeing. Serving over 350,000 businesses and managing more than 2.5 million employees worldwide, Employment Hero reduces administrative burdens by up to 80%, enabling organizations to focus on their goals and create more productive, engaged teams. By revolutionising the employment marketplace, Employment Hero is making employment easier, more valuable and rewarding for everyone.

About the research

Employment Hero, The AI Paradox at Work (2026). Survey of 3,290 business leaders and 5,454 workers across Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK. Conducted with Research Tech company Focaldata between 23rd April – 7th May. Canada sample: 1,001 business leaders; 1,500 workers

SOURCE Employment Hero

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Navigate Introduces Workforce Mental Health Initiative to Help Employers Activate Workforce Health

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New initiative includes one year of Mental Wellbeing Coaching for eligible employers, helping employees manage stress and build resilience through a connected culture, care, and clinical wellbeing experience.

WEST DES MOINES, Iowa, July 8, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Organizations continue to invest in employee health and wellbeing, yet many still struggle with the same challenge: helping employees experience that support when it matters most.

Stress. Sleepless nights. Caregiving. Financial pressures. Difficult conversations. These everyday challenges shape resilience and influence how people show up at work and at home. Benefits matter most when employees experience them in the moments that shape their health.

That’s why organizations are shifting their focus from simply offering benefits to activating workforce health.

To help employers strengthen workforce mental health through earlier engagement, Navigate Wellbeing Solutions today announced its Workforce Mental Health Initiative, a new approach that helps employees take a first step toward better mental wellbeing while connecting them to support already available through their employer.

Unveiled during the company’s June Broker & Consultant Experiences, the initiative includes one year of one-on-one Mental Wellbeing Coaching for eligible employers, giving employees an approachable starting point without copay or uncertainty about where to begin. When additional support is needed, Navigate’s health coaches help employees activate and stay engaged with their employer’s EAP, behavioral health, financial wellbeing, or other clinical resources.

“Employees don’t experience their health in categories,” said Troy Vincent, Founder and CEO of Navigate Wellbeing Solutions. “They experience stress, relationships, financial pressures, and everyday challenges all at once. Organizations have made meaningful investments in workforce health. Our role is to help employees take the next step with confidence so those investments become meaningful experiences that improve resilience, strengthen health, and create healthier workplaces.”

The initiative also provides workforce mental health utilization benchmarking, population risk insights, executive reporting, and annual impact reviews, giving employers clearer visibility into employee engagement and opportunities to strengthen workforce health over time.

“Many employees don’t need therapy first. They need someone to help them navigate what’s happening today,” said Jennifer Musick, PharmD, Vice President of Clinical Strategy at Navigate. “Coaching provides an approachable first step while connecting employees to clinical care whenever additional support is appropriate.”

Navigate’s Mental Wellbeing Coaching consistently delivers strong engagement, with 95% of enrolled participants completing their coaching sessions and a 100% participant satisfaction score.

Eligible employers implementing Navigate by January 1, 2027, will receive one year of Mental Wellbeing Coaching included as part of the Workforce Mental Health Initiative. For more information, visit our webpage.

About Navigate

Workforce Health Activation™ is Navigate’s approach to helping organizations make every health and wellbeing investment work harder. By integrating culture, care, and clinical wellbeing into a single personalized experience, Navigate helps people act while giving organizations clear insights into engagement, health improvement, and business outcomes. Learn more at www.navigatewell.com.

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/navigate-introduces-workforce-mental-health-initiative-to-help-employers-activate-workforce-health-302820812.html

SOURCE Navigate Wellbeing Solutions

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Hyundai Motor America and Chamberlain Group Bring myQ® Connected Garage Technology to Hyundai Vehicles

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FOUNTAIN VALLEY, Calif. and OAK BROOK, Ill., July 8, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Hyundai Motor America is partnering with Chamberlain Group, a global leader in intelligent access and monitoring solutions, to bring myQ® Connected Garage technology to Hyundai vehicles. This collaboration allows drivers to monitor and control their garage doors remotely directly from their vehicle’s touchscreen display.

With Hyundai myQ Connected Garage, drivers gain a new level of convenience and peace of mind. Hyundai owners can verify if their garage door has been left open and close it remotely. Whether drivers are in their driveway or hundreds of miles away, drivers can monitor and manage their garage door access through the vehicle’s touchscreen display for added awareness and convenience. Key features include:

Custom Geofencing: Conveniently automatically open or close a garage door based on a paired vehicle’s proximity, ensuring seamless arrival and departure. Drivers can also close a garage even when the vehicle’s backup camera takes over their screen.Personalized Driving Experience: Tailor a garage door’s operational settings to best fit the driver’s lifestyle while on the move. This includes choosing a preferred distance for either automatic or prompted open and close, in addition to a valet mode which disables the service to protect the vehicle owner’s home and privacy.Multiple Garage Doors, Multiple Locations: Drivers can monitor and control one or more compatible garage doors linked to their myQ account from their Hyundai’s touchscreen display.Close Door Reminder: If the auto close feature is interrupted, drivers receive a ‘close door reminder’ on the vehicle’s touchscreen within their chosen timeframe.

“This new integration with myQ’s Connected Garage reflects our focus on delivering intuitive, reliable technology that supports customers throughout their ownership journey,” said Manish Mehrotra, Chief Information Officer at Hyundai Motor North America. “By integrating award-winning connected features into our vehicles, we’re creating a more seamless, convenient experience customers can depend on every day.”

“Hyundai myQ Connected Garage seamlessly integrates simple and secure smart access technology into drivers’ daily routines,” said Kiel Fitzgerald, Vice President, Sales Strategy & Operations at Chamberlain Group. “Our partnership helps more drivers stay easily connected to their home’s security—providing convenience, confidence, and peace of mind from the road.”

Hyundai myQ Connected Garage works with today’s leading smart garage door openers, including LiftMaster, Chamberlain, and Craftsman. Most other brands of garage door openers can be easily upgraded to a compatible smart garage with a myQ Smart Garage Control device. This compact add-on is a cloud-based solution that does not require any hardware installation within the vehicle or manual programming. With a myQ account, a driver’s garage doors will automatically be connected to a compatible Hyundai vehicle when myQ is linked to their Hyundai Bluelink account.

The Hyundai Connected Garage feature is offered for a three-month complimentary trial, giving drivers the opportunity to experience added convenience and seamless control of their garage directly from their touchscreen. The service is available in select 2024-2026 Hyundai models, depending on model and trim. To see if your vehicle is compatible and to learn more, owners can check compatibility in the MyHyundai with Bluelink mobile app. 

About Chamberlain Group 
Chamberlain Group (CG) is a global leader in intelligent access and Blackstone portfolio company. Powered by our myQ technology, we make access simple and secure for millions of homeowners, businesses, and communities worldwide. Our flagship brands, LiftMaster® and Chamberlain® , are found in 50+ million homes, and 15 million people rely on the myQ® app daily. 

Our patented vehicle-to-home connectivity solution, myQ Connected Garage, is available in millions of vehicles from the leading automakers. 

Follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram.

About Hyundai Motor America
Hyundai Motor America offers U.S. consumers a technology-rich lineup of cars, SUVs, and electrified vehicles, while supporting Hyundai Motor Company’s Progress for Humanity vision. Hyundai has significant operations in the U.S., including its North American headquarters in California, the Hyundai Motor Manufacturing Alabama assembly plant, the all-new Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America, several cutting-edge R&D facilities and more than 855 independent dealers. These operations are part of Hyundai Motor Group, which is investing $26 billion in the U.S. from 2025 to 2028. For more information, visit www.hyundainews.com.

Hyundai Motor America on Twitter | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn | TikTok

Disclaimer
Hyundai Bluelink+ and myQ accounts are required to activate the myQ-enabled garage door opener. This feature depends on various other factors including LTE network coverage to transmit data. Coverage is not available everywhere. Geofence and auto actions depend on GPS/location services, vehicle and mobile connectivity, and environmental conditions, and may not function in all situations. Certain services may collect location information and data usage applies. Bluelink terms and conditions apply.

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hyundai-motor-america-and-chamberlain-group-bring-myq-connected-garage-technology-to-hyundai-vehicles-302820311.html

SOURCE Hyundai Motor America

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SIGGRAPH 2026 Introduces the Games Summit, a New One-Day Home for Game Developers

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The 53rd annual conference debuts a curated day of games programming on Sunday, 19 July, spanning accessibility, audio, performance capture, and the economics of modern games development, with games content running all week

LOS ANGELES, July 8, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — SIGGRAPH 2026, taking place 19–23 July 2026 at the Los Angeles Convention Center, will open with the Games Summit, a new one-day track dedicated to game developers and enthusiasts. Held on Sunday, 19 July, the Games Summit brings together leading studios and indies for a day of talks and networking focused on how games are made and where the medium is headed.

The Games Summit is a deliberate widening of the lens. Alongside the technical, real-time rendering-focused conversations SIGGRAPH is known for, it makes room for the broader questions facing game teams today.

“SIGGRAPH is renowned for deep technical insights, and that isn’t going anywhere. This year’s games programming expands the scope with broader topics game developers are wrestling with right now,” said Emily Hsu, SIGGRAPH 2026 Games Chair. She notes that SIGGRAPH is known as the world’s premier conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques, a category games squarely occupy.

A Full Day, From Comfort to Cinematics
The Games Summit runs from morning to evening on opening day and covers a deliberately broad range of topics, including accessibility, audio, visual effects, performance capture, pipelines, and the overall state of gaming.

The day opens with “Beyond the Dot: New Ways to Reduce Motion Sickness in Gaming”, from Adrian Ledda, Magalie Rosseeuw, and Ewa Trusz with Activision, which reframes motion comfort as an accessibility issue affecting up to a third of players and embeds inclusive design directly into gameplay systems.

A session on game audio follows, exploring how sound and music are layered into games. From there, the Battlefield 6 team at Electronic Arts presents “How We Brought the Franchise Vision to Life With Our Destruction System Debut”, treating destruction as a tactical gameplay ecosystem rather than visual spectacle. A Computer Animation Festival Animation Theater session midday spotlights games and cinematics work, before “Performance Capture at Scale: Building a Pipeline for Battlefield 6 Cinematics”, in which Pasha Sol from Electronic Arts details how EA Create Capture adapted film-grade virtual production to the pace and scale of AAA development.

The Economics of Building Games
One of the day’s marquee conversations is “Forging the Glacier at IO Interactive: Fireside Chat with Henrik Schlichter (Technical Director)”, joined by John Canning of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), on what it takes to build and scale utilizing the studio’s in-house proprietary game engine, Glacier. As the industry grapples with rising costs, shifting platforms, and an explosion of available tools, the question of how studios build their games has never been more consequential. Schlichter sits down to discuss, debate, and unpack the realities of modern game development: what it takes to build a custom engine, innovate at scale, and make games cheaper, faster, and better without sacrificing quality. Equal parts technical deep dive and industry reality check, the session takes on a pressure point the field rarely discusses openly.

“It’s not enough just to make great games. They also have to be economically sound,” Hsu explained. “If you’re trying to move faster and do it at a higher quality while still saving money, the only way is better tooling, better pipelines, and rethinking the technology behind it.”

Where Film and Games Meet
The convergence of film and games runs throughout the Games Summit, from performance capture to shared file formats.

The day’s closing “The OpenUSD Roundtable: Using an Open Source File Format in Film and Game Dev Pipelines” makes that convergence literal, seating film and game developers at the same table to work through a file format that now moves across both pipelines, while “Performance Capture at Scale: Building a Pipeline for Battlefield 6 Cinematics” shows EA Create Capture carrying film-grade virtual production techniques onto a AAA game stage for Battlefield 6 cinematics.

“We’re already seeing game cinematic pipelines leaning heavily on filmmaking techniques, and film pipelines being built on game engines so the lines aren’t blurred. They’re gone,” Hsu said. “What matters now is hybrid fluency in both. Those who have it can expand their toolkit and build the right pipeline for the project in front of them.”

Hsu continues, “That’s the spirit of SIGGRAPH. There are no wins from hoarding information or existing in an an echo chamber of a single way of working. We advance across industries and as studios if we’re actually sharing, cross-pollinating, and learning from each other.”

Games Content All Week
Games programming does not end when the Games Summit does. Throughout the week, games content appears across Talks, Courses, Production Sessions, Appy Hour, and Real-Time Live!. The flagship is “Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games”, the long-running course presented in two parts on Tuesday, 21 July, which brings production-proven rendering techniques to the stage from Natalya Tatarchuk of Activision alongside lecturers from EA SEED, Sony Interactive Entertainment, IO Interactive, and Roblox. Attendees can find it all when filtering by “Games” on the SIGGRAPH 2026 full schedule.

For Hsu, the goal is straightforward. “My hope is that game devs leave Sunday’s Games Summit feeling like they’ve already made great connections and experienced something worthwhile — and then realize the conference week is just getting started. The Games Summit stands on its own, but it is also part of a larger conference that brings together researchers, artists, and technologists who solve problems in ways that might surprise them. For those who can make the week of it, there’s a lot more where that came from.”

The Games Summit is open to Full Conference, Full Conference Supporter, and Experience badge holders. Games content in other programs may carry different registration access, so attendees should check each program’s page for details.

Together, the Games Summit and games programming across the week demonstrate how SIGGRAPH continues to champion bold ideas in games while advancing the future of computer graphics and interactive techniques. To explore this year’s conference and offerings, visit the website to see where games are headed, and register now to experience everything the Games Summit has to offer at SIGGRAPH 2026.

About ACM, ACM SIGGRAPH, and SIGGRAPH 2026
ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting educators, researchers, and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources, and address the field’s challenges. ACM SIGGRAPH is a special interest group within ACM that serves as an interdisciplinary community for members in research, technology, and applications in computer graphics and interactive techniques. The SIGGRAPH conference is the world’s leading annual interdisciplinary educational experience showcasing the latest in computer graphics and interactive techniques. SIGGRAPH 2026, the 53rd annual conference hosted by ACM SIGGRAPH, will take place live 19–23 July at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/siggraph-2026-introduces-the-games-summit-a-new-one-day-home-for-game-developers-302820965.html

SOURCE SIGGRAPH 2026

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