AI Adoption Statistics (2026)

What percentage of businesses use AI?

About one in four: 24.2% of U.S. businesses used AI in at least one business function in the two weeks before the Census Bureau's latest Business Trends and Outlook Survey, collected Oct 19 to Nov 1, 2026. That is up from 17.3% a year earlier, when the Census Bureau first asked the broader question. Asked about the next six months, 27.6% expect to be using AI.

In the European Union, 20.0% of enterprises with 10 or more employees used at least one AI technology in 2025, according to Eurostat, up from 13.5% in 2024.

Why do AI adoption statistics disagree?

Because they count different businesses. McKinsey's survey found that 88% of respondents' organizations used AI in at least one business function in 2025, up from 78% in 2024 and 55% in 2023. Its respondents are executives and managers, mostly at larger companies, and one AI use anywhere in the organization counts. The Census Bureau and Eurostat sample every kind of firm, and most firms are small.

Figure 1 lines these answers up on one scale. The highest, 88%, is 5.2 times the lowest (17.0% of small EU firms) and 3.6 times the U.S. rate of 24.2%. Each number is accurate for the group it describes. Quoting the survey figure as "88% of businesses" overstates adoption among the typical company several times over.

Which industries use AI the most?

Information leads at 45.0%, nearly twice the U.S. rate of 24.2%, followed by professional and technical services (41.6%), educational services (39.5%) and finance and insurance (39.2%). These are knowledge-work sectors where AI tools for writing, coding and analysis fit existing tasks.

The lowest rates are in mining, oil and gas (10.2%), accommodation and food services (12.1%) and transportation and warehousing (12.6%). Retail trade sits at 19.1% and manufacturing at 21.4%.

Which countries use AI the most?

Denmark leads the EU at 42.0% of enterprises, followed by Finland (37.8%) and Sweden (35.0%). Romania (5.2%), Poland (8.4%) and Bulgaria (8.5%) have the lowest shares. Denmark also recorded the biggest increase from 2024, up 14.5 percentage points.

Germany (26.0%) is above the EU average, while France (18.2%) and Italy (16.4%) are below it. In McKinsey's survey, reported organizational use grew fastest in Greater China (75% to 88%) and Europe (80% to 91%) between 2024 and 2025.

Are small businesses using AI?

Less than large ones: 22.8% of U.S. firms with one to four employees used AI in the latest survey, compared with 44.1% of firms with 250 or more. Adoption rises with every size class. In the EU the gap is wider, 17.0% for firms with 10 to 49 employees vs. 55.0% for those with 250 or more.

The Census Bureau reported in May 2026 that AI use had grown among firms with at least 20 employees since December 2025 but had not changed significantly among smaller firms. By October, the rate for the smallest firms had risen too, from 19.0% in May to 22.8%.

How many companies have scaled AI?

About half of the largest: 49% of McKinsey respondents at companies with $5 billion or more in revenue said their AI deployment was scaling or fully scaled in 2025, compared with 27% to 32% at companies under $1 billion. Everyone else was experimenting, piloting or not using AI.

Payoff lags further. In McKinsey's 2026 survey, as reported by The Register, 37% of respondents attributed any EBIT impact to AI, unchanged from 2025, and about 6% met McKinsey's definition of an AI high performer.

Methodology & caveats

U.S. figures come from the Census Bureau's Business Trends and Outlook Survey (BTOS), a biweekly survey of U.S. employer businesses. The AI question asks whether the business used AI in any business function in the last two weeks; it replaced narrower wording on Nov 17, 2025, so earlier BTOS AI estimates are not comparable and are not shown. The latest data files label the technology "Super Intelligence or SI (formerly referred to as Artificial Intelligence or AI)"; the Census Bureau publishes it as one continuous series. Standard errors are about 0.6 points for the national estimate and larger for sectors and size classes. The trend is labeled by collection period end; each estimate refers to the two weeks before collection.

EU figures come from Eurostat's 2025 survey on ICT usage in enterprises and cover enterprises with 10 or more employees outside agriculture, mining and finance. Country values are shown as published in the dataset (two decimals), printed to one decimal; the EU average is shown as 20.0%, as published in the release (19.95% in the dataset). The 2025 questionnaire added a category for AI that generates pictures, video and audio.

McKinsey figures are self-reported by survey respondents and describe their organizations; the 2023–25 values are read from the Stanford AI Index 2026 charts of McKinsey data, and the 2026 values are from The Register's report, because McKinsey's site could not be fetched to confirm them. The scaling shares in Figure 7 are derived by adding two published segments. U.S. data are for October 2026, EU data for 2025 and McKinsey data for 2025, so the comparisons in Figure 1 mix periods as well as definitions. Gartner's 2026 AI spending forecasts, cited in the original source, were left out because Gartner's releases could not be fetched to confirm the figures.