Which countries are adopting AI the fastest?

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) entered the mass market just three years ago, but by the end of 2025 some 16% of the world’s working-age population used generative-AI tools each month. This rapid growth in adoption has been uneven, however. New data, released on January 8th, show which countries are ahead and which are falling behind. America and China lead the world in developing the technology, but they are not the ones adopting it fastest. Measuring the spread of AI is not straightforward. One method, used by researchers at Microsoft, is to identify the share of people who used Microsoft desktop devices to get access to AI tools—such as ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek or Gemini—in a given month. The researchers combined this information with other data, such as Microsoft’s market share and mobile-phone use in a country, to estimate AI usage among the working-age population in 147 economies. Their estimates are rough—users of Microsoft devices may not be representative of the whole workforce—but they are a useful way to compare countries (see map).Residents of the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Norway, Ireland and France were the top AI adopters. In both the UAE and Singapore more than 60% of the working-age population used AI chatbots. Governments there were quick to promote the technology. (It may be that governments of small countries are quicker than others to encourage their citizens to adopt innovations.) South Korea is the fastest-growing market; there the number of working-age users increased by 18.5% from the first to the second half of last year (see chart). Viral AI-generated images—photos transformed into Japanese anime-style figures—caught Koreans’ attention, and models’ grasp of their language is fast improving.People in rich countries tend to use AI chatbots more than those in poor ones do (see chart), but GDP per person is an imperfect guide to how quickly a country takes up the technology. America ranks only slightly above the Czech Republic and below Poland, despite being far richer than both. India appears to be adopting AI much faster than incomes there would suggest, while China is slightly below trend. Relative to GDP, people in Jordan and Vietnam are particularly keen users of LLMs.The newest Microsoft data quantify, for the first time, the global spread of DeepSeek, a free, open-source Chinese model that shocked the world by matching the performance of its American rivals last year. DeepSeek is especially popular in Africa, where usage per person is between two and four times that of other regions. It also leads in places where American technology is restricted: the countries where DeepSeek has the largest estimated market share are China (89%), Belarus (56%), Cuba (49%), Russia (43%) and Iran (25%). DeepSeek’s model is rightly lauded for its openness but Chinese censorship is embedded in the chatbot—it refuses to answer questions about topics like the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.