AI in Business Adoption Statistics 2026

The BTOS data (December 2025 to May 2026) show that overall AI usage hovered between 17% and 20% — and that between 20% and 23% of businesses expected to be using it in the next six months.

In 2025, 19.95% of EU enterprises used AI technologies.

In 2025, 20.2% of firms reported using AI, up from 14.2% in 2024 and 8.7% in 2023, meaning adoption has more than doubled over the past two years.

In the second quarter of 2026, 19.2% of businesses reported using AI to produce goods or deliver services over the 12 months preceding the survey.

Approximately a quarter (25%) of businesses reported that they are currently using some form of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in late December 2025, up 15 percentage points since the question was first introduced in late September 2023; for businesses with 250 employees or more, the proportion was higher at 44%.

In October 2026, AI adoption reached 56.8% of U.S. businesses on Ramp, up 1.0 percentage points from September and 13.3 points from a year earlier.

Organizational AI adoption continued to rise in 2025, up to 88% of surveyed organizations, though AI agent use remains early.

Generative AI is now a business staple, with 95% of companies in the US using it, up 12 percentage points in just over a year.

The results show both the growing reach of AI across the workforce and its evolving role in employee productivity: 44% of organizations now report significant employee adoption of AI, a more than fourfold increase from the 10% reported just one year ago.

For example, 37% of firms with at least 250 employees reported using AI in their business operations.

In the data collection period ending May 3, 2026, 32% of firms with 100 to 249 employees said they used AI.

In 2025, 17% of small enterprises, 30.36% of medium enterprises and 55.03% of large enterprises used AI.

Adoption remains highly uneven across firms of different sizes: 52.0% of large firms use AI, compared with 17.4% of small firms.

Approximately a quarter (25%) of businesses reported that they are currently using some form of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in late December 2025, up 15 percentage points since the question was first introduced in late September 2023; for businesses with 250 employees or more, the proportion was higher at 44%.

Over 1 in 4 (27.8%) businesses with 100 or more employees reported using AI in the last 12 months.

Among businesses with 1 to 4 employees, about one-fifth (19.9%) reported using AI in producing goods or delivering services in the last 12 months.

As of May 3, 2026, the AI use rates in the Information (39.7%) and Finance and Insurance (33.9%) sectors were both higher than the national rate (19.8%) but neither reported significant shifts since December.

In comparison, businesses in the Retail Trade sector reported current and expected usage lower than the national average: around 14% of businesses currently use AI, and about 17% expect to in the next six months.

In 2025, the information and communication sector (with 62.52%) and professional, scientific and technical service activities (with 40.43%) stood out with the highest share of enterprises that used AI.

This ranged from 24.82% (real estate activities) to 10.79% (construction).

In 2025, 57.3% of ICT firms across the OECD used AI, the highest share of any industry, followed by professional and scientific services (36.8%).

Year-on-year growth reached 62.5% in accommodation and food services, and 59.1% in construction.

The highest share was recorded in Denmark (42.03%), followed by Finland (37.82%) and Sweden (35.04%), while the lowest shares were recorded in Romania (5.21%), Poland (8.36%) and Bulgaria (8.55%).

In 2025, 34.70% of enterprises using AI technologies used these software or systems for marketing or sales and 31.05% for the organisation of business administration processes or management.

Among businesses that reported using AI over the last 12 months (19.2%), the most commonly used applications were data analytics (36.6%), followed by text analytics (34.5%) and virtual agents or chat bots (28.2%).

With these safeguards in place, adoption is broadening from individual agents to coordinated multi-agent systems: 62% of organizations are currently building, testing, or deploying AI agents, up from 53% last quarter.

25% of organizations have deployed multi-agent systems, up from 6% across the previous two quarters.

The IBM CEO study,* which surveyed 2,000 CEOs globally, revealed that executive respondents expect the growth rate of AI investments to more than double in the next two years, and 61% confirm they are actively adopting AI agents today and preparing to implement them at scale.

Nearly half of leaders (46%) say their companies are using agents to fully automate workflows or processes, but not every function will evolve at the same pace—or to the same degree.

According to the survey, agents already account for 17% of total AI value in 2025, and that share is expected to reach 29% by 2028.

Worldwide spending on AI is forecast to total $2.52 trillion in 2026, a 44% increase year-over-year, according to Gartner, Inc. a business and technology insights company.

Building AI foundations alone will drive a 49% increase in spending on AI-optimized servers for 2026, representing 17% of total AI spending.

Private investment grew fastest at 127.5% and now accounts for 60% of the total.

Annual budgets have doubled since early 2024, now averaging about $10 million, an 102% increase over February 2024 levels (see Figure 6).

Among firms paying for AI, the top 1% spent a median of $10,199.20 per employee per month on AI, compared with $16.32 for the median firm.

88% anticipate Gen AI budget increases in the next 12 months; 62% anticipate increases of 10% or more.

71% track total AI inference and API spend, but only 44% track per-unit inference cost.

Overall, 33% report gains in either cost or revenue, while 56% say they have seen no significant financial benefit to date.

Despite widespread experimentation, only one-in-eight (12%) CEOs say AI has delivered both cost and revenue benefits.

Surveyed CEOs report that only 25% of AI initiatives have delivered expected ROI over the last few years, and only 16% have scaled enterprise wide.

Globally, 5% of companies qualify as “future-built” for AI.

72% formally measuring Gen AI ROI, focusing on productivity gains and incremental profit.

The revenue gap is narrowing 28% now report revenue gains from AI, up from 20% in January.

58% of organizations now report measurable business value from AI initiatives.

More than 80% of reported use cases are meeting or exceeding expectations, and nearly 60% of those satisfied with AI’s performance say that it has also improved business results (see Figure 4).

Studies report gains of 14% to 15% in customer support, 26% in software development, and 50% in marketing output.

In 2025, among EU enterprises who had ever considered using AI technologies, the most common reason for not using AI technologies was the lack of relevant expertise (70.89%), followed by lack of clarity about the legal consequences (52.52%), and concerns regarding violation of data protection and privacy (48.83%).

Finally, scaling remains a challenge, with 75% of companies struggling to find the in-house expertise they need across critical functions.

Cybersecurity or privacy concerns most likely to be a barrier that limits the use of AI for businesses More than 1 in 10 businesses (13.4%) reported cybersecurity or privacy concerns to be a barrier that limits the use of AI , with the second leading barrier being cost (10.6%).

In late December 2025, 4% of businesses that currently use some form of AI technology reported that their overall workforce headcount had decreased as a result of using those technologies; 5% of businesses that were planning to adopt AI technology within the next three months reported that they expect headcount to decrease as a result.

And while a third of leaders (33%) are considering headcount reductions, we’re also seeing new roles emerge.

54% of CEO respondents say they are hiring for roles related to AI that did not exist a year ago.