AI adoption in European businesses in 2024
Denmark ranks highest with over 27% of businesses using at least one AI technology in 2024.
Eurostat has released new data on AI adoption by European businesses in 2024, based on a survey covering more than 150,000 firms with at least 10 employees. The results show significant variation in AI uptake among European countries.
Denmark ranks highest with over 27% of businesses using at least one AI technology in 2024—twice the EU average of 13.5%. AI adoption rates are notably higher across businesses in the Nordic and Benelux countries than the rest of Europe. Romania, Türkiye and Poland recorded the lowest adoption rates.
Compared with 2023, AI-adoption rates increased in all countries apart from Türkiye, with the EU-average adoption rate almost doubling from the 8 % recorded in 2023.
The survey also showed that the larger the business, the higher the AI adoption rates were. Across the EU, 21 % of medium size businesses (50-249 employees) and 41 % of large businesses (+250 employees) used AI, compared to just 11 % among small businesses (10-49 employees).
Denmark had the highest adoption rates across small and medium size businesses, however for large businesses Finland ranked highest with a 70 % adoption rate.
The AI-technologies the survey tracked usage of include:
technologies analysing written language (text mining)
technologies converting spoken language into a machine-readable format (speech recognition)
technologies generating written or spoken language (natural language generation)
technologies identifying objects or people based on images (image recognition, image processing)
machine learning (e.g. deep learning) for data analysis
technologies automating different workflows or assisting in decision-making (AI based software robotic process automation)
technologies enabling machines to physically move by observing their surroundings and taking autonomous decisions.
Among these, the most commonly AI technologies used were text mining, natural language generation and speech recognition.
Interestingly, the survey also found that the main type of purpose the AI-technologies were used for were marketing and sales (34%) followed by business administration processes/management. Notably, for large businesses (+250 employees), use of AI for ICT security ranked highest.
Explore the data further
One of the main goals of this Substack is to provide insights on data trends as well as recommendations and guides to open data sources and visualisation tools.
Data source
The data used in this article is published by Eurostat on 23 January, and is part of the EU survey on ICT usage and e-commerce in enterprises.
A great way to explore the data further is by reading Eurostat’s “Statistics Explained”, covering the main findings. There you will also find downloadable Excel file with data behind all the charts used in that article.
The source tables can be viewed in the Eurostat Data Browser. There you can dig deeper into the data by looking at for example specific AI technology use, or time-series data. A breakdown of AI use by industry sector can be found in this table.
Visualisation tool
The charts and tables used in this post is made with Datawrapper.
The data in the charts used in this article can be downloaded directly from the link below the charts by pressing “Get the data”. This can be helpful if you want to create your own visualisations from this dataset.
If you find it helpful to reuse these charts, I have made them available on Datawrapper River, where you can find a “Reuse this chart” button using the below links. Doing that will import the chart directly into your Datawrapper account (which is free to set-up). In this way you can, for example, try out different ways to visualise the data.
Datawrapper River links: