In 2025, a significant 20% of EU enterprises with 10 or more employees embraced artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, marking a substantial 6.5 percentage point increase from 2024's 13.5%. This growth is even more remarkable when compared to 2021 (7.7%) and 2023 (8.1%), indicating a rising trend in AI adoption among EU businesses. The adoption rates vary widely across the EU, with Denmark leading the way at 42.0%, followed by Finland at 37.8% and Sweden at 35.0%. Conversely, Romania, Poland, and Bulgaria lag behind with adoption rates of 5.2%, 8.4%, and 8.5%, respectively. Notably, almost all EU countries experienced an increase in AI technology usage compared to the previous year, with Denmark, Finland, and Lithuania witnessing the highest growth rates of +14.5 pp, +13.5 pp, and +12.5 pp, respectively. The survey reveals that the most prevalent use of AI technology by EU enterprises is in analyzing written language, accounting for 11.8% of all AI applications. This is followed by AI-driven image, video, sound/audio generation (9.5%), written or spoken language generation (8.8%), and speech-to-text conversion (7.2%). In 2025, the use of AI technology for analyzing written language saw the most significant growth, rising by 4.9 percentage points, while written or spoken language generation increased by 3.4 percentage points. For further insights, refer to the following resources: Statistics Explained article on AI in enterprises, Thematic section on the digital economy and society, Database on digital economy and society, Digitalisation in Europe 2025, Digitalisation dashboard, and Business sector profiles. The data is sourced from the 2025 EU survey on ICT usage and e-commerce in enterprises, encompassing all enterprises with at least 10 employees or self-employed individuals classified under specific economic activity sections. AI technologies encompass various applications, including text mining, speech recognition, natural language generation, speech synthesis, image recognition, image processing, machine learning, robotic process automation, and autonomous machine control. Machine learning, a key component of AI, involves training computer models to enhance automated tasks like pattern recognition. Natural language processing, natural language generation, and speech recognition enable computers to understand human language, convert data to natural language, and identify spoken words for machine-readable formats. It's important to note that AI technologies for generating images, videos, and sound/audio are a new category, absent from the 2024 questionnaire, resulting in no comparative data for that year.
