Report: Global AI Usage Increases as Adoption Gap Continues to Expand
AI use has actually reached 17.8% among the world’s working-age population, while adoption stays far higher in established economies than in the Worldwide South, according to Microsoft’s most current International AI Diffusion Report.
The quarterly report, released by Microsoft’s AI Economy Institute, found that 26 economies now report AI use surpassing 30% of their working-age populations, up from the previous quarter.
The United Arab Emirates kept its position at the top of Microsoft’s National AI Leaderboard with a 70.1% adoption rate, while the United States moved from 24th to 21st place with 31.3% of its working-age population using AI tools. The rankings step generative AI usage throughout populations between ages 15 and 64.
Juan Lavista Ferres, Microsoft’s chief data researcher and head of the AI Economy Institute, kept in mind the irregular worldwide distribution in the company’s blog post announcing the findings. “The quarter brought ongoing widening of the AI space in between the Global North and South, with use now at 27.5% in the North and 15.4 percent in the South,” Ferres composed.
The report highlights momentum in Asian markets, driven partly by improved AI abilities for Asian languages. South Korea, Thailand and Japan saw the most considerable movement in adoption rates during the quarter, according to the company.
Microsoft said the research study is based upon anonymized telemetry data, with modifications for differences in OSes, device market share, internet gain access to and country populations. The company said no single metric can completely record AI adoption and that its AI Economy Institute is continuing to refine how it determines the technology’s impact.
Software application advancement was one of the clearest locations of modification. Worldwide, Git pushes– the process developers use to publish code modifications– increased 78% year-over-year, a sign of increased coding activity as tools such as GitHub Copilot, OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code become more typical in development workflows.
The tasks information informs a more mixed story than forecasts of AI-driven job losses. U.S. software application designer employment reached about 2.2 million in 2025, up 8.5% from 2024 and the greatest level on record. Early 2026 data showed designer employment in March had to do with 4% greater than it was a year previously.
“When designer performance boosts, the cost of building software decreases,” Ferres explained in the blog post. The financial logic recommends that if software need shows flexible, companies react by constructing more applications across broader use cases rather than reducing headcount.
The quarterly measurement represents the most recent in Microsoft’s continuous effort to track AI diffusion internationally. The business keeps in mind that while no single metric completely captures innovation adoption patterns, the existing method supplies the strongest cross-country step available, with plans to include additional indicators as approaches grow.
The growing gap in between industrialized and establishing economies shows that AI’s benefits are not spreading out uniformly, according to the company’s data. Microsoft discovered a 12.1 percentage point distinction in adoption in between the Global North and Worldwide South, a divide that appears to be widening as infrastructure, language assistance and financial barriers continue to form who can use these tools.
Microsoft’s next quarterly update on the impact of AI on the international economy is expected to be launched in August.