AI adoption among EU businesses reached 20% in 2025, with the highest use in Denmark, Finland and Sweden, according to new Eurostat data.

BRUSSELS: The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) across the European Union has accelerated in 2025, with 20% of businesses employing at least one AI technology, according to new data published by Eurostat, the EU’s statistical office.

This marks a significant increase of 6.5 percentage points compared to 2024, when only 13.5% of enterprises reported using AI. In 2021, the figure stood at just 7.7%, highlighting how AI technologies have rapidly gained ground among medium and large businesses across Europe.

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The highest rates of AI adoption were seen in northern European countries, with Denmark leading at 42%, followed by Finland at 37.8% and Sweden at 35%. In contrast, adoption remains relatively low in Romania (5.2%), Poland (8.4%) and Bulgaria (8.5%).

Eurostat noted that almost every EU member state recorded an increase in AI usage between 2024 and 2025. Denmark experienced the most dramatic rise at +14.5 percentage points, followed by Finland and Lithuania.

The most common applications of AI in European enterprises include written language analysis (11.8%), generating multimedia content such as images, videos or audio (9.5%), producing written or spoken language (8.8%) and converting spoken language into machine-readable text (7.2%).

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Among these, the fastest-growing area was the analysis of written language, which saw an increase of nearly 5 percentage points compared to 2024. The use of AI to generate written or spoken language also grew, reflecting a broader trend of integrating generative AI into business workflows.

The growing popularity of AI among EU enterprises reflects the bloc’s ongoing digital transformation push, supported by various EU-level funding programmes and regulatory frameworks aimed at enabling ethical and sustainable technology deployment.

Eurostat’s findings also come as the EU finalises its landmark AI Act, which aims to balance innovation with risk management by introducing the world’s first comprehensive legal framework for artificial intelligence.