How many European businesses use AI? What Eurostat's data shows

How widely do businesses in Europe use AI? Eurostat, the statistics office of the European Union, measures it through its EU survey on ICT usage and e-commerce in enterprises¹. Here is what the 2025 results show.

One in five businesses now uses AI

In 2025, 20.0% of EU businesses with 10 or more employees used AI technologies, up 6.5 percentage points from 13.5% in 2024¹. In 2021 it was only 7.7%¹.

Between 2023 and 2025 the share rose from 8.1% to 20.0%¹. To us, that is a big change in a short time, and a sign that AI has moved from trials into everyday work for many businesses.

Size makes a big difference

Larger businesses are far ahead. In 2025, 17% of small businesses, 30.36% of medium-sized ones and 55.03% of large ones used AI². Eurostat counts businesses with 10 to 49 people as small, 50 to 249 as medium and 250 or more as large².

The gap between countries is wide too. Denmark led with 42.0%, ahead of Finland at 37.8% and Sweden at 35.0%¹. If you sell into several European markets, the businesses you compete with, and the ones you sell to, may be at very different stages.

What businesses use AI for

The most common use was analysing written language, at 11.8% of businesses¹. Next came generating pictures, video or audio (9.5%), generating written or spoken language (8.8%) and turning speech into machine-readable text (7.2%)¹.

Among businesses that use AI, the top purpose was marketing or sales, at 34.70%, followed by business administration and management at 31.05%².

That last figure matters for anyone in marketing. In other words, about a third of the businesses using AI already use it for marketing or sales².

Why many businesses have not started yet

Among businesses that did not use AI in 2025, 14.21% had considered it². For businesses that had considered AI, the most common reason for not using it was a lack of relevant expertise (70.89%), followed by unclear legal consequences (52.52%) and concerns about data protection and privacy (48.83%)².

The main barrier, in other words, is know-how rather than interest. That is a gap that can be closed step by step.

What this means for your brand

Businesses are not the only ones using AI. In 2025, 32.7% of people aged 16 to 74 in the EU used generative AI tools³. For a brand, we read this as a double shift: the people who buy from you use AI tools, and so do many of the businesses competing for them.

Three practical steps follow:

1. Find out how AI assistants describe you today. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity the questions your customers ask, in the languages of your markets, and note whether you are mentioned.
2. Make your site easy for machines to read. Crawlable pages, clear text and accurate structured data come first.
3. Look at each market on its own. The figures differ widely between countries, so a plan that works in one market may not fit another.

OLAB Assist shows how AI assistants answer the questions your customers ask, market by market, and what to fix on your site so they can find you.