Eurostat: one in five EU firms now deploys AI tools in operations

Eurostat’s new figures show that AI is no longer a fringe experiment for European firms: one in five companies with at least 10 employees is now using AI tools, up sharply from 13.5% just a year earlier. Nordic countries are far ahead—over 40% of Danish firms report AI use—while countries like Italy sit around the EU average at 19%. ([orizzontescuola.it](https://www.orizzontescuola.it/intelligenza-artificiale-in-ue-una-impresa-su-5-la-usa-danimarca-al-42-italia-al-19-i-dati-eurostat/?utm_source=openai))

For the AGI race, widespread enterprise adoption matters as much as headline model breakthroughs. It creates stable demand for applied AI, generates domain‑specific data and task distributions, and pressures vendors to build more reliable, controllable systems. An SME in Denmark using AI for logistics or customer support today is indirectly funding the ecosystem of tools, cloud infrastructure and MLOps practices that frontier labs will later rely on. High variance between member states also reveals where future regulatory and skills bottlenecks may slow diffusion, even if models themselves keep improving.

Europe’s challenge is to convert adoption into differentiated strength rather than generic dependence on U.S. and Chinese stacks. That means more investment in sovereign compute, open models tuned to EU languages and sectors, and regulatory clarity that encourages responsible experimentation rather than chilling it.