Report: Global AI Use Rises as Adoption Gap Continues to Widen
AI usage has reached 17.8% among the world's working-age population, while adoption remains far higher in developed economies than in the Global South, according to Microsoft's latest Global AI Diffusion Report.
The quarterly report, published by Microsoft's AI Economy Institute, found that 26 economies now report AI usage exceeding 30% of their working-age populations, up from the previous quarter.
The United Arab Emirates maintained 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 measure generative AI usage across populations between ages 15 and 64.
Juan Lavista Ferres, Microsoft's chief data scientist and head of the AI Economy Institute, noted the uneven global distribution in the company's blog post announcing the findings. "The quarter brought continued widening of the AI gap between the Global North and South, with usage now at 27.5% in the North and 15.4 percent in the South," Ferres wrote.
The report highlights momentum in Asian markets, driven partly by improved AI capabilities for Asian languages. South Korea, Thailand and Japan saw the most significant movement in adoption rates during the quarter, according to the company.
Microsoft said the research is based on anonymized telemetry data, with adjustments for differences in OSes, device market share, internet access and country populations. The company said no single metric can fully capture AI adoption and that its AI Economy Institute is continuing to refine how it measures the technology's impact.
Software development was one of the clearest areas of change. Globally, Git pushes — the process developers use to upload code changes — rose 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 common in development workflows.
The jobs data tells a more mixed story than predictions of AI-driven job losses. U.S. software developer employment reached about 2.2 million in 2025, up 8.5% from 2024 and the highest level on record. Early 2026 data showed developer employment in March was about 4% higher than it was a year earlier.
"When developer productivity increases, the cost of building software declines," Ferres explained in the blog post. The economic logic suggests that if software demand proves elastic, organizations respond by building more applications across broader use cases rather than reducing headcount.
The quarterly measurement represents the latest in Microsoft's ongoing effort to track AI diffusion globally. The company notes that while no single metric perfectly captures technology adoption patterns, the current approach provides the strongest cross-country measure available, with plans to incorporate additional indicators as methodologies mature.
The growing gap between developed and developing economies shows that AI's benefits are not spreading evenly, according to the company's data. Microsoft found a 12.1 percentage point difference in adoption between the Global North and Global South, a divide that appears to be widening as infrastructure, language support and economic barriers continue to shape who can use these tools.
Microsoft's next quarterly update on the effect of AI on the global economy is expected to be released in August.