the map that shows who is in charge and who has been left out

When AI arrived and we saw everything it could do, the first impression of many was that it was going to take away their jobs (and the truth is, some statements didn’t help either), although the reality at the moment is different: we work more and rest less. Knowing how to use AI has become another skill, one that can be essential depending on your job: being a waitress is not the same as being a secretary or being a plumber or journalist.

But even if the profession matters and the deployments are more or less global (in fact, Europe often lags behind as a matter of legislation), AI has not reached the same level throughout the world. The Microsoft AI Diffusion Report that monitors the AI ​​economy on a global scale (specifically, 100 countries) for the first quarter of 2026 collect a fact: 17.8% of the world’s working-age population uses it, but there are 10 countries that lead it and many that are behind.

Of course: Microsoft’s report uses anonymized telemetry from its products. That is, if someone uses only ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude and never touches anything from Microsoft, they do not appear in the count. Microsoft tries to correct this bias with statistical adjustments, but it does not completely eliminate it.

Microsoft’s report looks better with this infographic adaptation by Visual Capitalist what colors countries based on their use of AI: yellow tones for those places with high adoption and purple ones where it is little used. It is, in a nutshell, a quantitative snapshot of the actual use of generative AI tools.

It is inevitable to associate the adoption of AI with labor productivity and competitiveness. Without going any further, Microsoft itself does it relating its real effects on employment: dev work in the US broke records in 2025, reaching 2.2 million, 8.5% more than the previous year. Obviously, this gap between the countries that use AI the most and those that use the least has as a background unequal access to this technology. In short: it is a more than perpetual digital divide and widens the inequalities that already exist.

Which countries lead the use of AI

Adoption of AI in the world by country. First quarter of 2026. Microsoft via Visual Capitalist

Among the countries that lead the use of AI, one stands out: the United Arab Emirates, with 70% of its working-age population using artificial intelligence and growth that quadruples the world average rate. They are followed by Singapore (63%) and a group of highly digitalized countries, mostly European: Norway (49%), Ireland and France (48% each), Spain (44%), New Zealand (43%), and the United Kingdom, Netherlands (42%). Closing the top 10, Qatar tied with the Netherlands. The pattern is clear: they are moderately rich economies, with good internet connections and governments that have been investing in digital infrastructure for years.

But the vast majority moves well below those figures and what better example than an a priori unexpected United States: it only has a 31% share despite being the cradle of almighty powers such as Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It is one thing to build artificial intelligence and quite another to use it.. Here it depends more on having a homogeneous digital infrastructure, state adoption policies and territorial equality, factors where small states like the UAE or Singapore have structural advantages.

In the queue are many countries from Africa, Central Asia and Latin America, with quotas of just one digit or little more: Venezuela 10%, Russia 10%, Morocco 12%, Bolivia 13%, among others. The digital divide between north and south, at its finest: the Global North reached 27.5% usage compared to only 15.4% in the Global South. AI is spreading, but in a heterogeneous way towards those who were already advanced in digitalization.

However, it is worth remembering again that since it is based on Microsoft product telemetry, this indicator may underestimate real adoption in markets where other providers predominate: China deserves special mentionwhere the AI ​​ecosystem has powerful local products such as Baidu, Alibaba, Deepseek or Moonshoot and his impressive Kimi K3.

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Cover | Visual Capitalist