Today's Edition
A. SREENIVASA REDDY (ABU DHABI)
The UAE has ranked first globally for artificial intelligence adoption, with 64% of the working-age population using generative AI tools by the end of 2025, extending its lead over all other countries, according to the Microsoft AI Diffusion Report published in January 2026.
The report shows that AI usage in the UAE rose sharply from 59.4% in the first half of 2025 to 64.0% in the second half, giving the country a lead of more than three percentage points over Singapore, which ranked second with 60.9% adoption. “Countries that have invested early in digital infrastructure, AI skilling, and government adoption continue to lead,” the report said, highlighting the UAE as the top-ranked economy globally.
According to the report, the UAE’s position reflects a long-term, deliberate policy approach rather than a recent surge. It noted that the UAE appointed the world’s first Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence in 2017, five full years before ChatGPT captured the world’s attention, and launched a national AI strategy covering nine priority sectors. “When the current generative AI wave arrived, UAE residents encountered a familiar technology,” the report said, adding that trust levels in AI are also significantly higher in the UAE than in many Western economies.
"Regulatory pragmatism has also advanced the UAE’s global AI leadership. The UAE was forward-thinking in creating sandbox environments that enabled controlled experimentation,” the report said.
Beyond the UAE, the report said a small group of advanced economies dominate the top tier of AI adoption. Alongside Singapore, countries such as Norway, Ireland, France, Spain, New Zealand, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Qatar feature in the top ten globally, with adoption rates ranging between the high-30s and mid-40s. The rankings among these countries were largely stable in the second half of the year, underscoring what the report described as a “saturated” top tier of early adopters.
In contrast, the United States slipped further down the rankings despite its leadership in AI infrastructure and frontier model development. The report said the US fell from 23rd to 24th place, with 28.3% of the working-age population using generative AI tools. “Leadership in innovation and infrastructure does not by itself lead to broad AI adoption,” the report observed, noting that several smaller, highly digitised economies outpace the US in usage penetration.
South Korea emerged as the standout success story of the second half of 2025. The country climbed seven places in just three months, moving from 25th to 18th globally, the largest jump recorded by any nation in the period.
Generative-AI usage in South Korea rose from about 26% to more than 30% of the population, driven by government policies, improved Korean-language AI models and consumer-facing features that resonated widely. The report noted that AI is now used extensively in schools, workplaces and public services, and that South Korea has become one of ChatGPT’s fastest-growing markets, prompting OpenAI to open an office in Seoul.
Another major development highlighted in the report was the rapid rise of DeepSeek, an open-source AI platform that gained traction in 2025 by releasing its model under an MIT licence and offering a free chatbot. This approach removed financial and technical barriers to access, leading to strong adoption in markets such as China, Russia, Iran, Cuba and Belarus, as well as across parts of Africa. The report said DeepSeek’s success illustrates how accessibility and cost can significantly influence global AI diffusion, particularly in regions underserved by traditional providers.
Despite rising global adoption, the report warned of a widening digital divide. While overall global AI usage reached 16.3% of the world’s population by the end of 2025, adoption in the Global North grew nearly twice as fast as in the Global South. As a result, 24.7% of the working-age population in the Global North now uses generative AI tools, compared with just 14.1% in the Global South, widening the gap further in the second half of the year.
To measure adoption, the report said it tracks AI diffusion as the share of people who used a generative AI product during the reported period. The metric is derived from aggregated and anonymised Microsoft telemetry, adjusted to account for differences in operating systems, device-market share, internet penetration and country population. Microsoft noted that no single metric is perfect but described this as the strongest cross-country measure currently available, with further refinements planned over time.
