Artificial intelligence grows but creates more and more inequality

One in six people worldwide now uses generative artificial intelligence tools. This might sound like an achievement, but Microsoft's new report on AI deployment for the second half of 2025 tells a more complex story: while global adoption rises to 16.3 per cent (up 1.2 per cent from the first half of 2025), the gap between developed countries and the rest of the world continues to widen.

The numbers capture an accurate reality: in the Global North (developed countries) adoption has grown almost twice as fast as in the Global South (developing countries). In the second half of 2025, 24.7 per cent of the working-age population in rich countries use generative AI tools, compared to just 14.1 per cent in the rest of the world. The gap has increased from 9.8 to 10.6 percentage points in six months. To put it crudely: while Silicon Valley debates yet another language model, half the planet still struggles to access a stable internet.All ten countries with the fastest growth in AI adoption are high-income economies.

At the top of the global ranking is the United Arab Emirates with a 64% adoption rate among the working-age population, up from 59.4% at the beginning of the year. This record is no accident: the Emirates appointed the first Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence in 2017, five years before ChatGPT became a mass phenomenon. While other governments were still debating whether AI deserved political attention, Abu Dhabi had already launched a national strategy covering nine priority areas. The result is a 67% level of trust in AI according to the Edelman Trust Barometer 2025, compared to 32% in the US and a similar European average.

Singapore retains the second position with 60.9% adoption (up from 58.6% in the first half of the year), followed by Norway in third place with 46.4% (up from 45.3%) and Ireland in fourth with 44.6% (up from 41.7%). France, Spain, New Zealand, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Qatar complete the top ten. Italy ranks 26th with 27.8% adoption, up from 25.8% in the first half of the year, broadly in line with the European average but far behind the Scandinavian and Gulf leaders. The United States, despite its technological leadership, is only 24th with 28.3%, even down from the previous half-year. The paradox is obvious: the country that develops the most advanced models struggles to translate this excellence into widespread use among its citizens.

The Microsoft report here highlights a crucial point: leadership in innovation and cutting-edge infrastructure alone do not guarantee widespread adoption. The US dominates in frontier modelling and cloud infrastructure, but lags behind smaller, highly digitised economies with focused national AI strategies. The trust gap revealed by the Edelman Trust Barometer suggests that concerns about privacy, misinformation and impact on work weigh more heavily than elsewhere.