Businesses and AI: one in five has adopted it, but the manufacturing sector is making the most significant leap
The services sector remains the driving force, with 25.9 per cent of businesses adopting the technology (compared with 19.1 per cent in 2024). However, the most significant increase in absolute terms comes from the manufacturing sector, which has risen from 6.2% to 13.6% (+7.4 percentage points)
Key points
In Italian industry, artificial intelligence is no longer an isolated experiment: over the course of a year, the number of manufacturing firms using it has more than doubled. This is the most significant finding from the survey carried out by Unioncamere, in collaboration with Dintec, based on over 20,000 responses collected over the last two years.
One in five companies uses AI
Between 2024 and 2025, the overall proportion of companies reporting that they use AI solutions rose from 13.1 per cent to 19.5 per cent – a jump of more than 6 percentage points that brings the manufacturing sector closer to the threshold of one in five companies. Growth, however, is proceeding at different rates across sectors.
Services lead the way, but industry is picking up pace
The services sector remains the driving force, with 25.9 per cent of businesses adopting the technology (up from 19.1 per cent in 2024). However, the most significant increase in absolute terms comes from the manufacturing sector, which has risen from 6.2% to 13.6% (+7.4 percentage points).
AI and Made in Italy
Within the sector, the ‘Made in Italy’ supply chains – fashion, automotive, furniture and agri-food – are showing the most marked growth: from 3 per cent in 2023 to 6.3 per cent in 2024, rising to 11 per cent in 2025 – almost quadrupling the initial figure in three years. Retail is also growing, to 13% (+4.2 percentage points), as is agriculture, from 5.2% to 8.1%.
The determining factors
Three factors in particular determine which companies adopt AI and which lag behind. The first is digital maturity: companies that use AI have an average score of 2.81 on a scale of 0 to 4, compared with 2.17 for those that do not use it. The second is the ability to manage research and development: amongst companies adopting AI, 39.3 per cent have fully automated R&D that is integrated across business functions, compared with 24.1 per cent of the others. The third factor is openness to foreign markets: exporting companies adopt AI in 11.9 per cent of cases, compared with 7.1 per cent of those operating solely in the domestic market.
