Quarter of all businesses used AI technology last year, study shows

Approximately one in four businesses with ten or more employees (22.7%) used at least one form of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in 2024.

According to Statistics Netherlands, text mining was the most commonly used AI technology last year. About 13.5% of all businesses used text mining in their line of work. Text mining is the analysis of written texts.

Approximately one in eight companies (12.3%) used AI to generate written or spoken text, also called natural language generation. Compared to 2023, companies were 2.5 times more likely to use text mining, and three times more likely to use language generation technology. The use of speech recognition technology almost doubled from 3.7% in 2023 to 6.5% in 2024.

In addition, researchers noted that larger companies were more likely to exploit AI technology than smaller companies. The use of AI technology was most common among companies with 500 or more workers, and the lowest among companies with 10 to 19 employees.

AI technology was predominantly used by companies in the information and communication sector (58%), followed by specialized business services (39.8%) and providers of financial services (37.4%).

Across Europe, 13.5% of all companies said they used AI technology last year. The country where AI technology was most exploited, is Denmark (27.6%), closely followed by Sweden (25.1%), Belgium (24.7%), Finland (24.4%), and Luxembourg (23.7%). Eastern European countries like Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland and Romania scored well below the European average.

What about the companies that didn’t use AI technology in their day-to-day operations? According to Statistics Netherlands’ AI Monitor, ‘lack of experience’ was the most important reason not to use AI technology (74.6%).

Privacy also played a major role in the decision to waive AI technology. More than half of companies with 100 or more workers said that privacy concerns were the main reason for not adopting AI technology.