A new study shows a clear gap in workplace AI use between the US and Europe - and suggests management structure may be a key reason why.
Europe might be slower to adopt artificial intelligence (AI) than the United States because of how its businesses are structured, according to new research.
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The report from Brookings Institute surveyed more than 5,000 people in the United States and six European countries to find out how regularly they use AI at work: France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Italy and the United Kingdom in June 2025 and February 2026.
The study measures both company-level integration and individual use of AI in the workplace.
It then compared that data to the US business census and Europe’s ICT Usage and E-Commerce in Enterprise survey to find out how people are using AI at work.
American companies are more likely to integrate AI into daily operations, with an estimated 34% using AI for any purpose, compared to an EU-wide average of 20% At the individual level, 43% of US respondents say they use AI in their work, compared to 32% in Europe in 2026.
The EU-US gap widens with companies that use AI solely for production; seven percent of US production companies have already integrated AI compared to just four percent in Europe.
Worker adoption in Europe varies, with 36% of respondents in the United Kingdom saying they use it for work, and 35.6% in both Sweden and the Netherlands.
Italy had the lowest adoption rate of the European countries surveyed at just one in four respondents saying they had adopted AI at work. The report also says that adoption is stalling in France and Germany, where 28% and 31% of respondents respectively use AI at work.
That means US AI adoption ranges between 18% and 68% higher than in Europe, the study found.
Pro-AI employees encouraged by managers to use it
The researchers suggest that the biggest difference between US and EU companies’ AI use is their management structure.
US respondents who used AI at work were more likely to say they had been encouraged by managers to do so and were provided with a specific internal tool to use, with 42% saying they got both, compared to France and Italy, with 17% and 16% respectively.
“Almost all of the US-Europe adoption gap is accounted for … once firm encouragement is taken into account,” the study writes.
US workers are also motivated to use AI because their companies reward and promote those who do, the study found.
Workers who are not encouraged to use AI or delegated a specific AI tool, whether in the US or EU, were less likely to say they were using AI on the job, the survey also found.
The size of the company matters, too. Workers at companies with over 250 employees in both the US and high-adoption EU countries, such as the UK, Netherlands and Sweden, were more likely to be using AI than those who worked at smaller companies, the study found.
Demographics explain about a third of the gap, the study found.
AI uptake in all countries was higher for male respondents, those under 45 and with a university education than their female, older, less-educated counterparts, the study found.
When the researchers adjusted for the respondents’ education, age and sex between the US and EU countries, they found that Sweden would have nearly identical AI adoption rates to the US.
More than half of the respondents from all countries that work in computer or math fields said that they use AI at work, compared to below 27% personal services, 33% in hotels and food services, indicating that the respondents’ field of work largely impacts whether they use AI or not.
Separate EU data points point to similar structural barriers. Eurostat data, released this week, also shows that European companies lack the technical expertise needed to implement AI in their businesses, despite knowing that it would benefit them.
European companies also said they are concerned about data privacy, legal concerns or point to the cost as a barrier for putting AI in place, according to Eurostat.
