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Estimated share of working-age adults who use generative AI

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Artificial Intelligence

What you should know about this indicator

  • These are modeled estimates, not survey data. They are derived from anonymized usage signals collected by Microsoft's software and services, which log whether users visited a platform.
  • Microsoft can directly observe this mainly on Windows desktops and tablets. It then scales these numbers up to estimate total use across desktop, tablet, and mobile devices in each country.
  • To do this, Microsoft adjusts for how common desktop and tablet devices are in each country, how much Internet use happens on mobile rather than desktop, and how many users share data with Microsoft.
  • This indicator counts anyone who visited one of 19 tracked AI tools during the period, from a single visit to daily use. It does not distinguish between occasional and frequent users.
  • The 19 tracked platforms are: Alice, ChatGPT, Character.ai, Claude, CLOVA X, DeepSeek, ERNIE Bot (Yiyan.baidu), GigaChat, Google Gemini, Grok, Khanmigo.ai, Meta.ai, Microsoft Copilot, Midjourney, Mistral.ai, NanoSemantics AI Assistant, Perplexity, Tongyi Qianwen, and Xiaowei.
  • Users with less than 90 minutes of total activity observed through Microsoft telemetry per month are excluded, to reduce the influence of very infrequent users. This threshold applies to overall tracked activity, not to time spent on AI tools.
  • Some countries do not have enough data for their own estimate and are assigned a regional average instead.
  • The source notes that coverage is limited in some countries, especially Russia, Iran, and parts of China, so estimates for these places carry greater uncertainty.
Estimated share of working-age adults who use generative AI
Share of the population aged 15–64 who used a website or app in the second half of 2025. Estimated from anonymized usage data on Microsoft platforms, scaled up to represent each country's working-age population.
Source
Microsoft (2026) – with minor processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
April 7, 2026
Next expected update
October 2026
Date range
2025–2025
Unit
%

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Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

Microsoft – Microsoft AI Diffusion Report 2025

Microsoft measures AI diffusion as the share of people worldwide who have used a generative AI product during the reported period. This measure is derived from aggregated and anonymized Microsoft telemetry and then adjusted to reflect differences in OS and device-market share, internet penetration, and country population. Additional details on the methodology are available in their AI Diffusion technical paper.

Retrieved on
April 7, 2026
Retrieved from
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/topics/AI-Economy-Institute/reports/Global-AI-Adoption-2025/
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Microsoft Research. AI Diffusion Report 2025. January 2026.

Microsoft measures AI diffusion as the share of people worldwide who have used a generative AI product during the reported period. This measure is derived from aggregated and anonymized Microsoft telemetry and then adjusted to reflect differences in OS and device-market share, internet penetration, and country population. Additional details on the methodology are available in their AI Diffusion technical paper.

Retrieved on
April 7, 2026
Retrieved from
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/topics/AI-Economy-Institute/reports/Global-AI-Adoption-2025/
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Microsoft Research. AI Diffusion Report 2025. January 2026.

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Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Estimated share of working-age adults who use generative AI”, part of the following publication: Charlie Giattino, Edouard Mathieu, Veronika Samborska, and Max Roser (2023) - “Artificial Intelligence”. Data adapted from Microsoft. Retrieved from https://auto-epoch.owid.pages.dev:8789/20260421-080745/grapher/estimated-share-people-generative-ai.html [online resource] (archived on April 21, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Microsoft (2026) – with minor processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

Microsoft (2026) – with minor processing by Our World in Data. “Estimated share of working-age adults who use generative AI” [dataset]. Microsoft, “Microsoft AI Diffusion Report 2025” [original data]. Retrieved May 8, 2026 from https://auto-epoch.owid.pages.dev:8789/20260421-080745/grapher/estimated-share-people-generative-ai.html (archived on April 21, 2026).

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Data URL (CSV format)
https://auto-epoch.owid.pages.dev/grapher/estimated-share-people-generative-ai.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://auto-epoch.owid.pages.dev/grapher/estimated-share-people-generative-ai.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

Code examples

Examples of how to load this data into different data analysis tools.

Excel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://auto-epoch.owid.pages.dev/grapher/estimated-share-people-generative-ai.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://auto-epoch.owid.pages.dev/grapher/estimated-share-people-generative-ai.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://auto-epoch.owid.pages.dev/grapher/estimated-share-people-generative-ai.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://auto-epoch.owid.pages.dev/grapher/estimated-share-people-generative-ai.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://auto-epoch.owid.pages.dev/grapher/estimated-share-people-generative-ai.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Stata
import delimited "https://auto-epoch.owid.pages.dev/grapher/estimated-share-people-generative-ai.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear