UAE leads AI adoption with 73.3% working-age use

Microsoft’s AI Economy Institute ranked the United Arab Emirates first in a Sept. 21 report, with 73.3% of people aged 15 to 64 using generative AI in June 2026.

The figure was almost four times the global rate of 18.8%, which rose from 17.8% in the first quarter of 2026, according to the Microsoft report cited by Quartz.

The ranking covers 147 economies and measures the share of working-age people who used generative AI during the period. Microsoft built the estimate from anonymized telemetry and adjusted it for device and operating-system market share, internet access and population.

Singapore ranked second at 64.3%, leaving the UAE ahead by 9 percentage points. Ireland placed third at 49.9%, followed by France at 49.6%, with Norway close behind, according to the ranking.

The data show a split between where AI systems are developed and where they are most widely used. The U.S., home to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Nvidia, ranked No. 21 by Microsoft’s adoption measure.

Microsoft’s global figures also point to an adoption gap between richer and poorer regions. Usage reached 28.8% in the Global North and 16.2% in the Global South in June 2026, a difference of 12.6 percentage points.

The UAE’s result follows years of government attention to artificial intelligence. The country appointed a minister of state for artificial intelligence in 2017, released a national AI strategy with a 2031 horizon, and opened the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence in Abu Dhabi in 2019.

Singapore’s position reflects a long-running digitization drive and a services-heavy economy. The city-state launched its Smart Nation initiative in 2014, established AI Singapore in 2017 and published a national AI strategy in 2019, followed by a second version in late 2023 focused on computing capacity, talent and business adoption.

Ireland’s third-place ranking puts it at the top of Europe by this measure. The country hosts European operations for major U.S. technology companies, including Google, Meta, Microsoft, LinkedIn and Apple, and has drawn a workforce concentrated in software, sales, operations and support roles.

Microsoft said its metric is imperfect. It counts how many people use AI, not how often they use it or how deeply the tools are embedded in work, and it does not yet include several newer tools.

The company said it plans to expand the set of tools measured in its next report. Microsoft expects that methodological change to raise measured usage in most places, especially China, according to the Quartz article.

Microsoft also has commercial exposure to the region leading the table. In 2024, it invested $1.5 billion in G42, an Abu Dhabi AI company, while applying the same adjusted telemetry-based method across the economies it ranked.

South Korea recorded the largest quarterly gain among the tracked economies, while Saudi Arabia made the biggest rise in rank. Japan had the fastest relative growth in the quarter but stood at 24.7%, well below Singapore’s 64.3%.

Source: Quartz article citing Microsoft AI Economy Institute report, Oct. 23, 2026.