AI automation
The AI Adoption Gap: What Eurostat's Numbers Say About Smaller Firms
In the EU, AI use is far more common in large enterprises than in small ones. Here is what the gap means in practice.
The size gap
Eurostat's 2024 survey of enterprises with ten or more employees found that 13.5 percent of EU enterprises used at least one AI technology. The share rises sharply with company size: 11.2 percent of small enterprises, 20.9 percent of medium-sized enterprises and 41.1 percent of large enterprises.
The national spread is wide as well. Denmark was highest at 27.6 percent, while Romania was lowest at 3.1 percent, although every member state increased its share compared with 2023.
What businesses actually use
The most common technology was text mining, used by 6.9 percent of enterprises, followed by natural language generation at 5.4 percent and speech recognition at 4.8 percent. These are practical, task-level tools: reading documents, drafting text and transcribing speech. They are not the sweeping transformations that headlines suggest.
What the gap means for a small business
A smaller firm does not need a large data team to benefit. Large enterprises tend to have more repetitive back-office volume and more specialist staff, so they were first to adopt. Small firms have the same kinds of repetitive work at a smaller scale: quotations, invoices, enquiries, stock lists. The practical route is to pick one of these, automate it, and keep a person in charge of the result.
Where we fit
MayTech Labs builds AI and automation for businesses that cannot justify a large in-house team. We focus on small, well-defined workflows that can be tested quickly and extended later.
