Today we published our latest Global AI Diffusion Report. The global adoption of artificial intelligence continued to rise in the first quarter of 2026. During the quarter, AI usage increased by 1.5 percentage points from 16.3% to 17.8% of the world’s working age population. Intensity of use among economies with the highest rates of AI diffusion also increased, with 26 economies now exceeding 30% of the working age population using AI.
At the top of Microsoft’s National AI Leaderboard, the UAE continued to lead global AI diffusion at 70.1%. The United States finally started to move up the national rankings, albeit only from 24th to 21st based on a 31.3% usage rate by the working age population.
Notable developments in the quarter included accelerating AI adoption in Asia driven in part by improving AI capabilities in Asian languages. South Korea, Thailand, and Japan saw the greatest movement. More broadly, the quarter brought continued widening of the AI gap between the Global North and South, with usage now at 27.5% in the North and 15.4% in the South. These trends are discussed below, including a deeper dive on the positive impact of enhanced multilingual AI capabilities in Japan.
To track all these trends, we continue to measure AI diffusion as the share of people worldwide between ages 15 and 64 who have used a generative AI product during the reported period. This measure is derived from aggregated and anonymized Microsoft telemetry and adjusted to reflect differences in OS and device-market share, internet penetration, and country population. Additional details on the methodology are available in our AI Diffusion technical paper.[1]
No single metric is perfect, and this one is no exception. Through the Microsoft AI Economy Institute, we continue to refine how we measure AI diffusion globally, including how adoption varies across countries in ways that best advance priorities such as scientific discovery and productivity gains. For this report, we rely on the strongest cross-country measure available today, and we expect to complement it over time with additional indicators as they emerge and mature.
Sectorally, the quarter saw strengthened AI coding capabilities leading to a dramatic increase in production of software code. This was reflected in production by Anthropic’s Claude Code, the OpenAI’s Codex, and Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot. Git pushes – through which software developers put coding changes online – increased 78% year over year globally. Interestingly, the quarter brought added evidence that, at least for now, AI coding capabilities may be increasing demand for the employment of software developers.
As discussed in more detail in the report, when developer productivity increases, the cost of building software declines. If demand for software is elastic, organizations can respond by building more software across a wider range of use cases. It is still too early to know the full labor-market impact of AI-assisted coding, but the available data shows that in 2025, total U.S. software developer employment reached approximately 2.2 million, rising 8.5% year over year and marking a record high for the profession. Early data for the first quarter of 2026 shows that software developer employment in March 2026 was about 4% higher than in March 2025.
Download the latest Global AI Diffusion report. and explore the data here.
[1] A. Misra, J. Wang, S. McCullers, K. White, and J., L. Ferres, “Measuring AI Diffusion: A Population Normalized Metric for Tracking Global AI Usage,” Nov. 04, 2025, arXiv: arXiv:2511.02781. doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2511.02781.
Tags: AI, AI diffusion, AI for Good
