Microsoft warns AI adoption gap is widening as global usage climbs

Microsoft’s latest AI diffusion report shows faster global uptake, stronger growth in Asia, and a sharp rise in AI-assisted software development.

Microsoft’s Global AI Diffusion report shows the UAE leading AI usage in Q1 2026, with Singapore, Norway, Ireland, and France also among the highest-ranked economies. Photo credit: Microsoft.

Microsoft has reported a rise in global generative AI use during the first quarter of 2026, while warning that adoption is spreading unevenly across regions.

The company’s latest Global AI Diffusion report, published by the Microsoft AI Economy Institute, finds that AI usage increased from 16.3 percent to 17.8 percent of the world’s working-age population during Q1. The report measures AI diffusion as the share of people aged 15 to 64 who used a generative AI product during the reported period.

The figures point to a market that is moving beyond early experimentation, but not at the same pace everywhere. Microsoft says 26 economies now have more than 30 percent of their working-age population using AI, while the gap between the Global North and Global South has continued to widen.

The UAE remained at the top of Microsoft’s National AI Leaderboard, with AI usage reaching 70.1 percent of the working-age population. Singapore followed at 63.4 percent, ahead of Norway at 48.6 percent, Ireland at 48.4 percent, and France at 47.8 percent.

The United States moved from 24th to 21st place, with usage at 31.3 percent. The United Kingdom ranked eighth, with AI usage reaching 42.2 percent.

AI adoption divide continues to widen

Microsoft’s data shows AI adoption in the Global North growing more than twice as fast as in the Global South.

In Q1 2026, 27.5 percent of the population in the Global North used generative AI, up from 24.7 percent in the second half of 2025. In the Global South, usage reached 15.4 percent, up from 14.1 percent.

That moved the gap between the two groups from 10.6 percentage points to 12.1 percentage points.

Microsoft links the divide to differences in reliable electricity, internet connectivity, and digital skills. That makes AI adoption a wider education and workforce issue, rather than a question of tool availability alone.

The report also notes that its measure is not a perfect proxy for all AI activity. Microsoft says the data is derived from aggregated and anonymized telemetry and adjusted for operating system and device-market share, internet penetration, and population.

Asia gains pace as AI improves in local languages

Asia recorded some of the fastest growth in the quarter. Microsoft says 12 of the 15 fastest-growing economies for AI adoption since June 2025 are in Asia, with South Korea, Thailand, and Japan seeing the largest increases.

South Korea’s AI user share rose 43.2 percent compared with H1 2025. Thailand increased by 36.4 percent, while Japan rose by 34.1 percent.

Microsoft says stronger support for local languages and multimodal interaction appears to be driving wider use. The report points to improvements in non-English language performance across tasks such as messaging, search, learning, and content creation.

Japan’s ranking moved from 56th in H1 2025 to 48th in Q1 2026. Adoption in Japan rose 3.4 percentage points over the quarter, more than three times the global average.

The report says performance on Japanese professional exams has increased from about 50.8 percent accuracy in earlier models to more than 90 percent in recent systems. On the MMLU benchmark, Japanese accuracy rose from around 50 percent on GPT-3.5 Turbo to around 80 percent on GPT-4o.

AI coding tools push software activity higher

Microsoft also points to a sharp increase in software development activity, linked to AI coding tools from Anthropic, OpenAI, and GitHub Copilot.

Git pushes, where developers put coding changes online, increased 78 percent year over year globally. New Git repositories rose 45 percent compared with Q1 2025.

The report says GitHub Copilot has shifted from a code suggestion tool into a broader AI coding platform, with support for multiple models, coding agents, command line use, and integrations with collaboration and project management tools.

Merged GitHub pull requests associated with AI coding agents have grown more than 28 times since June 2025. Microsoft says this offers a proxy for the expansion of AI-assisted coding workflows, even though it captures only part of total AI-augmented development activity.

The labor market impact remains unresolved. Microsoft says total U.S. software developer employment reached around 2.2 million in 2025, up 8.5 percent year over year. Early Q1 2026 data shows software developer employment in March 2026 was about four percent higher than in March 2025.

Microsoft’s Q1 figures show AI use rising across work, coding, learning, and everyday digital activity, while the infrastructure gap remains visible. The next question is whether faster adoption in high-income and digitally mature economies will accelerate the skills gap before slower-growth markets can catch up.