Irish businesses and AI: where Ireland ranks in the EU
In 2025, 19.6% of Irish businesses with ten or more staff used some form of AI. The EU figure was 20.0%. Ireland hosts the European bases of several of the largest US technology companies, and on this measure it is an average member state, down from 11th place to 14th in a year. We pulled the full Eurostat series to see where the gap sits. Then we asked a narrower question: does any of it make an Irish business easier to find when a customer asks an AI assistant?
Four numbers from the 2025 survey
Every figure in this post comes from Eurostat's Artificial intelligence by size class of enterprise table (isoc_eb_ai), pulled from the Eurostat API on 27 September 2026. The table was last updated on 15 June 2026 and covers survey years 2021, 2023, 2024 and 2025. It counts enterprises with ten or more people employed, across all sectors except agriculture, mining and finance. We rounded to one decimal place.
Ireland tracked the EU average almost exactly
Eurostat asks every enterprise the same question each year: did you use any of a list of AI technologies? Ireland's answer has sat within 1.5 percentage points of the EU figure in every survey since 2021. It was 7.9% against 7.7% in 2021, 8.0% against 8.1% in 2023, 14.9% against 13.5% in 2024, and 19.6% against 20.0% in 2025.
Source: Eurostat, isoc_eb_ai, enterprises with 10 or more persons employed using at least one AI technology, updated 15 June 2026. There was no 2022 survey. The 2025 list adds an eighth technology (generating pictures, video or audio), so 2025 is not strictly comparable with earlier years.
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| Survey year | Ireland | EU 27 |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 7.9% | 7.7% |
| 2023 | 8.0% | 8.1% |
| 2024 | 14.9% | 13.5% |
| 2025 | 19.6% | 20.0% |
Two cautions before reading much into the lines. First, the definition moved. The 2025 questionnaire added an eighth technology, AI that generates pictures, video or audio, and the "used any AI" figure counts a firm that uses only that one. In the Eurostat table the image-generation row exists for 2025 and is empty for every earlier year. Some of the 2025 jump is new counting, not new adoption. Second, there was no survey in 2022, so the chart joins 2021 straight to 2023.
What the lines do show is that Ireland was ahead in 2024 and behind in 2025. It added 4.7 points in a year while the EU average added 6.5.
The Nordics and Benelux are twice as far along
Ranked across all 27 member states, Ireland was 12th in 2021, 12th in 2023, 11th in 2024 and 14th in 2025. Denmark leads at 42.0%, followed by Finland at 37.8% and Sweden at 35.0%. Romania is last at 5.2%. Spain, at 20.3%, moved past Ireland in 2025, as did Estonia and Lithuania.
Source: Eurostat, isoc_eb_ai, 2025, enterprises with 10 or more persons employed using at least one AI technology. Twelve of 27 member states shown. The Netherlands figure carries a break-in-series flag.
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| Country | Enterprises using AI, 2025 |
|---|---|
| Denmark | 42.0% |
| Finland | 37.8% |
| Sweden | 35.0% |
| Belgium | 34.5% |
| Netherlands | 33.2% |
| Germany | 26.0% |
| Spain | 20.3% |
| EU 27 | 20.0% |
| Ireland | 19.6% |
| France | 18.2% |
| Italy | 16.4% |
| Romania | 5.2% |
This is a statistic about Irish-resident enterprises, so the Irish operations of multinationals are in it. It still lands on the average, and the size breakdown shows where Ireland is ahead and where it is not.
Big Irish firms lead Europe. Small ones do not
Split by headcount, Ireland's average hides two different stories. 57.3% of Irish enterprises with 250 or more staff used AI in 2025, against 55.0% across the EU. Among small firms of 10 to 49 people it was 16.8% in Ireland and 17.0% in the EU. Medium-sized Irish firms, 50 to 249 staff, trailed by more: 28.0% against 30.4%.
Source: Eurostat, isoc_eb_ai, 2025, share of enterprises in each size class using at least one AI technology. Firms with fewer than 10 staff are not in this table for Ireland or the EU.
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| Enterprise size | Ireland | EU 27 |
|---|---|---|
| 10 to 49 staff | 16.8% | 17.0% |
| 50 to 249 staff | 28.0% | 30.4% |
| 250+ staff | 57.3% | 55.0% |
The trend matters more than the snapshot. Irish large firms went from 50.8% in 2024 to 57.3% in 2025, a gain of 6.4 points. Irish firms with 50 to 249 staff went from 24.9% to 28.0%, a gain of 3.2 points, while the EU's medium firms gained 9.4. In 2024 Ireland's medium-sized firms were almost four points ahead of the EU. A year later they were more than two behind.
The sole traders, cafes, guesthouses and trades that make up most of the Irish business count are not in these figures at all. Eurostat's AI table starts at ten employees, and the Irish data has no micro-enterprise breakdown. On every other cut in this table, the smaller the firm, the lower the rate, so there is no reason to think the micro figure is higher.
Ireland is behind on image and voice, level on text
Eurostat breaks "any AI" into the eight technologies behind it. In 2025 Irish firms matched or beat the EU on text generation (9.0% against 8.8%), machine learning for data analysis and workflow automation. The gap sits in the newer, media-heavy tools: 5.7% of Irish firms used AI to generate pictures, video or audio, against 9.6% across the EU, and 5.8% used speech recognition against 7.2%.
Source: Eurostat, isoc_eb_ai, 2025, share of all enterprises with 10 or more persons employed using each technology. A firm can use several. The eighth technology, autonomous robots and vehicles, is under 1.5% in both and is left out.
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| AI technology | Ireland | EU 27 |
|---|---|---|
| Text mining (analysing written language) | 10.5% | 11.8% |
| Generating images, video or audio | 5.7% | 9.6% |
| Generating text, speech or code | 9.0% | 8.8% |
| Speech recognition | 5.8% | 7.2% |
| Workflow automation (RPA) | 6.0% | 5.4% |
| Machine learning for data analysis | 5.8% | 5.1% |
| Image recognition | 2.7% | 3.8% |
Using AI is not the same as being found by it
Every one of those eight technologies describes something a business does with AI inside its own walls: analysing documents, drafting text, transcribing calls, automating a workflow. None of them describes what happens when a customer opens ChatGPT or Gemini and asks for a recommendation. That second thing is decided by what the engines can read about you on the open web, and a firm can score on all eight technologies without changing a word of it.
Eurostat's closest measure to the customer side is purpose: what the AI was used for. In 2025, 5.3% of Irish enterprises used AI for marketing or sales, against 6.9% across the EU. Ireland was ahead on this in every earlier survey, and in 2025 it went backwards: the Irish figure fell from 5.6% while the EU rose from 4.6%.
Source: Eurostat, isoc_eb_ai, share of all enterprises with 10 or more persons employed using AI technologies for marketing or sales.
Show the data
| Survey year | Ireland | EU 27 |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 2.6% | 1.6% |
| 2023 | 2.8% | 1.9% |
| 2024 | 5.6% | 4.6% |
| 2025 | 5.3% | 6.9% |
Put that another way: among Irish firms that use AI at all, the share putting it to work on marketing or sales dropped from 37.8% in 2024 to 26.7% in 2025. The EU figure held at about 35%. Even the customer-facing slice measures AI used to write campaigns or score leads, not whether the firm turns up in an answer.
We have tested the gap directly. When we ran five Irish travel questions through three engines for our post on Irish holidaymakers, Loveholidays, a company that had just launched an app inside ChatGPT and published research on AI trip planning, appeared in none of the fourteen engine runs. Cassidy Travel, a Dublin agency with plain comparison and destination pages, appeared in five. On the two hotel questions, none of the 32 citations came from a hotel's own website. How much a business uses AI told us nothing about which of them the engines named.
Financial services showed a related pattern. When we ran ten Irish home insurers through mention scans, one of the most-mentioned carriers was cited in just 2 of 18 answers to "best home insurance Ireland", and comparison sites took the citation instead. Our Irish mortgage scans found the same split between the lenders the engines mention most and the ones they speak about most warmly. Being talked about, being recommended and being cited are three different outcomes, and none of them is measured by an adoption survey.
What an Irish business should take from this
The adoption gap is real but small. Ireland is average, not behind. The worrying part is direction: medium-sized Irish firms went from ahead of the EU to behind it in one survey, and Irish marketing and sales use of AI went down while Europe's went up.
Closing it will not make you visible. A firm that buys a transcription tool or a drafting assistant is now counted as an AI user by Eurostat. Its chances of being named when a customer in Galway asks an assistant for a recommendation are unchanged, because those depend on what the engines can find and quote.
Visibility is measured separately. Write down the five questions a customer asks before choosing you, run them through the main assistants, and record whether you are named and which sites the answer cites. That is a test you can repeat monthly, and it is the only number here that describes you rather than the national average.
Questions about the numbers
Sources: Eurostat, Artificial intelligence by size class of enterprise (isoc_eb_ai), updated 15 June 2026 and pulled through the Eurostat API on 27 September 2026; Central Statistics Office, Information Society Statistics Enterprises 2025. Engine test figures are from a Baseline Labs visibility report run on 8 September 2026, described in our post on Irish holidaymakers.
