Eurostat this week reported that the use of artificial intelligence among EU enterprises continued to rise sharply in 2025, with Cyprus trailing behind the European average despite steady improvement over the past four years.

Across the bloc, around 20 per cent of enterprises with at least 10 employees used AI technologies in 2025.

This represents a robust increase of 6.5 percentage points compared with 13.5 per cent in 2024, underscoring what Eurostat described as growing momentum in the business adoption of digital tools.

Cyprus maintained one of the lowest adoption rates in the EU, reaching 9.27 per cent in 2025, which remained far below the EU-27 average of 19.95 per cent, widening the performance gap to more than 10 percentage points.

This placed Cyprus ahead of only Greece, Bulgaria, Poland, Turkey (with a percentage of 7.41 per cent in 2025), and Romania.

The trajectory marks a continuation of Cyprus’ slow but steady improvement.

In 2021, Cyprus recorded an adoption rate of 2.59 per cent at a time when the EU-27 average was 7.65 per cent, leaving a difference of 5.06 percentage points.

By 2023, Cyprus had increased its rate to 4.67 per cent, while the EU stood at 8.06 per cent, reducing the gap slightly to 4.19 percentage points.

In 2024, EU adoption surged to 13.48 per cent and Cyprus rose to 7.90 per cent, a shift that nonetheless widened the gap to 5.58 percentage points as the bloc advanced more rapidly.

By 2025, the divide grew further, despite Cyprus more than tripling its 2021 rate.

Eurostat said “twenty per cent of EU enterprises used artificial intelligence in 2025”, describing the figures as evidence of a technology that is becoming more mainstream across most of the Union.

The highest adoption levels were recorded in Denmark at 42.0 per cent, Finland at 37.8 per cent and Sweden at 35.0 per cent.

At the bottom were Romania at 5.2 per cent, Poland at 8.4 per cent and Bulgaria at 8.5 per cent, placing Cyprus just above this lowest group but still well below the EU norm.

Almost all EU countries recorded increases in the share of enterprises using AI compared with 2024, with Denmark reporting the strongest growth of 14.5 percentage points, followed by Finland with 13.5 points and Lithuania with 12.5 points.

Eurostat added that the most common use of AI technology among EU enterprises in 2025 was to analyse written language at 11.8 per cent.

This was followed by generating pictures, videos or audio at 9.5 per cent, generating written or spoken language at 8.8 per cent and converting spoken language into machine-readable format at 7.2 per cent.

Compared with 2024, the fastest-growing application was the analysis of written language, which increased by 4.9 percentage points, followed by written or spoken language generation at 3.4 points.