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Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has published its Global AI Diffusion report, analyzing the global adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in the first quarter of 2026.
In the report, Microsoft found that AI use has risen by 1.5%, rising from 16.3% to 17.8% of the world’s working-age population. In 2026, AI adoption also surged, with 26 economies now having over 30% of working adults utilizing AI.
At the top of its National AI Leaderboard, Microsoft revealed that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) continues to lead global AI diffusion at 70.1%, while the United States moves up in the national rankings from 24th to 21st, with a 31.3% usage rate.
In Asia, notable AI adoption has been observed, with South Korea (+43%), Thailand (+36%), and Japan (+34%) recording the greatest growth. Similarly, strong adoption gains occurred in Mongolia, Iran, Laos, and Turkey, as well as in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, and Cambodia.
“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,” Microsoft said in a blog post on May 7.
To track these AI trends, Microsoft measured AI diffusion by the share of people ages 15 to 64 who have used generative AI in Q1 2026. The data is derived from aggregated, anonymized Microsoft telemetry and adjusted to reflect differences in OS and device market share, internet penetration, and country population.
Sectorally, the tech giant saw strong AI coding capabilities, leading to increased software code production, as reflected in the work of Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, and Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot. Git pushes, or the act of adding coding changes online, rose by 78% year over year globally.
“AI coding capabilities may be increasing demand for the employment of software developers,” Microsoft’s report read. “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, including across broader economic sectors.”
Another key driver of the surge was stronger support for local languages and multimodal interaction, which has broadened AI’s relevance. Improvements in diverse language performance in multilingual benchmarks like MMLU assesed the same knowledge tasks across 14 languages: Arabic, Bengali, German, Spanish, French, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Swahili, Yoruba, and Chinese, have seen making AI tools capable of handling multilingual tasks, “making them more accessible for everyday use cases such as messaging, search, learning, and content creation.”
Concluding their report, the tech giant stated that while AI adoption has been accelerating in the first quarter of this year, the benefits have not been evenly distributed. The Global North is advancing more rapidly than the Global South, highlighting the need to address foundational gaps in electricity, connectivity, digital skills, and access to local languages.
Asia is emerging as a “major growth engine,” led by Japan and South Korea. And the clearest sign of AI’s near-term economic impact, Microsoft said, is in software development, as new coding models and agentic tools emerge alongside increased code production, repository creation, and AI-assisted development activity.
“These trends suggest that AI diffusion is entering a new phase: broader, faster, and more practical, but also one that requires deliberate action to ensure its benefits are shared globally,” Microsoft remarked.
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