Report: Europe's AI gap is organisational, not technical, as US workplace use hits 43%
A Sifted report sponsored by London Business School argues that Europe lags the US in workplace AI adoption mainly because of an organisational gap — skills, management, trust and the cost of fitting AI into how firms work — rather than a technology gap. Citing a St. Louis Fed analysis, it says about 43% of US workers used AI for their jobs in early 2026 versus 32% in Europe, with US workers logging more than three times as many AI work hours as those in Germany, France and Italy; Eurostat data shows only 20% of EU firms use AI at all, up from 13.5% a year earlier, with Denmark at 42% and Romania at 5.2%. The report also cites McKinsey figures that 88% of organisations use AI somewhere but just 7% have fully scaled it, says more than 85% of banks supervised by the European Central Bank now use AI, and notes that UK avatar startup Synthesia reportedly turned down a $3bn offer from Adobe last year.
It reframes Europe's AI gap around organisational and governance capacity rather than compute, offering firms and policymakers a different lens.