UAE residents top Microsoft’s AI adoption list

Residents of the UAE are the biggest AI super users on the planet, according to a Global AI Diffusion report out this week from Microsoft just days before the AI Everything conference gets underway in Abu Dhabi. Just over 73% of the UAE’s working-age population were users of generative AI in 2Q 2026, up a bit more than three percentage points from the prior quarter.

Why? That high adoption rate probably has something to do with being a small nation with a wealthy population, but it’s also at least partly due to the country’s tech-forward focus and its national priority on AI adoption. Singapore, another small, wealthy country, has the second-highest adoption rate in the study at 64%.

Other rankings: Qatar sits at 43% adoption in the study. The United States is at 33%, Saudi Arabia is at 31%, and Egypt at nearly 16%. Nearly 19% of people globally are using generative AI, Microsoft found.

UAE businesses are super users, too. Across the nation, 72% of businesses are using AI this year compared with 53% last year, a separate study commissioned by Amazon Web Services and the UAE’s Artificial Intelligence Office found.