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France: 40% of micro-businesses and SMEs use AI, while adoption remains limited elsewhere in Europe

The 2026 France Num Barometer confirms that 40% of French micro-businesses and SMEs now use an AI solution, up from 26% a year earlier. In Spain, only 4.1% of industrial SMEs have reached that point, a gap by size and industry that several studies confirm this week. In the United States, large companies are putting governance in place for their AI agents, while in France MAIF and Edison IA illustrate two approaches, sovereignty and financing, to speed up adoption among SMEs and mid-sized companies.

Key developments

  1. The 2026 France Num Barometer confirms the acceleration among micro-businesses and SMEs

    According to the 2026 France Num Barometer, carried out by Crédoc for the Direction générale des entreprises among 9,655 micro-businesses and SMEs, 40% of them now use at least one AI solution, compared with 26% in 2025 and 13% in 2024. Among SMEs alone, the rate reaches 53%. The leading uses remain content generation (34%) and chatbots (24%). Only 19% of companies pay for these solutions, but 68% of users consider the impact positive, a figure that rises to 85% among paying users. Adoption varies widely by industry, from 72% in the digital sector to 18% in agriculture.

    Sources: Ministère de l'Économie, Direction générale des Entreprises, ZDNet France, Le Parisien, Economie Matin, Capital, Brief IA, ActuIA, Archimag, LesEco.ma

  2. Edison IA raises €1 million amid the adoption gap between SMEs and large companies

    Nantes-based start-up Edison IA has closed a €1 million funding round with Go Capital, CIC Ouest and Bpifrance to support SMEs and mid-sized companies in deploying AI agents, with a termination guarantee if return on investment is not demonstrated within six months. According to Insee, 31% of companies with 50 to 249 employees used at least one AI technology in 2025, compared with 58% of those with 250 or more employees. Edison IA targets around 25,000 French companies and aims for about a hundred clients by 2028, in a market that is already crowded according to the Hub France IA map.

    Sources: FrenchWeb, Le Filia, Le Journal des Entreprises

  3. In Spain, AI adoption by SMEs remains limited and uneven

    The 2026 IndesIA Barometer, based on 131,554 companies, finds that only 4.1% of Spanish industrial SMEs use AI, up from 2.1% in 2024, with adoption rising with company size (6.5% for companies with 50 to 250 employees) and varying by region, led by Madrid at 6.3%. A Zoho study for Namirial also shows that only one Spanish company in four is in good digital health, a factor associated with a much higher return on investment from AI: 99% versus 46% for the least digitally advanced companies.

    Sources: Forbes España, La Ecuación Digital, El Periódico, El Español, El Ecosistema Startup (1, 2), Emprendedores

  4. MAIF reorganises its information system around French providers

    The mutual insurer MAIF has announced that it is relying on Mistral AI, Scaleway and Diabolocom to modernise its information system, with digital sovereignty now included in its supplier selection criteria. At the end of 2025, around 10,000 employees had access to Microsoft Copilot and the insurer counted around fifty experiments. An agreement signed with its six trade unions rules out AI-related redundancies and creates a twelve-member AI committee attached to the CSE. According to MAIF's deputy chief information officer, European solutions have been chosen in more than 50% of large tenders over the past year.

    Sources: Alliancy, FrenchWeb, IT for Business

  5. Large organisations are structuring the governance of AI agents

    An OECD report, based on interviews with 25 organisations including Google, Microsoft, Deutsche Telekom and public administrations, finds that none deploys an AI agent with unrestricted autonomy: a human always validates irreversible actions. Nvidia, for its part, has presented a security platform for AI agents bringing together more than one hundred organisations, including Anthropic, SAP, Salesforce, Citi and JPMorganChase. At Thales, executives report seeing abnormal behaviour in AI agents. These announcements come as an Omdia study finds that AI agents are a priority for 82% of companies, without security risks being under control.

    Sources: Journal du Net, Silicon.fr, Les Echos, LeMagIT

Figures of the week

  • 40 %

    share of micro-businesses and SMEs using AI solutions

    French micro-businesses and SMEs, 2026, more than 9,000 companies surveyed

    « 40 % des TPE PME utilisent désormais des solutions d’intelligence artificielle, soit 14 points de plus en un an. »

    Direction générale des Entreprises , from Baromètre France Num 2026

  • 4.1 %

    share of Spanish industrial SMEs using AI in 2026

    Spanish industrial SMEs, 2026

    « el 4,1% de las pymes ya utiliza estas tecnologías, lo que refleja un crecimiento sostenido tras pasar del 2,1% en 2024 al 2,9% en 2025 »

    Forbes España , from Barómetro IndesIA 2026

  • 58 %

    share of small employers already using AI agents regularly or occasionally

    US small employers, forthcoming SBE Council survey

    « SBE Council’s forthcoming “Small Business Check Up Survey,” to be released next week, finds that 58% of small employers are already using AI agents regularly or occasionally. »

    Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council , from SBE Council Small Business Check Up Survey

  • 50 %

    share of organisations deriving significant value from AI in 2026

    1,330 executives and senior managers surveyed, 2026

    « près de la moitié des organisations interrogées déclarent tirer une valeur significative de l'IA »

    Le Monde Informatique , from Applied AI Index, Boston Consulting Group

  • 2,670 USD billion

    global AI spending in 2026

    global, 2026

    « Les dépenses mondiales consacrées à l’intelligence artificielle devraient progresser de 49,5 % en 2026, après avoir déjà atteint 1 787 milliards de dollars l’an dernier. »

    IT for Business , from Gartner

  • 67 %

    share of finance departments using at least one AI tool in 2026

    215 finance managers, France, United Kingdom, Germany, United States, 2026

    « 67 % des directions financières interrogées utilisent désormais au moins un outil d’IA. »

    DAF Magazine , from Baromètre des outils CFO 2026, Spendesk / CFO Connect

In France and Spain

France

Beyond the national barometer, several studies shed light on the blind spots of French adoption. According to Robert Half, 67% of recruiters report longer hiring times because of AI-generated applications, and 36% struggle to tell a generated CV from a genuine one. An IBM study highlights that 48% of French companies do not involve their HR director in AI strategy, and 79% of HR directors believe AI creates invisible work for employees. According to SoSafe, more than 90% of professionals use AI at work, compared with 10% two years ago, fuelling a "shadow AI" phenomenon. Bull is investing €80 million to double its supercomputer production in Angers, driven by AI-related demand.

Sources: Silicon.fr (1, 2), Alliancy (1, 2)

Spain

Spanish companies are multiplying initiatives beyond industry. CaixaBank is creating a department dedicated to AI and data and has had its board approve an AI risk management policy, while the banking sector is increasing its technology spending by nearly 16% in 2026. According to Computing, 65% of Spanish chief financial officers now lead their company's AI strategy, and 88% of Spanish lawyers say they use it routinely. A new €600 million public voucher is intended to support adoption by SMEs and the self-employed, while the TeamSystem Observatory finds that 32% of SMEs still find it difficult to use AI safely.

Sources: Computing (1, 2), elEconomista (1, 2, 3), MuyPymes

Internationally

United States

In the United States, business use of AI reached a record level at the end of September, up around 50% since July, according to the Ramp AI Index, driven by price competition between Anthropic and OpenAI. Among small businesses, the SBE Council finds that 58% of employers already use AI agents and 82% have adopted at least one tool, with two thirds reporting revenue gains. In banking, Bank of America puts its annual gains from generative AI at $800 million. McDonald's uses AI to set different prices by restaurant, resulting in differences of up to 21% on the same Big Mac. Microsoft is evolving Copilot into an agentic work platform combining conversation, code and persistent agents.

Sources: Brief IA, Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council, Cinco Días, Xataka, Journal du Net

China

Tencent is renting 100,000 chips from Oracle to speed up its AI push against ByteDance and Alibaba, in the race for computing capacity among Chinese giants. On the OpenRouter platform, Chinese models accounted for 45.5% of usage in August, exceeding the combined total of Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta, according to Xataka, which highlights their role in reducing inference costs for companies.

Sources: Financial Times, Xataka

Rest of the world

In the United Kingdom, start-up ElevenLabs has doubled its valuation to $22 billion, with its voice agents handling more than 15 million conversations per week for companies such as Stripe and Deutsche Telekom. In Belgium, Agoria finds that only 6% of technology companies have integrated AI into their processes, while in Canada the Léger AI Index measures 68% of employees as users but 61% without training. In Argentina, 41.6% of SMEs already use AI according to nadIA, and in Mexico 87% of people use it according to Google Cloud.

Sources: Maddyness, Le Soir, Léger, El Ecosistema Startup, El Cronista

What's changing

Compared with the previous week (132 articles versus 128 this week), quantified studies become the dominant type (30% versus 25%), ahead of announcements, which fall back (20% versus 27%), while regulation drops sharply (2% versus 12%). The keyword "agents ia" moves to the top of mentions (20% versus 6% the previous week), ahead of "pme", which falls (14% versus 19%). The share of articles about mid-sized companies rises slightly (8% versus 6%), and the construction industry appears among the most cited industries (8%), having been absent from the previous week's ranking.

Comparison with the previous week

Method

Digest written on 5 October 2026 by an AI model (Claude Sonnet 5, by Anthropic) from the 128 articles published in the AI watch for 28 September – 4 October 2026. Each paragraph links to the entries it draws on, and every number in the text was found in one of those articles before publication. The figures of the week are given with the exact sentence from the article that provides them. Digest translated from French by Claude Sonnet 5.5.

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