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Weekly digest ·

AI adoption is growing, while the gap between SMEs and large companies persists in Europe

The Banco de España confirms a persistent gap in Spain between large companies (70% AI adoption) and SMEs (30 to 35%), while in France Insee measures a rise from 10% to 18% in the share of companies using AI, but a marked training deficit. Several studies (Gartner, Red Hat) show that rapid AI adoption is not always accompanied by governance or a measurable return on investment. In the United States, Microsoft has launched a voluntary departure plan targeting 60,000 employees, alongside its massive investments in AI.

Key developments

  1. Spain: the adoption gap between large companies and SMEs remains stable

    According to a Banco de España study based on the EBAE survey and the Central de Balances Integrada, 70% of large Spanish companies use AI, compared with 30 to 35% of SMEs, a gap that has remained stable since 2024. SME usage has doubled in two years but remains well below that of large companies. Large companies anticipate greater gains in productivity (61% versus 27% for SMEs), training (79% versus 35%) and specialist recruitment (62% versus 17%). The effect on employment remains limited for 89% of companies that have adopted AI, but 24% of large companies expect headcount reductions, against 18% expecting an increase.

    Sources: Demócrata (1, 2, 3), Forbes España, La Vanguardia, El Nacional.cat, elEconomista, Economía 3, El Español

  2. The return on investment of AI remains hard to demonstrate

    Several studies agree on the difficulty of turning AI adoption into measurable results. According to Gartner, only 13% of CIOs see significant or transformational value, and only 3% of companies exceed their savings targets, while 97% fail to meet them, even as 38% are already over their AI budget. Another Gartner study shows that only 21% of the time freed up by automation is reallocated to creative tasks, and 78% of HR directors surveyed have no shared view of the value created by AI. In the United States, a study of more than 600 listed companies shows that three-quarters have invested in AI without gaining a stock market return premium over their competitors.

    Sources: IT for Business, Brief IA, El Español, Harvard Business Review

  3. In Spain, high confidence but limited real control over AI agents

    A Red Hat study of 1,400 CIOs in 14 countries shows that in Spain autonomous AI agents are already present in 100% of the organisations surveyed and that 85% of CIOs say they are confident in their security, while only 30% know precisely how their data flows, 22% have full visibility of their software supply chain and 28% continuously assess the risks linked to their AI suppliers. The study puts France at 31% full visibility of data flows, against 61% in South Africa. Red Hat links this gap to the proliferation of agents without a clear identity or oversight.

    Sources: Revista Byte TI, Computerworld España, IT User, Channel Partner, Computing, Europa Press

  4. France: usage is up, but training remains insufficient

    In France, Insee reports that 18% of companies with ten or more employees used at least one AI technology in 2025, up from 10% a year earlier, with the main obstacles being a lack of expertise (53%) and concerns about data protection (43%). A YouGov survey for Microsoft France indicates that 80% of business leaders use generative AI every week, but that more than seven in ten managers have received no training. A Cognizant Research study shows that 80% of employees would like to use AI more than their role allows, while a Jabra study reports that a third of millennials and 22% of Generation Z have received no AI training from their company.

    Sources: Journal du Net, Maddyness, Comarketing-News, LeMagIT (1, 2)

  5. Microsoft launches a voluntary departure plan for 60,000 employees

    Microsoft has launched a voluntary departure plan targeting up to 60,000 employees, around 27% of its workforce, in the United States, Canada, India and the United Kingdom, to absorb the $41 billion of hardware investment committed to AI in the last quarter. The company also spent up to $175 billion on AI infrastructure this year, while Azure grew by 48%. According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, announced tech layoffs in the United States have reached 165,925 since January, up 54% year on year; around 21% of them are said to be attributed to AI although the cuts had already been decided, according to Sam Altman.

    Sources: Le Figaro, Les Echos, Financial Times, La Tribune, Siècle Digital, LeMagIT, Xataka

Figures of the week

  • 18 %

    share of companies with 10 or more employees using at least one AI technology in 2025

    France, companies with 10 or more employees, 2025

    « D'après l'Insee (Insee Première n° 2120, juillet 2026), 18 % des entreprises de 10 salariés ou plus déclaraient utiliser au moins une technologie d'IA en 2025, contre 10 % un an plus tôt. »

    Journal du Net , from Insee Première n° 2120, juillet 2026

  • 32.5 %

    Share of Spanish SMEs using AI

    SMEs, Spain (range 30-35%)

    « Entre un 30% y un 35% de las pequeñas y medianas empresas en el Estado utilizan la inteligencia artificial »

    El Nacional.cat , from Banco de España

  • 13 %

    Share of CIOs seeing significant or transformational value from AI for their company

    2,000 CIOs and IT leaders surveyed between May and July 2026

    « Seuls 13 % des répondants déclarent que leur organisation a déjà tiré de l’IA une valeur significative ou transformationnelle. »

    IT for Business , from Gartner, enquête 2027 auprès de 2000 DSI

  • 75 %

    Share of the US public companies studied that have invested in AI and moved beyond the pilot stage

    More than 600 US public companies

    « A study of more than 600 U.S. public companies found that roughly three-quarters have invested in AI and moved beyond pilots but have yet to earn a shareholder-return premium over industry peers. »

    Harvard Business Review

  • 5.3 %

    Share of OECD companies (10 or more employees) using AI for the security of their IT systems in 2025

    Companies with 10 or more employees, OECD area, 2025

    « En 2025, 5,3 % des entreprises de l’OCDE (10 salariés et plus) déclaraient l’utiliser pour la sécurité de leurs systèmes, soit environ un quart des entreprises utilisatrices d’IA. »

    Bpifrance , from OCDE, base de données sur l'accès et l'usage des TIC

In France and Spain

France

Beyond the training gaps already noted, the OECD reports that in 2025 only 5.3% of companies use AI for the security of their systems, compared with 26.7% of companies with 250 or more employees and 3.7% of companies with 10 to 49 employees. A Delinea survey of 2,254 IT managers shows that only about half check in real time that access policies for AI agents are being applied. Orange Cyberdefense is partnering with Mistral AI to develop cybersecurity agents based on Mistral Large 4. An investigation into the French administration finds AI tools being developed in an uncoordinated way, with widely varying costs and effectiveness.

Sources: Bpifrance, Journal du Net, La Tribune, Silicon.fr, BFM Business, L'Usine Digitale, Challenges

Spain

The IndesIA barometer, which analyses 131,554 pymes using identifiable digital signals, puts visible AI usage at 4.1% in 2026 against 2.1% in 2024, a more restrictive scope than that of the Banco de España. The Superior Court of Justice of Madrid ruled that a redundancy plan cannot be justified by the use of AI alone, without another economic reason. A study by the Institut d’Economia de Barcelona observes a slight rise in unemployment in the occupations most exposed to AI, notably programmers. The Mapa del Emprendimiento 2026 reports that 26.5% of Spanish startups are now founded by a single person.

Sources: Europa Press, Revista Cloud Computing, La Ecuación Digital, El Ecosistema Startup, Xataka (1, 2), Emprendedores, IT User

Internationally

United States

Beyond the headcount reductions at Microsoft, Anthropic reports in its IPO filing revenue of $6.6 million per employee over the twelve months to the end of September, compared with $1.4 million a year earlier, a ratio close to Nvidia's ($7.2 million) and well ahead of Microsoft's ($1.5 million). Tech layoffs have reached nearly 197,000 since January according to Trueup. Amazon says it has more than a million robots in its distribution network, intended, according to its CEO, to replace the most repetitive tasks without reducing overall employment, while the company records negative cash flow of $42.4 billion linked to its AI investments. Oracle is expanding its partnership with OpenAI to connect ChatGPT to its applications.

Sources: Xataka (1, 2), Cinco Días, Brief IA, MIT Sloan Management Review

China

In China, the large technology companies ByteDance, Tencent and Alibaba are offering up to one million yuan a year, around €134,000, to engineers responsible for adapting AI to customers' practical needs (forward-deployed engineers), a salary four to ten times higher than the industry average according to official Chinese figures. Searches for this profile have risen by 1,523% in seven months according to Maimai. The same profile is also sought in the United States by Google, OpenAI and Anthropic, which is investing $100 million to train 10,000 of them.

Sources: Xataka

Rest of the world

In the Netherlands, the government plans to use AI to cut its civil service workforce by 16% by 2035, or 25,000 posts. In the United Kingdom, an independent audit by Grant Thornton shows that Capita did not deliver the promised automation for the management of pensions for 1.7 million civil servants, causing payment delays and blocked files. In India, IT service providers now derive 10% of their revenue from helping clients integrate AI. In Latin America, venture capital dedicated to AI startups almost doubled in the first half of the year, rising from $165 million to $327 million.

Sources: Le Figaro, Siècle Digital, IT for Business, Financial Times, El Cronista

What's changing

Over the last five weeks, the share of data-based studies in the AI watch has risen from 16% (week of 19 to 25 October) to 27% this week, while the share of announcements fell from 35% to 27%. The share concerning SMEs is back up to 24%, after 17% the previous week, a level close to that seen at the end of September (27%). The banking-insurance-finance departments industry, which accounted for 21% of articles the previous week, falls back to 13%, a level comparable to the early October weeks. The keyword “Spain” remains present in 8% of articles, as in the previous week, after 5% in the three weeks before that.

Comparison with the previous 4 weeks

Method

Digest written on 2 November 2026 by an AI model (Claude Sonnet 5, by Anthropic) from the 209 articles published in the AI watch for 26 October – 1 November 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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