FRANKFURT, June 24 (Reuters) – Only a small fraction of euro zone firms use artificial intelligence intensely and they tend \u200cto be small, young, service-oriented companies, leaving plenty of \u200croom for diffusion, a European Central Bank blog post said on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
The vast \u200bmajority of firms now say they have been using AI but economists have been debating just how intense this use is and whether it can yield the sort of efficiency gains that are \u200crelevant on a macroeconomic \u2060level.<\/p>\n
Surveying more than 5,000 companies across the bloc, the ECB found that over 70% report using AI \u2060and much of the rest plan to start this year. But use is moderate or infrequent and only 7% use AI intensely, the \u200bsurvey \u200bfound.<\/p>\n
“The intensive use that drives transformation \u200band generates macroeconomic gains \u200cremains rare,” the authors, all ECB researchers, said, in a post that does not necessarily represent the ECB’s views.<\/p>\n
Intense use is skewed towards smaller companies with large firms clearly lagging behind, the survey results showed. Younger firms also used AI more intensely than \u200colder companies and use was skewed towards \u200bhigh-tech, knowledge-intensive services.<\/p>\n
“Firms at an early \u200bstage of adoption often \u200bcite cost reductions and improvements in operational efficiency \u200cas their main reasons for using \u200bit,” the blog \u200bsaid. “Intensive users are more frequently motivated by growth and innovation.”<\/p>\n
Firms tend to invest in AI when their competitors do, succumbing \u200bto peer pressure, \u200cand intensive users spend heavily on customised solutions that \u200bgo well beyond just purchasing licences, the blog said.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by \u200bBalazs KoranyiEditing by Tomasz Janowski)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"FRANKFURT, June 24 (Reuters) – Only a small fraction of euro zone firms use artificial intelligence intensely and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":84369,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,25,45562,21378,36697,671],"class_list":["post-84368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-euro-zone","tag-european-central-bank","tag-firms","tag-operational-efficiency"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84368\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/84369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}