Who Adopts AI? Evidence on Firms, Technologies and Workers

Giuseppe Pulito (), Mariola Pytlikova, Sarah Schroeder and Magnus Lodefalk ()
Additional contact information
Giuseppe Pulito: ROCKWOOL Foundation Berlin
Magnus Lodefalk: Orebro University, Ratio Institute, GLO

No 18515, IZA Discussion Papers from IZA Network @ LISER

Abstract: Using surveys of Danish firms and individuals linked to employer–employee administrative data, we analyze AI adoption across technologies, business functions, and workers. We show that AI adoption is driven primarily by firm capacities rather than performance. Adoption is strongly associated with firm size, digital infrastructure, and workforce composition, particularly education and STEM intensity, while productivity and capital intensity explain little of the variation. Conditional on AI adoption, larger and more digitally mature firms deploy advanced technologies more broadly. Moreover, AI technologies diffuse across multiple business functions while other advanced technologies remain function-specific. Individual-level evidence mirrors these patterns and points towards workforce readiness as a key determinant of AI adoption. Finally, commonly used occupational AI exposure measures vary substantially in their ability to predict actual adoption, with benchmark-based measures outperforming patent-based and LLM-focused alternatives. These findings show that treating AI as a monolithic category obscures economically meaningful variation in who adopts, what they deploy, and how well existing measures capture it.

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence; technology adoption; digitalisation; human capital; AI exposure measures (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D24 J23 J62 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-lma and nep-sbm
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Related works:
Working Paper: Who Adopts AI? Evidence on Firms, Technologies and Worker (2026)
Working Paper: Who Adopts AI? Evidence on Firms, Technologies and Workers (2026)
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