Eurostat: Close to 9% of businesses in Bulgaria use AI

In 2025, about 8.55 per cent of enterprises in Bulgaria with 10 or more employees were using artificial intelligence (AI) techologies to conduct their business, the third-lowest percentage in the European Union, EU statistics agency Eurostat said on December 11.

The figure for Bulgaria is up from 3.61 per cent in 2023 and 6.47 per cent in 2024.

In 2025, 20 per cent of EU enterprises with 10 or more employees used AI technologies to conduct their business, showing a solid growth of 6.5 percentage points (pp) from 13.5 per cent in 2024, Eurostat said.

Compared with 2021 (7.7 per cent) and 2023 (8.1 per cent), the use of AI technologies is becoming more popular among EU businesses, the statistics agency said.

The highest shares of these enterprises in 2025 were in Denmark (42 per cent), Finland (37.8 per cent) and Sweden (35.0 per cent). At the other end were Romania (5.2 per cent), Poland (8.4 per cent) and Bulgaria (8.5 per cent).

Almost all EU countries recorded increases in the share of enterprises using AI technologies compared with the previous year. Denmark registered the highest increase (+14.5 pp), followed by Finland (+13.5 pp) and Lithuania (+12.5 pp).

The most common use of AI technology by EU enterprises was to analyse written language (11.8 per cent). This was followed by AI use to generate pictures, videos, sound/audio (9.5 per cent), written or spoken language (8.8 per cent) and to convert spoken language into machine-readable format (7.2 per cent).

Compared with 2024, the use of AI technology that grew the most in 2025 was analysing written language (+4.9 pp), followed by the generation of written or spoken language (+3.4 per cent), Eurostat said.

(Main photo: André Rainaud/ freeimages.com)