Less than four in ten people in Switzerland use generative AI tools regularly.

I was on holiday, away from any client work, in a region where AI barely shows up in daily life. No ambient use of it, no assumed familiarity, none of the background I'm used to here. Working in AI adoption for a living, you start to believe the world caught up already. It hasn't. Not even the part of it I live in. But as this is my perspective, I searched some data that could confirm this perception:

Microsoft's latest AI Diffusion data has global generative AI use at 17.8% of the working-age population this quarter. Switzerland comes in well above that, at 37.8%, more than double the global rate, and still under four in ten people.

The gap between high-adoption and low-adoption regions isn't closing either. The Global North sits at 27.5%, the Global South at 15.4%, and that gap widened from 10.6 to 12.1 points in a single quarter. GROWING, not shrinking.

From my perspective, a workshop pitched at "everyone already knows the basics" alienates half the room. A rollout plan that assumes comfort with AI wastes budget on tools nobody's ready to use. This is exactly why my work with teams starts with AI adoption training, not tool rollouts. I'd rather find out where a team actually stands before I decide what they need.

Where is your team on this, really? Not where you assume they are.

PS: a week with barely any AI around me was a good reset, recommending it, even to someone who works in this every day 😊.

Here is the link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Microsoft-AI-Diffusion-Report-2026-Q1.pdf