AI use in EU strategic sectors more than doubles to 18% in four years, JRC finds

The share of firms using artificial intelligence in the European Union's ten strategic economic sectors grew from 7% in 2021 to 18% in 2025, according to an analysis published by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) on 14 October 2026.

Sector by sector

The JRC drew on Eurostat's ICT enterprise survey data collected between 2021 and 2025, covering sectors from agri-food to defence to energy. According to the report:

• Media and the cultural and creative sectors lead adoption, with 38% of firms using AI.
• Energy firms grew from 18% to 34%, and electronic-communications firms from 12% to 30%.
• Mobility, tourism and agri-food lag behind, where AI use is "still confined to marketing, sales, and other accessible tasks."
• Across the whole EU economy, beyond the ten strategic sectors, adoption rose more modestly, from 8% in 2021 to 20% in 2025.

The JRC said the growth was "driven mainly by accessible, general-purpose AI" — tools that analyse or generate text, code, images, sound and video — rather than deeper integration into production processes. It identified a shortage of specialised skills and "regulatory uncertainty, including concerns about data protection and privacy" as the dominant bottlenecks to wider adoption across most sectors.

Why it matters

The report gives Brussels a sector-by-sector baseline for the Apply AI Strategy, the Commission programme launched a year earlier to push AI uptake into core business processes rather than one-off marketing tools. The JRC found that capital-intensive sectors such as energy and electronics are adopting faster than labour-intensive ones, a divide that will sound familiar to energy-exporting economies in the Caspian region as they weigh how to push AI adoption beyond their own capital-intensive core industries.