EU enterprises are increasingly adopting digitalization across their activities with 59 percent reaching at least a basic level of digital intensity in 2023. The latest release from Eurostat reveals that 58 percent of small and medium-sized enterprises across the EU reached a basic level of digital intensity or greater last year, while the share for large enterprises was significantly higher at 91 percent.
The EU’s Digital Intensity Index (DII) measures the digitalization of enterprises using 12 digital technology measures including AI technology, social media, cloud computing, customer relationship management (CRM), or having e-commerce sales accounting for at least 1 percent of total turnover. “At least a basic level of digital intensity” entails the use of at least four of those digital technologies.
Basic level of digital intensity targets
According to one of the targets of the digital decade, more than 90 percent of EU SMEs should reach at least a basic level of digital intensity by 2030. Last year, small and medium-sized enterprises across the EU were 32 percentage points away from the digital decade 2030 goal.
The report also reveals that 4.4 percent of EU SMEs reached a very high level of digitalization while 19.6 percent reached a high level. Most SMEs recorded low (33.8 percent) or very low (42.3 percent) digital intensity levels.
Finland emerged as the EU country with the highest level of enterprises reaching a very high level of digitalization at 13 percent. Following closely came Malta at 11.4 percent and the Netherlands at 11 percent.
Meanwhile, the EU countries with the most enterprises having a very low digitalization level were Romania at 72.1 percent, Bulgaria at 70.6 percent, and Greece at 56.2 percent.
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AI adoption among EU enterprises
In another report, Eurostat revealed that 8 percent of enterprises in the EU with 10 or more employees used AI technologies to conduct their business in 2023. The highest shares of enterprises with 10 or more employees using AI technologies were in Denmark, Finland and Luxembourg. Meanwhile, the lowest shares were in Romania, Bulgaria, Poland and Hungary.
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