AI in the Netherlands in numbers: what the statistics say

Of the companies that use AI, 35% use it for marketing or sales, 32% for administration or management tasks and 25% for research or innovation (CBS, December 2025).

It varies widely by sector. In information and communication, 70% of companies with 10 or more persons employed used AI in 2025. In hospitality, transport and storage, and construction it was between 16% and 21%. In addition, 10% of all companies considered AI in 2025 but didn't use it (CBS).

Why those companies didn't start, CBS doesn't measure. In our conversations we often hear the same reason: not the technology, but the question of where to begin.

43% of working people use AI in their work. 41% think their own work could partly be taken over by AI, 4% think fully (CBS, February 2026, in Dutch).

Of Dutch people aged 18 and over, 39% said in 2025 that they had used AI in the past three months, for example to create text or images. And 94% of Dutch adults have heard of AI (CBS, AI in de samenleving, in Dutch).

Use is growing fast. In a panel survey by Ruigrok NetPanel, the share of Dutch people who use AI weekly rose from 19% to 40% in one year (fieldwork May and June 2026, 2,311 respondents aged 14 and over). That's commercial panel research, not official statistics (Ruigrok, August 2026, in Dutch).

In the SME Barometer (MKB Barometer) by Exact, 70% of SME owners say in 2026 that they use AI. But 47% don't yet know how to use AI effectively, and use is mainly for text and images (56%). Only 36% use AI for insight into their own business performance. 41% call investing in AI a priority (fieldwork first quarter of 2026, more than 1,700 business owners; Exact, August 2026, in Dutch).

The rules haven't sunk in yet either. In a KVK poll from June 2025 among 651 business owners, self-employed people included, half didn't know the European AI Act, and 2% to 3% were actively preparing for it (KVK, September 2025, in Dutch). What the law asks of your company depends on how you use AI; a lawyer has the final word.

Controlled experiments in customer service, software development and consultancy show average productivity gains of 5% to more than 25%. The effect depends heavily on the task and the user's experience (OECD, 2025). Three well-known studies:

• Customer service. Employees with an AI assistant resolved on average 15% more questions per hour. Less experienced employees gained the most; the most experienced barely got faster (Brynjolfsson, Li and Raymond, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2025, 5,172 employees at one company).
• Writing. Highly educated professionals were 40% faster with ChatGPT on short, job-related writing tasks, and the quality was rated 18% higher. Whether the texts were factually correct, the researchers didn't check (MIT, Science, 2023).
• Consultants. On tasks within AI's capabilities, consultants using GPT-4 completed 12.2% more tasks and worked 25.1% faster. On a task outside them, they were 19 percentage points less likely to get the right answer than colleagues without AI (Dell'Acqua et al., Organization Science, 2026, 758 BCG consultants).

The lesson from that last study matters most: AI makes good work faster, but it also produces convincing wrong work if you put it on the wrong task. That's why a human stays in the loop, and why you first check which tasks are suitable.

The figures tell a clear story. Using AI is no longer a head start: a third of companies do it, and almost half of mid-sized companies. The difference is in what you do with it.

Most organizations get stuck at separate prompts and texts. That's a personal gain: an employee who writes faster. The real gain is in processes that start to run differently, such as requests that process themselves or customer questions with a prepared answer. You can see that gap in the SME Barometer too: 70% of SME owners use AI, but 47% don't yet know how to use it effectively.

To close that gap, you don't need to read research. You need to know which of your processes are suitable and what they deliver. That's what we work out in the AI Quick Scan: one day on site, and within a week a business case and a roadmap. You can start yourself with the free AI self-assessment or the AI savings calculator.

We only show figures whose original source we have found, with the year of measurement. We leave out research commissioned by interested parties. One exception: the SME Barometer from software vendor Exact. We always cite it with its source.

A word of caution when comparing: CBS sometimes measures companies with 2 or more persons employed and sometimes with 10 or more, and Eurostat divides size classes differently from CBS. Don't simply put those figures side by side.

We update this page when new figures come out. Missing a figure, or spotted a mistake? Let us know via contact.