During the first quarter of this year, worldwide AI use increased by 1.5 percentage points to 17.8% of the world’s working age population, up from 16.3% in the second half of 2025, information technology firm Microsoft reports.

Intensity of use among economies with the highest rates of AI diffusion also increased, with 26 economies now exceeding 30% of the working age population using AI, shows the Microsoft AI Economy Institute's 'Global AI Diffusion Q1 2026 Trends and Insights' report.

Notable developments in the first quarter included accelerating AI adoption in Asia, driven in part by improving AI capabilities in Asian languages. South Korea, Thailand and Japan saw the greatest movement.

Further, the AI gap between the Global North and South continued to widen, with use now at 27.5% in the North, up from 24.7% in the second half of 2025, and 15.4% in the South, up from 14.1%, the report states.

Adoption in the North is growing more than twice as fast as in the South. This divide reflects the systemic challenges facing the Global South, and underscores the need to address foundational gaps in electricity, connectivity, digital skills and local language access.

Until these gaps are addressed, the benefits of generative AI will remain unevenly distributed, risking a deepening of existing global inequalities, Microsoft says in the report.

Bridging this gap will require access to technology, as well as a focus on building the foundational enablers that allow AI to be meaningfully used in local contexts.

One of the most critical, and often overlooked, barriers is language, as many African languages remain underrepresented in the datasets and models that underpin modern AI systems, limiting who can benefit from these advances, the report points out.

To this end, Microsoft AI for Good Lab is collaborating with the Masakhane African Languages Hub, through the LINGUA Africa initiative, with the aim to accelerate the development of African language AI datasets, models and tools to address the continent’s linguistic under-representation in technology.

By backing community-led language infrastructure with funding, compute credits and expertise, Microsoft is expanding local language access while supporting the diffusion of inclusive, locally relevant AI across Africa, it states.

Despite the gap, Africa is emerging as a powerful force in the global software economy, with an estimated 4.7-million developers as of 2024.

South Africa, with more than 500 000 developers and a growth rate of nearly 15% between 2019 and 2024, ranks alongside Egypt and Nigeria as one of the continent’s largest developer hubs, which reflects the maturity and depth of their established technology ecosystems.

Overall, between 2019 and 2024, Africa’s developer base expanded at a yearly rate of 21%, which is the fastest of any region and creates a strong foundation for participation in an increasingly AI-accelerated future.

AI is also reshaping how software gets built, with developer activity on GitHub reflecting the shift, the report shows.

Over the past year, global Git pushes, through which software developers place coding changes online, rose 78%, and new repositories increased by 45%.

The quarter also brought further evidence that AI coding capabilities may be increasing demand for the employment of software developers. When developer productivity increases, the cost of building software declines.

If demand for software is elastic, organisations can respond by building more software across a wider range of use cases, including across broader economic sectors, the report notes.

Additionally, GitHub pull request activity tied to AI coding agents has surged more than 28 times, with the acceleration coinciding with major model advances including Anthropic's Claude Opus and OpenAI's GPT-5 Codex family, which advanced real-world software engineering.

Further, GitHub's Copilot evolved into a broader AI coding platform with multi-model support and autonomous coding agents. Copilot, and other AI coding tools like Claude Code and Codex, are now active participants in the software development lifecycle, the report shows.

Meanwhile, the United Arab Emirates continued to lead global AI diffusion at 70.1% and is one of ten, of the 147 economies measured, that now have AI use above 40%, which places them in a leading cohort of high AI-adoption economies.

AI adoption continued to accelerate in the first quarter of this year, but the benefits are spreading unevenly.

The clearest sign of AI’s near-term economic impact is software development, where new coding models and agentic tools are dramatically increasing code production, repository creation, and AI-assisted development activity.

Together, these trends suggest that AI diffusion is entering a new phase, namely a broader, faster, and more practical phase, but also one that requires deliberate action to ensure its benefits are shared globally.

“Our latest AI Diffusion report findings show that AI is moving rapidly from experimentation to practical, everyday use, but the benefits are not yet evenly shared.

“For South Africa, the rise in local AI use to more than 23% is encouraging progress, but our position globally underscores the urgency of investing in digital infrastructure and skills,” says Microsoft South Africa commercial solutions and AI officer Ravi Bhat.

“We view this phase of AI growth as an opportunity to help ensure AI supports inclusive growth, innovation, and long‑term competitiveness across South Africa’s economy,” he says.

South Africa currently ranks forty-sixth out of the 147 economies measured for the report, and its AI use increased by two percentage points to 23.1% in first quarter of the year, up from 21.1% in the second half of 2025.