According to the latest report from the Microsoft AI Economy Institute, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) has advanced in nearly all economies during the second quarter of 2026, with South Korea and Saudi Arabia leading the growth. The Global AI Diffusion report, published by the institute for the second quarter of 2026, measures the share of the global population aged 15 to 64 that has used a generative AI product. This data is collected through the institute’s own telemetry, which is aggregated and anonymized. The results are adjusted based on factors such as the market shares of operating systems and devices, internet penetration, and the population of each country. In the second quarter of 2026, 18.8 percent of the global workforce used AI, up from 17.8 percent in the previous quarter. This increase was observed in nearly all economies tracked by the report. The United Arab Emirates (73.3 percent) and Singapore (64.3 percent) continue to lead the ranking. South Korea saw the highest absolute increase, adding 3.5 percentage points compared to the first quarter. This is the third consecutive quarter where South Korea has shown the highest growth, bringing its total increase to nearly 15 percentage points over the past year. France ranks fourth with 49.6 percent of active users, continuing its upward trend in the global ranking, having been fifth with 44 percent in the previous report. The study also highlights a growing gap between northern and southern countries. In northern countries, 28.8 percent of the workforce used AI in the second quarter, up from 27.5 percent in the previous quarter. In southern countries, the share increased from 15.4 percent to 16.2 percent. The gap between the two regions now stands at 12.6 percentage points, compared to 12.1 percentage points in the previous quarter and 10.6 percentage points a year earlier. The uses of AI also differ between the regions. According to an analysis of conversations with Microsoft’s AI assistant, Copilot, self-directed learning is 29 percent more common in southern countries than globally, and school support is 32 percent more common. In northern countries, AI is more frequently used for purchases, information searches, and feedback requests. Microsoft cautions that these results might be partially influenced by the younger population in southern countries. Open weight models, which allow for more flexibility and customization in AI applications, are gaining ground in the AI ecosystem. At the end of 2025, a public analysis by OpenRouter, covering more than 100,000 billion tokens, estimated that these models accounted for about a third of the volume exchanged on the platform. According to a Microsoft analysis of the same data, this share now reaches 75 percent. Furthermore, the adoption of these models has continued to grow beyond the peaks of major AI launches such as those from DeepSeek, Kimi, Qwen, and GPT-OSS, indicating that their use is moving beyond the experimental phase. This trend could particularly benefit southern countries, where open weight models reduce the cost of accessing AI and make it easier to adapt to local languages.