Six out of ten companies with ten or more employees using artificial intelligence continue in experimentation, with only 6% having integrated it significantly, according to a panel of technology executives in Madrid.
The 60% of Spanish companies with ten or more employees using artificial intelligence (AI) remains in the experimentation phase, while only 6% report significant use. This was highlighted at the 'Global Trends 2026' conference, organised by AmChamSpain in Madrid, as reported by notimerica.com.
On the panel titled 'The global AI race: where is Spain?', participants included the vice president and country manager Iberia of Google, Lino Cattaruzzi; the vice president and president for Spain and Portugal of HP, Inés Bermejo; the senior vice president for Spain of Oracle, Albert Triola; and the country manager Iberia of Anthropic, Cristina Pitarch. The session was moderated by the general director of DigitalES, Miguel Sánchez Galindo.
Participants emphasised that Spain has a very high-capacity network coverage reaching 95% of households and 86.3% of rural areas, compared to the European rural average of 58.8%. Additionally, the country has 55.5% of renewable electricity generation and 301 edge computing nodes, making it the third largest park in Europe and attracting computing capacity.
Despite these infrastructures, the adoption of AI is progressing at a slower pace. In 2025, 20.3% of Spanish companies with ten or more employees were using AI, almost double that of the previous year, according to Eurostat. However, data from the Bank of Spain shows that most have not yet incorporated it into their processes or decisions.
The implementation gap widens according to company size: in the European Union, AI usage drops from 55% in large corporations to 17% in SMEs with 10 to 49 employees.
During the session, four key areas were addressed: how to ensure that investment in infrastructure leads to economic and R&D activity; how to reduce administrative friction and deployment timelines; how to promote adoption in small and medium-sized enterprises; and what regulatory predictability measures companies request from the Public Administration.
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