TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Pulito, Giuseppe
AU  - Pytlikova, Mariola
AU  - Schroeder, Sarah
AU  - Lodefalk, Magnus
        TI  - Who Adopts AI? Evidence on Firms, Technologies and Workers
        PY  - 2026/Mar/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 18515
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/publications/dp18515
        AB  - Using surveys of Danish firms and individuals linked to employer–employee administrative data, we analyze AI adoption across technologies, business functions, and workers. We show that AI adoption is driven primarily by firm capacities rather than performance. Adoption is strongly associated with firm size, digital infrastructure, and workforce composition, particularly education and STEM intensity, while productivity and capital intensity explain little of the variation. Conditional on AI adoption, larger and more digitally mature firms deploy advanced technologies more broadly. Moreover, AI technologies diffuse across multiple business functions while other advanced technologies remain function-specific. Individual-level evidence mirrors these patterns and points towards workforce readiness as a key determinant of AI adoption.  Finally, commonly used occupational AI exposure measures vary substantially in their ability to predict actual adoption, with benchmark-based measures outperforming patent-based and LLM-focused alternatives. These findings show that treating AI as a monolithic category obscures economically meaningful variation in who adopts, what they deploy, and how well existing measures capture it.
        KW  - Artificial Intelligence
KW  - technology adoption
KW  - digitalisation
KW  - human capital
KW  - AI exposure measures
        ER  -