Machine Learning Adoption Rates Around the World

Buffer

A worldwide survey of data professionals showed that adoption of machine learning methods in their company is 45%. Twenty-one percent of survey respondents said their employer is exploring ML methods. ML adoption rates varied by country with Israel (63%), Netherlands (57%) and the United States (56%) showing the highest and Egypt (31%), Morocco (24%) and Nigeria (23%) showing the lowest adoption rate. ML adoption also varied by company size, with larger companies having higher adoption rates (61%) than medium (45%) and small (33%) companies.

Businesses are leveraging the power of machine learning methods to help them extract better quality information, increase productivity, reduce costs and extract more value from their data. As the amount of data continues to grow along with the processing power of technology, businesses will continue to incorporate ML into their business. Researchers have found different AI / ML adoption rates. In one study, adoption rate of ML Methods was 10%; in a 2020 study by McKinsey, adoption rate of AI was 50%. Still, another study found that 42% of companies were currently using AI and 40% of companies were planning on using AI in the next two years. Another 2020 study found that 59% of enterprises have machine learning initiatives either in production or at a proof-of-concept stage.

Current Analysis on Machine Learning Adoption

Kaggle conducted a worldwide survey in October 2020 of 20,036 data professionals (2020 Kaggle Machine Learning and Data Science Survey). The survey sample consisted of data professionals, including men (~79%) and women (~19%), from a variety of job titles (e.g., data scientist, business analyst, machine learning engineer, software developer) and company sizes. The survey asked a variety of questions, including “Does your current employer incorporate machine learning methods into their business?”

Figure 1. Machine Learning Adoption Rates across Countries. Click image to enlarge.

Machine Learning Adoption by Country

Results of the survey appear in Figure 1 for the overall sample as well as countries that have 50 or more respondents. Overall, results show that the adoption rate of machine learning methods is 45%. Twenty-one percent of respondents indicate their company is exploring ML methods. Twenty percent of respondents indicate their company does not use ML methods.

Countries that are early adopters of ML methods include:

1. Israel (63% adopt ML)
2. Netherlands (57%)
3. United States (56%)
4. UK and Northern Ireland (54%)
5. Germany (54%)
6. Australia (53%)
7. France (52%)
8. China (52%)
9. Taiwan (51%)
10. Greece (49%)

Countries with the lowest adoption rate of ML methods include:

1. Nigeria (23% adopt ML)
2. Morocco (24%)
3. Egypt (31%)
4. Philippines (31%)
5. Argentina (32%)

Countries with the highest percent of companies exploring ML methods include:

1. Chile (36% are exploring ML methods)
2. Sweden (35%)
3. Malaysia (32%)
4. South Korea (31%)
5. Peru (29%)

Figure 2. Adoption of ML Methods Across Company Size

Machine Learning Adoption by Company Size

We also looked at adoption rates by company size. Those results appear in Figure 2. Supporting prior studies, we found that larger companies have higher adoption rates about ML methods. The largest enterprise companies (10,000+ employees) reported ML adoption rates of 61%. The smallest companies (0-49 employees) reported adoption rates of 33%. Of the smallest companies, a little over a quarter of them (27%) indicate that they are exploring the use of ML methods.

Summary

Survey of data professionals showed that adoption rates of machine learning methods among businesses is 45%. About 21% of respondents indicated that their company is exploring machine learning methods with the hope of putting a model into production one day.

ML adoption rate varies by country and company size. Survey results reveal that early adopters come from large enterprise companies (adoption rate of 61%) and some countries including the United States, Israel, Netherlands and the UK and Northern Ireland.

Machine learning vendors, looking for inroads into businesses, could focus their marketing and sales efforts on small businesses as they have the highest percentage of companies who are exploring the use of ML methods.