South Africa leads rest of Africa in AI adoption

South Africa is the highest-ranked country on the African continent for adoption of generative AI, according to new data from Microsoft – though the figures also show just how far the continent as a whole is trailing the rest of the world.

Microsoft’s Global AI Diffusion Q1 2026 report (PDF), published by the company’s AI Economy Institute, estimates that 23.1% of South Africa’s working-age population used a generative AI product in the first quarter of 2026, up from 21.1% in the second half of 2025. Microsoft’s data places South Africa 46th of the 147 economies it measures – ahead of every other African country included in the dataset.

The gap to the rest of the continent is wide. The next-highest African economies are Namibia and Botswana, both at about 15%, followed by Egypt at 14.8%. Nigeria sits at 10.1% and Kenya at just 8.7%. Most of sub-Saharan Africa clusters near the bottom of the global table, with Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia and others below 8%.

Microsoft derived its AI diffusion measure from aggregated, anonymised telemetry from its own products, adjusted for differences in operating system and device market share, internet penetration and population. The company conceded that “no single metric is perfect” and described it as the strongest cross-country measure currently available. The figures are therefore Microsoft’s modelled estimates rather than a precise headcount.

The report shows a widening gap between rich and poor economies. Microsoft estimates that AI usage in the Global North reached 27.5% in the first quarter of 2026, up 2.8 percentage points from the second half of 2025, while the Global South rose only 1.3 points to 15.4%. Adoption in the North, in other words, is growing more than twice as fast as in the South.

Foundational constraints

The report attributes the divide to foundational constraints that will be familiar to South African readers: unreliable electricity, limited internet connectivity and gaps in digital skills. Using Microsoft’s figures, the Global North has electricity access of about 98% and internet access of 90%, against 89% and 66%, respectively, in the South. Until those gaps close, the report argues, the benefits of AI will remain unevenly shared.

At the top of the global ranking, the United Arab Emirates leads on 70.1%, followed by Singapore on 63.4%. Microsoft says Asia has become the primary engine of growth, with 12 of the 15 fastest-growing economies since June 2025 located in the region – a surge the report links partly to AI models becoming markedly better at handling Asian languages.

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The report’s clearest evidence of AI’s near-term economic impact is in software development. Microsoft says global “git pushes” – the mechanism by which developers upload code changes – rose 78% year on year, while the number of new code repositories grew 45%.

Activity tied to AI coding agents has grown sharply: merged pull requests associated with such agents rose from about 83 000 in May 2025 to 2.3 million in March 2026, though Microsoft says this captures only a fraction of AI-assisted development.

The report leans heavily on coding tools from Anthropic and OpenAI, and on Microsoft’s own GitHub Copilot, as the drivers of this shift.

Notably, the report pushes back on the idea that AI is eroding demand for developers, at least so far. Citing US Bureau of Labor Statistics data, Microsoft says total US software developer employment reached a record of about 2.2 million in 2025, up 8.5% year on year, with March 2026 running about 4% ahead of a year earlier. It concludes that as AI lowers the cost of building software, organisations respond by building more of it.  – © 2026 NewsCentral Media