What happened
The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (University of Oxford) published its annual nine-country survey of generative-AI use, trust, and news consumption, fielded in Argentina, Australia, Denmark, Finland, France, Japan, Norway, the UK, and the USA. It reports weekly use of standalone gen-AI systems has risen from 34% last year to 51% in 2026 in the six countries with prior data, and daily use nearly doubled year-on-year from 16% to 28%. Getting information is now the dominant use case (38% weekly, up from 24% in 2025 and 11% in 2024), and 'researching a topic' (24%) outpaces answering factual questions (18%). ChatGPT remains the leader (34% weekly use, +12pp), while Gemini grew to 24% and Claude to 7%. Importantly for enterprise adoption, 67% of respondents still did not use an AI agent in the last week, and only 14% used one for a real task. Methodology: representative national surveys across nine countries, with year-over-year tracking in six; follows the institute's 2024 and 2025 waves.
Why it matters
This is the most authoritative cross-country evidence this week on consumer-side generative-AI adoption and agentic-AI readiness, providing benchmark adoption and trust figures against which executives can calibrate their own AI-deployment assumptions.
Action needed
Use the report's adoption-trajectory data (51% weekly / 28% daily use) to recalibrate any near-term customer- or workforce-facing AI projections, and note the low agentic-AI usage for realistic roadmaps.