Report shows steady, yet uneven, AI adoption across US
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By
Chris Teale
Microsoft said the lag can be attributed to urban adoption being double what it is in rural areas, though college towns are another powerful diffuser of the technology.
Residents in Maryland, Utah and Texas are among the biggest adopters of artificial intelligence in the U.S., but concerns remain about the tech’s uneven growth in rural areas compared to urban areas, according to a report released last week.
Microsoft found in its AI Diffusion Index that 36.3% of Maryland’s residents aged between 15 and 64 have used a generative AI product, based on adjusted company data and population. That’s just ahead of Utah (35.7%), Texas (35.3%), Virginia (34.7%) and New Jersey (34.5%). Nationally, Microsoft found that 31.3% of working-age Americans use AI tools.
But the report notes that adoption is uneven, especially between metropolitan and rural areas. Microsoft found a 16.7 percentage point gap between AI diffusion in urban (32.9%) and rural (16.2%) areas, a divide the report says, “stands out most clearly.”
And Microsoft found that residents of college towns are adopting AI the fastest. Among counties and county-equivalent areas with at least 10,000 residents, each of the top 15 counties by AI user share has a college or university, the report says. Williamsburg, Virginia, which is home to the College of William and Mary, led the way with a 73.2% AI user share, with 36.2% of its residents ages 18 to 24.
Harrisonburg, Virginia, home to James Madison University, came second at 67.5%, followed by Madison County, Idaho, home to Brigham Young University-Idaho, which ranks third at 67.2%, with 46.4% of residents between the ages of 18 and 24.
“Taken together, these findings show that AI diffusion in the United States is broad, but uneven,” the report says. “It is moving fastest in places with strong digital infrastructure, younger populations, and knowledge-intensive economies. It is moving more slowly in many rural and small town communities. As AI becomes a more important tool for work, education, and economic opportunity, understanding these differences will be important to helping more communities benefit from the next wave of technological change.”
The uneven adoption of AI, how it will spread throughout urban and rural areas and the technology’s potential effects on the future workforce continue to trouble state and local leaders. Researchers at the Brookings Institution asserted in July 2025 that the usual cities and metropolitan areas will dominate in making use of the technology, but that adoption will be uneven.
Microsoft used data collected anonymously from devices across the country to reach these initial conclusions, said Juan Lavista Ferres, the company’s chief data scientist and head of its AI for Good Lab. While there is an option for device users to opt out, many do not, so Microsoft could collect information on the usage of various AI models in the U.S. and around the world. By combining that data with information about device penetration, the composition between mobile and desktop, and the levels of internet connectivity, the company could extrapolate all that data and come to these conclusions.
Identifying the divide between rural and urban AI users was the “first aha moment for us,” Lavista Ferres said, adding that it may be partly due to a lack of trust in the technology in rural areas and also due to demographic differences, but is difficult to ascertain for sure.
“Right now, we are only seeing correlation,” he said. “We don't fully understand causation at this point, so we have hypotheses, we cannot explain some of these things. We know they correlate.”
Similarly, the company will look to dig in more on the state-level data to determine why, for example, some are further ahead on AI adoption than others, even though the differences in adoption rates are for now relatively small. The presence of more cities with more white-collar jobs might also explain why some states are ahead of others, Lavista Ferres said.
Microsoft intends to carry out a similar study in three months, he said, to understand how these trends evolve and especially to see how AI usage drops in college towns during the summer months, when schools are not in session. The company also will deepen its collaboration with LinkedIn and GitHub to understand the talent pool and other drivers in specific areas, all with a view to doing what he called “deeper dives” on how technology uptake is unfolding.