More Dutch businesses using AI, mainly text mining and language generation

Last year, 22.7 percent of Dutch companies with 10 or more employees used one or more artificial intelligence technologies, almost 9 percent more compared to the year before. They mainly used text mining (13.5 percent) and natural language generation (12.3 percent), Statistics Netherlands (CBS) reported in its AI monitor 2024.

The use of text mining, the analysis of written texts, more than doubled compared to a year earlier. Dutch companies’ use of natural language generation, generating written or spoken text, was even three times higher in 2024 than in 2023. The use of speech recognition increased from 3.7 percent in 2023 to 6.5 percent last year.

It is mainly large companies in the information and communication industry that use AI. Last year, 59.2 percent of companies with 500 or more employees used AI in some form, compared to 17.8 percent of companies with 10 to 19 employees.

58 percent of companies in the information and communication industry used AI last year, compared to 37.0 percent a year earlier. Companies in specialist business services (39.8 percent) and financial services (37.4 percent) also used AI relatively often. AI use was lowest in the construction (8.9 percent) and hospitality (9.0 percent) sectors.

For companies that had considered using AI but decided against it, “lack of experience” was the main reason (74.6 percent). “This was true for companies across all size classes and industries,” CBS said. Privacy concerns also played a role, with over half of companies with 100 or more employees citing this as the reason not to use AI technology.

In European terms, the Netherlands is in sixth place when it comes to AI use by its businesses. The use of AI technologies is only more common in Denmark (27.6 percent), Sweden (25.1 percent), Belgium (24.7 percent), Finland (24.4 percent), and Luxembourg (23.7 percent). The EU-27 average is 13.5 percent of companies using AI in 2024.