A framework to chart AI progress

Source: Microsoft's AI Diffusion Technical Report, AI for Good Lab. AI diffusion by economy.

Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab released fresh data on AI usage in late October. According to the AI Diffusion Report, there are three complementary forces of diffusion that every transformative technology advances through, showing who is building AI, and who can benefit from it: 

- The AI Frontier Index– where breakthroughs are created

Frontier builders are the inventors and pioneers who push the boundaries of what is possible. In AI, these are the researchers and model creators expanding the limits of intelligence. 

- The AI Infrastructure Index – where capacity to build and scale exists

Infrastructure builders are the the engineers, entrepreneurs, and institutions who scale breakthroughs through networks, tools, and skills. In AI, infrastructure builders provide the compute and connectivity that make large-scale intelligence possible.

- The AI Diffusion Index – where AI is used to improve lives.

The diffusion occurs with individuals, companies, and governments which use, adapt and apply new technologies to solve real-world problems. 

Ultimately, the value of AI will be judged not by the number of models produced, but by the extent to which they benefit society, the report's authors said. 

History teaches that progress accelerates when all three forces evolve together, the authors added. As an example, Edison built the light bulb, but it took power grids and everyday users to make electricity universal. The same holds true for AI. 

The research found that AI adoption in the Global North is roughly twice that of the Global South, with the gap widening sharply in countries where GDP per capita falls below US$20,000.

The UAE (59.4%) and Singapore (58.6%) lead in AI use among working-age adults, reflecting their long-term investment in digital connectivity and skills. In other regions, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia, adoption in many countries remains below 10%. 

The divide is attributable not only to access to AI tools; it reflects wider disparities in infrastructure, education, and language. Nations where low-resource languages dominate—like Laos—show lower adoption even after adjusting for GDP and Internet access. 

From a frontier builder perspective, the number of AI models continues to rise, while the performance gap between them keeps narrowing. The US, led by OpenAI’s GPT-5, remains at the frontier, with China trailing by less than six months. Only seven countries—including China and South Korea—rank among the top 200 models, and the distance between the frontier (US) and the last of these (Israel) is now 11 months. 

From an infrastructure builder perspective, the US and China together host 86% of global data centre capacity, underscoring how concentrated the foundation of AI remains, the report's authors noted. 

Strong infrastructure, education, and policy coordination can drive rapid adoption even without frontier-level model development or necessarily data centres, the authors concluded.  

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Read the report at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/group/aiei/ai-diffusion/