Rate of Israeli businesses using AI double EU average, IDI study finds

27 July 2025, 11:21 am

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Illustration: The OpenAI logo is seen displayed on a cell phone with an image on a computer monitor generated by ChatGPT's Dall-E text-to-image model, December 8, 2023, in Boston. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)

Artificial intelligence is beginning to do work previously performed by humans in some Israeli businesses, an Israel Democracy Institute analysis of a Central Bureau of Statistics survey of AI usage finds.

According to the IDI analysis, 28 percent of businesses in Israel used AI in the past six months — double the EU average in 2024 but lower than Germany’s rate of 44% in 2025.

Among those businesses, 60% say that certain tasks formerly performed by humans are now performed by AI, with 44% saying AI does “routine and technical tasks only,” while 16% say it does “tasks that require thinking.”

At this stage, 9% of businesses say that the use of AI has impacted the number of humans they employ. Within that figure, 5% of businesses say the use of AI has led to a decrease in recruitment, while the rest of the businesses surveyed say that they have shed employees due to AI.

“At this time, replacement of workers by AI is not negligible on the one hand, while on the other hand, it is substantially lower across industries than risk projection studies, but this merely represents one point in time and is likely to change as technology and usage develops,” IDI says in a statement.

“AI use is approximately three times higher in knowledge-intensive industries, led by high tech, than in traditional industries such as manufacturing and trade,” the statement says.