What happened
El País reports that 38% of residents in Spain regularly use generative AI, with private consultations the most common use. The article says 30% use it personally, while 18% use it at work and 16.2% for education, citing INE and Eurostat data. A UGT report argues that access remains sharply unequal by age, income, gender, education and employment status.
El País reports, citing Spain’s National Statistics Institute and Eurostat, that 38% of residents regularly use generative AI. Personal consultations account for 30% of reported use, nearly twice the 18% who use AI at work and above the 16.2% who use it for education. The article presents these figures as the latest available survey results, but the supplied source does not include the underlying tables or independent verification.
The article also describes a UGT report titled “Digital divide and artificial intelligence: The new inequality.” According to El País, UGT says 23 million people never use these tools and argues that the divide is concentrated among older people and lower-income groups. The report identifies the typical user as a young, employed man living in a large city, with Spanish nationality, relatively good income and at least secondary education.
El País further reports that 75% of people aged 16 to 24 use AI, compared with 7% of those aged 65 to 74. It says women represent 55.5% of nonusers, and that 44% of people with the lowest educational level do not know how to use AI. UGT attributes low workplace adoption less to employee resistance than to companies’ limited integration of AI into production processes. The article says 20% of companies with more than 10 employees provided information-technology training in 2024, compared with 3% of microenterprises.
Why it matters
The figures suggest that AI adoption in Spain is spreading faster in personal life than inside workplaces, while access and skills remain uneven. That gap matters because people who cannot use or evaluate AI may be excluded from emerging educational, professional and civic opportunities. The supplied report does not independently confirm the underlying survey tables or reconcile competing estimates from private consultancies.
The reported pattern challenges the idea that AI has already become a routine workplace technology. Personal use may be easier because individuals can experiment independently, while workplace deployment requires approved tools, training, data safeguards and changes to established processes. The source attributes the difference to limited business integration, but it does not provide independent workplace testing or evidence that this is the only cause.
The distributional figures are consequential because unequal AI skills can reinforce existing digital inequalities. Older people, lower-income groups, women and people with less education may face greater difficulty accessing benefits or identifying unreliable outputs. These findings are reported by El País from UGT and official statistics; the supplied material does not independently confirm their methodology, definitions or whether users’ frequency and quality of use were measured.
The disagreement between public statistics and private consultancy estimates is also important. El País reports that private studies place professional AI use between 51% and 62%, while INE and Eurostat figures remain around 18%. Without the differing survey questions, samples and definitions, these percentages cannot be treated as directly comparable.
What to watch next
Watch whether Spanish employers expand structured AI training and integrate these tools into production processes, particularly in microenterprises. Also watch for official clarification of why public statistics show workplace use near 18% while private studies report much higher figures. The source does not establish whether UGT’s proposed national training plan will be adopted or funded.
The immediate practical question is whether employers, especially Spain’s microenterprises, provide accessible training and embed AI in specific workflows rather than leaving adoption to individual experimentation. The article reports that microenterprises represent 95% of the productive base and provided information-technology training to only 3% of staff in 2024.
UGT proposes a national AI qualification plan, a right to continuous professional training during working hours and additional support for unemployed people. The source does not say whether the government has accepted these proposals, what they would cost or how participation and outcomes would be measured.
Future official releases should clarify the survey period, the definition of “regular use,” the distinction between generative AI and other AI tools, and the reasons for the large gap with private estimates. No general availability, pricing or specific AI product access conditions are documented in the source.