Some 11.5% of Portuguese businesses, around one in eight, use artificial intelligence for various tasks, new data from INE, the Portuguese statistics body, has found.
Among these businesses, around two thirds (59.4%) of firms use AI for written language analysis, while 50.9% use it to generate images, video, sound and audio, and 45.6% to generate written and spoken language and programming code.
In terms of the areas of application of this technology, meanwhile, it is mainly used in administrative processes and management tasks (40.8%), as well as marketing and sales (36.9%).
Internet usage among businesses
As INE’s data showed, almost all Portuguese businesses (98.8%) have access to the internet for business purposes, while some 62.9% of enterprises have their own website, and 63.8% use social media.
More than half (53.7%) use business software, and nearly half (45.0%) perform regular data analytics, a 6.4-percentage-point increase on the previous year. Around two fifths (38.7%) of firms have purchased cloud computing services, while 30.5% use IT systems or solutions for environmental purposes, and 11.9% monitor and quantify their impact.
E-commerce accounted for around a fifth (20.6%) of the total turnover of Portuguese businesses in 2024, a 1.1-percentage-point increase on the previous year, reaching around €83.9 billion, 9.8 percentage points higher than the previous year.
Online sales were conducted by 16.9% of enterprises, while 7.4% made sales through electronic data interchange (EDI) systems.
Personal use
Elsewhere, separate data from INE found that 38.7% of Portuguese individuals aged 16 to 74 have recently used AI tools, with usage higher among younger people (76.5%) and among students (81.5%)
Internet use in general among the population remains widespread (89.5%), while around half (49.6%) have used the internet to place online orders, mainly for clothing, footwear and fashion accessories (75.9%).
Meanwhile, a growing share of internet users reported encountering aggressive, discriminatory or humiliating content on the internet, up to 45.2% from 35.5% last year.
Reported encounters related to nationality, ethnic or racial origin (37.9%), political or social issues (37.0%) and sexual identity or orientation (33.2%). Read more here and here.
