AI adoption by country

“You do need guardrails.” says David de Graaf, global director of digital at Royal HaskoningDHV, a consultancy engineering firm providing solutions for the natural and built environment. “The European Union is establishing a new act to regulate AI, including the use of ChatGPT and facial recognition. The US, UK, and China are also rushing to create guidelines. That makes it more difficult for international companies to adopt AI.”

A number of core challenges must also be solved before leaders and experts feel comfortable using AI to its fullest potential. Quansheng Xu, president of the Beijing Institute of Architectural Design, an architectural design and consulting institute, notes: “The outputs produced by AI still need to have a certain level of human-computer interaction to control the quality, at present. Sometimes the text or image generated by AI will contain errors, perhaps because it does not understand the design purpose. Instead of blindly trusting AI, we need to learn and grow with it to prevent these errors.”

Nonetheless, in Autodesk’s cross-industry generative design—and AI-enabled products, user engagement increased by 24% from January 2023 to November 2023 (though this does not take overall subscriber growth into account). APAC led the way with a 55% increase in user engagement, which conforms with survey data showing China, Australia, and India as some of the top AI adopters—though Japan and South Korea are more cautious.