Who's Actually Deploying AI? A Reality Check on Czech and CEE Enterprise Adoption

Czech businesses are, by several measures, ahead of the European pack. The European Investment Bank's most recent survey found Czech firms outperforming EU averages on both AI adoption and innovation plans, while the Czech National Bank's own analysis puts AI use among Czech companies above the EU average of 14.6 per cent — a standing the CNB attributes partly to the past year's rapid expansion of AI technologies into everyday business processes. The CEE AI Index 2026, launched by AI Chamber in partnership with The Recursive and Europe Cloud, placed Czechia fifth among eleven Central and Eastern European countries, singling the country out — alongside Poland — as a co-leader in the "Deployment" pillar, reflecting exceptionally deep enterprise adoption and commercial integration of AI tools.

The size divide

The more useful number sits beneath the headline ranking: adoption is heavily skewed by company size. More than half of large European enterprises surveyed in 2025 used AI, against roughly 30 per cent of medium-sized companies and fewer than 20 per cent of small firms, according to CNB analysis. Czech-specific figures compiled by industry researchers put AI use at 41 per cent among large Czech firms, against just 11 per cent company-wide — a gap that reveals how much of the country's strong aggregate position is being carried by a relatively small number of large, well-resourced organisations rather than broad-based adoption.

A separate survey of 80 senior executives at major Czech enterprises, run by consultancy Adastra, found 51 per cent of organisations already working with AI in some form — though most of those sit between early-stage pilots and partial rollout, rather than mature, department-wide deployment. The same survey identified the primary obstacle: 56 per cent of respondents said their company's data is not yet accurate, complete or sufficiently AI-ready to support wider adoption — a governance and data-quality problem, not a technology-access one.

Where the gap is widest: manufacturing

The CNB's analysis is explicit that manufacturing lags other sectors in AI deployment, despite facing the most acute competitive pressure to adopt it — squeezed simultaneously by the lingering effects of the energy crisis and competition from lower-cost economies. The central bank's own Winter 2026 forecast has incorporated a modest upward revision to expected labour-productivity growth specifically on the assumption that AI investment in business processes will accelerate, a signal that policymakers view manufacturing AI adoption as a genuine lever for national competitiveness rather than a peripheral trend.

The SME picture across the region

Beyond large enterprises, a regional survey of small and medium-sized companies across CEE — including Czechia, Poland and Romania as comparatively strong performers — found more than three-quarters of companies reporting some AI use, but only around 25 per cent doing so at meaningful scale. The same research identified four SME archetypes: companies aware of AI's potential but held back by structural barriers, practical optimists actively experimenting, the indifferent, and those digitally withdrawn altogether — a spread suggesting that attitude toward AI does not reliably predict actual adoption. Awareness of the EU AI Act itself remains low even among adopters: only 39 per cent of SMEs surveyed regionally reported understanding the regulation, rising to 60 per cent among self-identified "heavy users" of AI.

The regulatory dimension

The EU AI Act's phased rollout — governance obligations from August 2025, high-risk system requirements from August 2026 — is expected to widen the gap between countries with pre-existing institutional maturity and those still building governance capacity from scratch, according to the CEE AI Index analysis. Czechia's relatively mature regulatory institutions position it, alongside Poland and Estonia, to convert AI Act compliance into a competitive advantage for attracting risk-averse institutional investors — provided the compliance burden itself doesn't disproportionately fall on the small and mid-sized companies least equipped to absorb it.

The takeaway

Czechia's AI adoption story is real but uneven: a genuine leadership position among large enterprises and in regional deployment rankings, sitting on top of a much shakier foundation of data readiness and mid-market uptake. For business leaders evaluating where the country's AI transformation is heading next, the more informative number may not be the adoption percentage at all — it's the 56 per cent of executives who say their own data isn't ready for what they're being asked to build on top of it.