|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
A sweeping new global survey has found that most of the world feels considerably more optimistic about artificial intelligence than the anxious, headline-driven discourse around the technology might suggest, at least outside the United States. According to Gallup’s ongoing research conducted in partnership with Microsoft, positive emotions toward AI outweigh negative ones in 34 of the first 37 countries to complete fieldwork this year, with only the United States, Egypt and the State of Palestine bucking that broader global trend.
The study measures public engagement with AI across five distinct dimensions, including awareness, frequency of use, expected impact, trust and emotional response, treating public engagement with the technology essentially as a ladder that people climb from basic awareness toward regular use. Gallup asked AI-aware adults in each country whether the technology makes them feel curious, happy, excited, worried, sad or angry, then compared the share reporting at least one positive emotion against the share reporting at least one negative one. Across all 37 countries surveyed so far, the median percentage reporting at least one positive emotion toward AI came in at 72 percent, compared with just 41 percent reporting at least one negative emotion, a gap wide enough to suggest genuine global enthusiasm rather than a narrow statistical edge.
That enthusiasm is not evenly distributed, however, and the countries where positive sentiment runs strongest cluster heavily in Asia and parts of the developing world rather than in the wealthy Western economies most associated with cutting-edge AI development. Positive emotions toward AI are most widespread in China, at 90 percent, followed closely by Singapore at 89 percent and Kenya at 87 percent, figures that place all three countries well above the global median. Curiosity emerged as the single clearest and most commonly reported positive emotion, ranking as the top response in 29 of the 37 countries surveyed. Across the full sample, a median of 64 percent of respondents said AI makes them feel curious, compared with 39 percent who said it makes them feel happy and 34 percent who said it makes them feel excited.
On the negative side of the ledger, worry stands out as the dominant emotion by a wide margin. Feeling worried was the most commonly reported negative emotion associated with AI in 35 of the 37 countries surveyed, suggesting that even in places where positive sentiment clearly outweighs negative sentiment overall, some baseline level of anxiety about the technology remains close to universal rather than confined to a handful of especially skeptical populations.
The gap between global optimism and American ambivalence fits a pattern that other independent surveys have documented over the past several years. Research compiled by the Brookings Institution has found that public sentiment toward AI has consistently leaned more negative than positive across Western countries specifically, with earlier U.S. surveys finding that roughly half of respondents believed AI’s risks outweighed its benefits, compared with only about a third who held the opposite view. Similar patterns have shown up in the United Kingdom, where earlier polling found nearly half of respondents believed AI’s risks exceeded its benefits, and where the share holding that pessimistic view had been climbing steadily in the years leading up to the current wave of AI adoption. That broader research consistently finds more favorable impressions of AI concentrated in emerging and Asian markets, alongside more cautious, negative impressions in Western countries, a divide the new Gallup-Microsoft findings reinforce rather than contradict.
Separate global research adds useful texture to why that gap persists even as AI adoption accelerates almost everywhere. A large multinational study on public attitudes toward AI found that people’s feelings about the technology remain genuinely ambivalent even within individual countries, with a majority reporting they feel simultaneously optimistic, at 68 percent, and worried, at 61 percent, about AI at the same time. That same research found a meaningful split by economic development level: in advanced economies, opinion is roughly evenly divided on whether AI’s benefits outweigh its risks, while in emerging economies, a clear majority believes the benefits outweigh the risks and more people report actually experiencing tangible benefits from the technology in their own lives.
Trust levels follow a similar geographic divide. That same body of research found only about two in five people in advanced economies trust AI systems, compared with roughly three in five in emerging economies, even though people across both groups tend to trust AI’s raw technical capability more than they trust its safety, security, or broader impact on society and individuals, a pattern that held consistently across every country included in that particular survey.
The practical implications of these findings extend well beyond simple public opinion tracking. Gallup’s broader engagement-ladder framework shows that awareness of AI remains far ahead of actual use across the countries surveyed, with median awareness sitting at 81 percent while the median share who have ever used AI, whether for work or personal purposes, drops to just 43 percent, and the share using it frequently falls lower still. That gap between widespread awareness and comparatively limited hands-on use suggests that much of the world’s optimism toward AI may currently be based more on general impression and curiosity than on sustained, direct personal experience with the technology, a dynamic that could shift meaningfully as adoption deepens in the countries where it currently lags.
With Gallup’s research ultimately set to expand to cover 140 countries in total, the current findings represent an early but substantial snapshot of how global public opinion is settling on AI at a moment when the technology’s rollout remains genuinely uneven across regions and income levels. Whether the current optimism gap between the United States and much of the rest of the world narrows or widens as AI adoption deepens globally will likely become clearer as Gallup’s full country coverage rolls out over the coming months. Continuing coverage of how public attitudes toward AI are evolving worldwide is available on Business Tech. Additional detail on the survey’s methodology and full country-level findings is available through Gallup’s official report.
