UK founders lag Western Europe on AI adoption, bunq research shows

British founders are using AI less than their peers in Western Europe, and bunq’s new survey suggests the problem is not just access. It’s trust, understanding and a stubborn pile of admin that won’t clear itself.

The survey covered 4,510 founders in the UK, Ireland, Spain, Germany and France. In the UK, 51% said they had used AI in the past year. That trails Germany at 79%, France at 76% and Spain at 73%.

That gap is awkward for a country whose government wants the UK to be seen as a leader in AI adoption. It’s also hard to square with the way founders describe their working lives. Two thirds of UK respondents said admin takes up at least a quarter of their week, and nearly one in six said it eats more than half their time.

Still, the biggest headache isn’t the paperwork of starting up. Only 13% named regulation and administrative burden as their main challenge. More founders pointed to access to finance, at 24%, and getting the business off the ground, at 22%. When asked what would help most, British entrepreneurs were split between lower business rates, easier access to finance and simpler tax filing.

The real brake on AI use, according to the survey, is uncertainty. Thirty-eight per cent of UK founders said they don’t know enough about how AI works or whether it can be trusted. That was higher than Spain at 26% and France at 25%. Price barely featured: just 26% named cost as their main obstacle, the lowest share in the survey.

There’s also a sharp age split. Among UK founders aged 25 to 34, 73% had used AI in the past year. Among those aged 55 to 64, the figure fell to 23%. In Spain, by contrast, the same older group reached 62%. So this is not simply an age story. It looks more like a British trust gap, with a side of bureaucratic fatigue.