You may know this, but I’m an American who’s lived in the UK for almost 30 years, working with Europeans and people from all over the world.

I feel like I have a pretty good handle on the differences between American and European people and businesses, but some things still turn my head.

I promised in my first LinkedIn post that mentioned our AI and thought leadership research that I’d return to this subject of AI. And this time I’m briefly going to pick up on a couple of comparisons between the two continents. This is not only about content to fuel partner marketing, but hear me out. (Our research actually covered ‘North America’ and ‘Western Europe’ and you can find our full report here.)

 

Quantity versus quality

First of all, one of our foundational questions showed American respondents using GenAI tools more than their European counterparts in their thought leadership.

Americans were slightly more skewed to using AI tools powered by public LLMs (rarely only public LLMs, which is a relief) than Europeans, who skew slightly more to company-built AI tools and AI features in popular business software.

But, in aggregate, Americans come out as using GenAI more.

So Americans creating thought leadership are more advanced, AI-wise? Not so fast.

We then found Europeans are more likely to rely on AI for ‘published or otherwise publicly facing content output’, appearing more in the 51-75% band (24.0% versus 16.0% for Americans). The band above that, 76-100%, was very small – almost no one is using AI that much.

 

Happy with AI?

The last data point I’ll mention in this short post is around satisfaction with GenAI tools for thought leadership. Europeans came out much more likely to answer ‘Very satisfied’ – 21.3% versus 9.3% for Americans.

It feels like overall carefulness around AI – even scepticism at times, as born out in some other answers – is leading Europeans to a healthier place.

Not all these region comparisons made it into our full report, but I’d be happy to share findings with you and have a chat.

 

Who and why

Lastly, I wanted to say something about those we polled. We surveyed, with the help of our partners High Beam Global (HBG), senior decision-makers in thought leadership at media-sized and large companies across the B2B tech, telecoms and professional services sectors.

We chose that breakdown mainly because our agency client base is 95% made up of those kinds of companies, people and sectors, spread across the US and Western Europe.

Would love to discuss this more, so ask me anything and keep those DMs coming.