America’s AI Lead Is Really a Management Story
Europe’s AI problem is not access to models. It is access to organizations that know what to do with them. A new Brookings paper by Alexander Bick and colleagues gives hard data to a fear that has been hanging over the continent since the PC era: the United States is not just inventing more frontier technology, it is absorbing it faster. That matters because, as Mario Draghi’s report on European competitiveness warned, Europe’s growth challenge is now inseparable from its capacity to diffuse new tools through ordinary firms.
The Gap Is Bigger Than a Chatbot Count
The headline numbers are uncomfortable. The Brookings authors find that 43 percent of U.S. workers use generative AI on the job, versus 32 percent across six European countries. The gap widens when intensity matters: 5.2 percent of all U.S. work hours involve AI, roughly double the rate in northern Europe and far above France and Italy. On the cleanest comparable firm measure, 7 percent of U.S. firms use AI in production, against a 4 percent EU average. Those findings also fit earlier evidence from McElheran and coauthors on AI adoption in America, which showed that advanced AI use clustered in larger, younger, more skill intensive firms rather than diffusing evenly across the economy.
Europe’s deeper problem is not just the U.S. lead. It is the hierarchy inside Europe itself. The UK, Sweden, and the Netherlands sit much closer to the American frontier than France and Italy. Demographics, occupations, industries, and firm size explain part of that spread, but only part. The Brookings paper estimates those compositional factors account for 55 percent of the average U.S.-Europe gap. The rest sits somewhere harder to legislate and harder to subsidize.
Management Is the Missing Infrastructure
That “somewhere” is management. The authors show that country scores from the World Management Survey are strongly correlated with AI adoption, echoing the older lesson from Bloom, Sadun, and Van Reenen’s classic study of the ICT era: American firms got more from digital technology because they reorganized around it better. In the UK data cited by the paper, only 2 percent of firms in the bottom management decile had adopted AI, versus 20 percent in the top decile. At the worker level, a one standard deviation rise in performance oriented personnel management is associated with a 9.6 percentage point increase in AI adoption.
The mechanism is even more revealing than the correlation. Firms with stronger management are much more likely to encourage AI use and provide tools. Once that encouragement is added to the model, the paper can explain nearly all of the U.S.-Europe adoption gap. That is why the emphasis on incentives is so persuasive. Technology rarely transforms organizations on contact. In an earlier public sector study, Garicano and Heaton found that police departments gained from IT only when they paired it with the managerial overhaul known as CompStat. Italy offers the private sector mirror image: Pellegrino and Zingales argued that weak meritocracy and loyalty based management were central to the country’s failure to capitalize on the last digital wave.
Productivity Will Reward Reorganization
The productivity literature is starting to show why this matters. In customer support, Brynjolfsson, Li, and Raymond found a 15 percent productivity gain from generative AI assistance. Noy and Zhang found professionals completed writing tasks faster and better with ChatGPT. In software, GitHub Copilot users finished a coding task 55.8 percent faster. But the story is not blind techno optimism: Dell’Acqua and coauthors show that AI shines on tasks within its capability range and can mislead on work that demands judgment beyond that frontier.
The Brookings paper connects those micro gains to macro stakes. Workers report meaningful time savings, larger in the U.S. than in Europe, and industries with higher AI adoption have recently posted faster productivity growth. The authors do not claim clean causality, and they do not find clear employment losses at the industry level. That caution lines up with the OECD’s assessment of AI’s macro productivity gains: the upside is real, but it depends on diffusion, complementary investment, and managerial capacity.
Conclusion
Europe should stop treating AI adoption as a procurement exercise and start treating it as an organizational test. The winning firms will not be the ones with the most policy rhetoric or the flashiest model demos. They will be the ones that reward performance, push experimentation into daily workflows, and redesign work so the tool actually gets used. The next productivity gap will not be decided only in research labs. It will be decided in middle management.
Key Take-Away
America’s AI lead is driven not just by better AI models, but by stronger management and faster organizational adoption. Europe’s productivity gap will depend on redesigning work and empowering firms to effectively use AI. Share on XImage credit: DC Studio/magnific
Dr. Gleb Tsipursky, called the “Office Whisperer” by The New York Times, helps tech-forward leaders stop overpaying for AI while boosting engagement and innovation. He serves as the CEO of the AI consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts. Dr. Gleb wrote seven best-selling books, and his forthcoming book with Georgetown University Press is The Psychology of Generative AI Adoption (2026). His most recent best-seller is ChatGPT for Leaders and Content Creators: Unlocking the Potential of Generative AI (Intentional Insights, 2023). His cutting-edge thought leadership was featured in over 650 articles and 550 interviews in Harvard Business Review, Inc. Magazine, USA Today, CBS News, Fox News, Time, Business Insider, Fortune, The New York Times, and elsewhere. His writing was translated into Chinese, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Korean, French, Vietnamese, German, and other languages. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training for Fortune 500 companies from Aflac to Xerox. It also comes from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral scientist, with 8 years as a lecturer at UNC-Chapel Hill and 7 years as a professor at Ohio State. A proud Ukrainian American, Dr. Gleb lives in Columbus, Ohio.
