AI use among businesses in Türkiye rose from 37 percent to 51 percent in a year

A fourteen point jump in twelve months

The article, written by Candeğer Muradoğlu and published by Webrazzi on 24 September 2026, presents findings from a study produced by AWS together with Strand Partners, published in Turkish as "2026'da Türkiye'nin Yapay Zeka Potansiyelini Ortaya Çıkarmak". According to the report, AI use among businesses in Türkiye rose from 37 percent to 51 percent in a single year. In other words, more than half of the surveyed group now actually works with the technology.

The same study finds that 66 percent of business leaders regard AI as a high priority or place it among their top strategic priorities. At the same time, 24 percent of businesses have reached an advanced stage of implementation. Read together, the three figures describe intent, usage and maturity sitting at three clearly different levels.

Transformation sped up, and some sectors are ahead

One finding worth noting is that 78 percent of businesses already using AI say the pace of their digital transformation increased. That frames the technology less as a standalone tool and more as an accelerator applied to programmes that were already running. On adoption, the sectors leading the way are financial services, media and entertainment, retail and manufacturing.

Berrin Özselçuk, General Manager of AWS Türkiye, is quoted as saying the question itself has moved. On that account companies have stopped asking whether they can use AI, and what is on the table now is how to scale it responsibly. That is an agenda shifting from technical feasibility to governance.

The distance between 66 percent and 24 percent

Line the numbers up and the shape is clear: 66 percent call AI a priority, 51 percent actually use it, 24 percent have reached an advanced stage. That comparison is our reading, not a conclusion the report states. Still, it points at a familiar pattern on the business side. There is a wide gap between putting a technology on the agenda and embedding it in daily operations, and the size of that gap is now visible in figures.

The second point is competitive. Once usage reaches 51 percent, using AI stops being a differentiator and starts becoming a baseline; what separates companies is not whether they use it but at what level of maturity. Responsible scaling, the theme Özselçuk points to, is where the question stops being technical and becomes one of data governance, permissions and auditability. We looked at the legal side of that in our piece on the KVKK guidance on generative AI.

Türkiye is the subject here, but not every question is answered

In this story Türkiye is not a footnote, it is the subject of the research. The 51 percent usage rate, the 66 percent who declare AI a priority, the 24 percent at an advanced stage and the 78 percent of users reporting faster transformation all describe businesses in Türkiye. So does the sector ranking, with financial services, media and entertainment, retail and manufacturing in front. This is one of the few topics where we can speak with local data instead of extrapolating from elsewhere.

The unknowns still deserve to be named. The source behind this article does not cover, so neither do we: the sample size and methodology of the study, the split by company size between smaller firms and large enterprises, the individual rates behind the sector ranking, which use cases were counted as adoption, how the advanced stage was defined, regional distribution, investment figures, the effect on employment, and when the earlier 37 percent was measured. We also did not work from the full report, only from the findings as reported. For that reason we make no forecast for the coming year.

Sources

Webrazzi, AI use among businesses in Türkiye rose to 51 percent over the past year