Picture the person most likely to have folded AI into her working week this year. The image that comes to mind is probably a founder in a wealthy tech hub. The data points somewhere else entirely. The fastest growth in AI use is happening among women entrepreneurs in emerging markets, in low- and middle-income countries, and it is not close.
New global research from the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, drawing on more than 3,000 women entrepreneurs across 66 countries and conducted with Intuit and the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law project, found AI use in these markets more than doubled in a single year. It went from 38 percent in 2024 to 82 percent in 2025. The Foundation calls it the fastest shift in business-tool adoption it has ever recorded.
The leapfrog, again
Analysts have a name for this pattern, because they have seen it before. The leapfrog. Mobile phones let whole regions skip the landline and the bank branch and go straight to money on a handset. AI looks like it may do something similar for women running small businesses far from the usual tech centers. More than half of the new users report using these tools weekly, and over a third daily. That is not experimentation. That is routine.
It is worth holding onto why this matters. When a tool is obviously useful and nobody is standing over you deciding whether you are allowed to use it, adoption moves fast. The women closing the distance quickest are not the ones with the most resources. They are the ones with the clearest reason and the fewest gatekeepers.
Fast to start, stuck at the surface
The same research is honest about the ceiling, and so should any reading of it be. Adoption is surging, but it is shallow. The Cherie Blair Foundation found women concentrated in consumer-facing uses, communications, marketing and design, the surface-level tasks that rarely change a business model or unlock real growth. Getting in the door is not the same as rearranging the house. It is the same fast-to-adopt, slow-to-embed pattern showing up in wealthier markets too.
What holds the deeper use back is not named as confidence anywhere in the data. It is named as skills, time, and the capacity to embed AI into core operations. In Sub-Saharan Africa women are still 29 percent less likely than men to use mobile internet at all, with affordability and digital literacy the main barriers. These are structural constraints, questions of infrastructure, cost, and hours in the day, not questions of nerve.
Why women entrepreneurs in emerging markets should change the conversation
Most coverage of women and AI leads with a gap and an implied fix aimed at the woman: be bolder, take the course, catch up. Even the adoption gap among younger founders often gets told that way. This data quietly reframes it. Where the conditions are right, women adopt AI faster than almost anyone. So the useful question is not how to make women more willing. It is how to change the conditions, the access, the affordable tools, the time to learn, the permission that is loosely given in these markets and often tightly rationed in richer ones.
That reframing has teeth for a business owner anywhere. If adoption follows usefulness and permission rather than personality, then the lever is environmental. It is the difference between telling someone to try harder and clearing the thing that is actually in her way. It is also why the stubborn funding gap facing women founders matters so much: capital is one of those conditions.
One small step
For a woman running a business, wherever she is, the encouraging part of this story is how low the bar turned out to be. The people driving that 82 percent did not start with a strategy. They started with one useful task. Picking a single job that eats time each week, a repeated message, a first-draft summary, some routine research, and running it through an AI tool once is enough to be part of the same shift. Starting at all puts you ahead.
The harder and more interesting question sits with everyone else in the room. If the fastest adopters are the ones with the fewest resources and the fewest gatekeepers, what does that say about the markets where adoption is slow, and about who has quietly been deciding there who gets to use these tools without a second thought?
