Artificial Intelligence Adoption, Complementary Digital Technologies, and Business Performance: Evidence from Labour Productivity Across European Industries

Artificial intelligence (AI) adoption has become an important component of enterprise digitalisation, yet its relationship with business performance may depend on complementary digital technologies. This study examines the associations of AI adoption, cloud-computing adoption, and data-analytics adoption with real labour productivity across European country–industry settings. The analysis combines harmonized Eurostat data for 2025 on enterprise digital-technology adoption with national accounts-based labour productivity statistics. The final sample comprises 119 country–industry observations covering 29 European countries and 10 NACE Rev. 2 industry sections. Baseline multivariate regression with HC3 heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors shows that AI adoption is positively but not significantly associated with labour productivity, while cloud-computing adoption has a negative but statistically insignificant association. Data-analytics adoption is positively and significantly associated with labour productivity (β = 0.500, p = 0.012). This association remains significant under several robustness specifications but becomes insignificant when country and industry differences are controlled for simultaneously. The findings indicate that the relationships between digital-technology adoption and labour productivity are not uniform across technologies and specifications. The results are interpreted as cross-sectional associations rather than causal effects.