95% of tech employees in Israel use AI tools, but is its widespread adoption causing demographic divides?

AI adoption reveals clear divides among tech staff, peripheral-region employees, and non-degree workers feel the greatest threat.

Zachi Hennessey , Calcalist, Israel, Novenber 11, 2025

There are currently more than 2,150 artificial intelligence companies operating in Israel, about 200 of which are branches of international firms. More than half of them focus on enterprise software, healthcare, fintech, and e-commerce. Compared to the broader high-tech sector, these companies tend to be more mature, raise more capital, and operate at later stages of the corporate lifecycle. Yet in the midst of the global AI revolution, Israel faces a strategic obstacle: a shortage of skilled and experienced talent capable of pushing the sector forward.

Nearly every high-tech worker uses some form of generative AI tools, according to a newly-published study by the Israel Innovation Authority, in collaboration with the Brookdale Institute.

The survey of over 500 high tech workers revealed that 95% of employees in the sector use AI tools regularly, and that 78% use them daily. Roughly 82% of those daily users turn to AI tools for at least three different categories of work, and about one in four use them for more than six.

The prevalence of AI tool usage spans the spectrum of high-tech-related jobs: from coding to marketing to human resources, everybody seems to have a finger in the AI pie. Understandably so, as 70% of surveyed employees report that the use of these tools results in a “substantial improvement” in the quality of their output, and half of surveyed workers report a significant reduction in work time.

The prevalence of these tools is particularly cause for concern to senior employees, who use AI less often than their junior and early-career cohorts (the most active adopters of AI for both content creation and code-related work). Veteran employees report markedly higher anxiety about job security: 37% of senior staff express significant concern, a rate far above that of other groups.

Most employees view artificial intelligence as a career opportunity, with 68% seeing upside and only 27% viewing it as a threat. Still, some amount of caution seems to be at play here: only 64% of startup employees use AI tools for code generation, compared with 77% in international R&D centers and service firms. This gap suggests that younger companies may be more cautious about adopting tools that could interact with or potentially expose the proprietary code they’re building.

For the original report [Eng.]

For the original report [Heb]