Introduction
$294.16 billion is the anticipated market size of Artificial intelligence (AI) in 2025. These numbers come from a report by Fortune Business Insights which also highlights how industries are adopting AI faster than ever.
But how familiar are everyday internet users with AI, and how do they perceive its use?
To understand AI familiarity among people, we at UserQ recently conducted a survey which included:
- 286 participants
- Aged 18 to 65+
- Representing over 10 countries.
First, let’s understand the process of how UserQ conducted this survey.
Our approach to surveying AI familiarity among participants
A survey has predefined open-ended and closed-ended questions that help us understand the participants’ views on a particular topic. However, creating one is always a challenge. To tackle this, UserQ has a 7-step method for setting up a survey and publishing its insights.
This method ensures we:
- Clearly define research objectives: We start by pinpointing the exact information we aim to gather from the survey. What are the key questions we want to be answered?
- Craft clear and concise questions: We avoid ambiguity and technical jargon, ensuring everyone understands the questions and can provide accurate responses.
- Balance open-ended and closed-ended questions: Open-ended questions allow for in-depth exploration of user experiences, while closed-ended questions provide valuable data for analysis.
- Incorporate diverse participant pools: We recruited participants from various backgrounds, nationalities, and age groups, available on our platform, leading to richer and more representative data.
- Analyse and interpret results: Once the survey concludes, we meticulously analyse the data, identify trends, and translate the findings into actionable insights.
Crafting effective surveys can provide valuable insights, but it’s crucial to ensure trust in the findings. To achieve this, we:
- Included participants from diverse nationalities and age groups to better understand the dynamics of AI familiarity and usage.
- Included both open-ended and close-ended questions to understand the use of AI and not let questions be a bit biased.
Let’s understand from our AI survey results what our participants have to say about their experiences with AI.
What was the aim of this survey?
We aimed to understand AI familiarity among people in the MENA region, their daily usage of AI, and whether they see AI as a helping hand or a threat.
Key insights about our participants
Before we proceed, we shall look at the diversity of the participants of our AI survey.
- 40% of the participants are between the age group of 26 to 35 years old.
- 29% of our participants belonged to Egypt, followed by Indians at 21% and Pakistanis at 9%, making them the top three nationalities in this survey that are currently residing in the MENA region.
- Within the MENA region, our participants were the residents of these top three countries: UAE (31.2%), Egypt (18.88%), and Saudi Arabia (15.73%).
- The survey had a diverse group of participants, with 59.44% male and 40.56% female participants.
As for the level of education, almost 60% of the participants held a bachelor’s degree and 17.48% had a master’s degree. Currently working in the private sector (61.02%), public sector (12.29%), followed by other employment status as mentioned in the survey questionnaire.
What questions did we ask our participants?
Now that the aim was clear, we designed a list of questions and found some interesting data. Here’s what we asked:
Q1. How familiar are you with artificial intelligence (AI)?
According to Statista, the average monthly search volume for the keyword “AI” was more than 30.4 million in 2023, indicating that people are familiar with the term and its uses.
This trend continues in 2025, as shown by Google Trends where “AI” and “Artificial intelligence” remain among the most actively searched keywords.
Unsurprisingly, we saw similar results with our survey, where 230 out of our 286 participants were aware of AI, from being extremely familiar to somewhat familiar.
Q2. Which of the following AI applications do you use regularly?
When it came to AI familiarity via applications, here’s what our AI survey results told us:
- 76.22% of our participants were aware of the use of AI through voice assistants (like Siri, Alexa, Gemini, etc) and chatbots found on customer service portals.
- 66.43% of our participants knew about the use of AI through recommendation systems for websites such as Netflix and Spotify.
- The rest of the findings can be seen in the image below.
It’s fascinating how AI has been integrated into daily life, but with its increased use, will people trust and recommend AI? That’s exactly what we asked next.
Q3. How likely are you to recommend AI-powered tools to a friend or colleague?
We asked our participants five questions to determine their likeliness on a Likert scale for the following:
Do our participants think AI is beneficial for daily use?
The answer was yes. A whopping 68.88% agreed that AI is useful in their daily tasks.
Can AI be trusted as much as our human counterparts?
According to a poll conducted by the CIPD, 63% of the participants said they trust AI when it’s about making important work decisions. Similarly, in our AI survey results, we saw that 24.48% of the participants were very likely and 32.87% to likely trust AI as much as their human counterparts.
Do AI tools improve productivity?
61.19% of the participants found AI tools to boost their productivity.
Are AI tools costly?
We saw a mixed reaction from our participants; half of the population said AI is expensive, and others were somewhat neutral to this statement.
Do AI-powered solutions have user-friendly interfaces?
Yes! That’s what our survey tells us. A combined 84.26% of the participants feel that AI-powered solutions have a good UI.
Q4. Rate your level of concern regarding AI impacting job security.
The previous questions gave us a quick understanding of the public’s general attitude towards AI. But does AI pose a threat to jobs in today’s world? Here’s what our participants had to say.
Our recent survey concluded the following:
- 41.61 % of the participants feel concerned about AI replacing jobs in the future, whereas they (37.42%) are also optimistic about AI creating new job opportunities.
- Half of our participants (50.35%) feel there should be a designated body to regulate how AI will impact the job market.
- 38.46% of our participants welcome AI advancements in the field.
Although people are a bit scared of AI taking over their jobs, they also feel this can create more job opportunities in the future and is there to help as an assistant rather than replace them.
Q5. To what extent do you agree with the statement: ‘AI can make life easier and more efficient.’?
When asked if they resonated with this statement, most of our participants strongly agreed.
- Only a handful of the participants disagreed with the statement.
- 41.96% of the participants agreed that AI makes life easier and more efficient.
- A majority (41.61%) agree that AI increases efficiency in daily life.
- This also highlights how AI plays an important role in people’s daily lives, and they will soon incorporate AI into everything.
Q6. Rank the following aspects of AI in terms of their importance to you.
By now, we were able to understand participants’ familiarity with AI, what they think about its use and growing popularity, and their concerns related to AI. As we saw earlier in our survey, the response to AI in daily life was overwhelmingly positive. But what aspects of AI matter most to them? Let’s explore that.
- With an average score of 3.67, privacy protection was ranked the highest among the aspects of AI that matter to our participants.
- This was followed by AI being accurate and reliable with the data and response it provides when interacting with it.
- The factor that mattered least to them was AI being cost-effective. It shows people are ready to invest in AI as long as it’s reliable, accurate, and maintains the privacy of user data.
Q7. What concerns do you have about AI, if any? Please explain.
We concluded this survey with an open-ended question asking our participants to express their concerns related to AI. As one might expect, most of the concerns were related to AI taking people’s jobs and not being a reliable source of information.
Here’s a quick summary:
- Over 70% of respondents highlighted the usefulness of AI in improving productivity and simplifying tasks.
- Approximately 15% of responses specifically cited the positive impact of AI in medical and research fields.
- 25% of responses expressed concerns about AI leading to job losses, particularly in manual and repetitive roles.
30% of responses mentioned privacy and security concerns. While 20% of them raised concerns about ethical issues and AI biases.
These concerns serve as a wake-up call for both regulatory bodies and businesses. As highlighted by Forbes, AI is being misused for malicious purposes, such as perpetrating financial fraud.
The potential for AI-driven harm necessitates a proactive approach to regulation, with the establishment of national or even international governing bodies to ensure responsible and ethical AI development and deployment.
Concluding our AI survey results
The rise of AI is undeniable. Our survey provides valuable insights into user perceptions, revealing a complex relationship with this transformative technology. While users recognise the potential benefits of AI in simplifying tasks and enhancing productivity, concerns about losing their jobs and data privacy remain prominent.
These findings underscore the crucial need for responsible AI development and deployment. A collaborative effort between businesses, regulators, and users is essential to ensure AI technologies are used ethically and benefit society as a whole.
If you’re looking to conduct extensive surveys like this, contact us at UserQ, and we will help you conduct user testing and surveys and provide solutions to your user problems.
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