A chart of AI sentiment by country, posted on X by Kevin Lin on 10 November with the question “Notice anything?”, had about 138,700 views by 08:30 UTC. Its numbers come from the Ipsos AI Monitor 2026: 83% of adults in China agree that products and services using AI make them excited, against 33% in the United States and 26% in Canada.
We checked all 32 values against Ipsos’s report and they match. The chart leaves out one thing Ipsos prints in its methodology. By our count, 11 of the 12 most excited countries were polled with online samples that Ipsos says are “more urban, more educated, and/or more affluent than the general population”.
Business Pill · Distribution Advantage
An evergreen Business Engineer explainer on distribution advantage. It teaches the general idea only and does not discuss the Ipsos survey or the X post.
The key insight: A viral chart of AI sentiment by country matches the Ipsos AI Monitor 2026 value for value: 83% of adults in China say AI products and services make them excited, against 33% in the United States and 26% in Canada. By our count, 11 of the 12 most excited countries were polled with samples Ipsos says are more urban, educated or affluent than the population.
Ipsos interviewed 23,532 adults online in 32 countries between 20 March and 3 April 2026. Across the 32 countries, 51% on average agreed that AI products and services make them excited, and 42% disagreed.
After China, the most excited were India at 79%, Thailand at 77%, Indonesia at 76%, South Korea at 74% and Malaysia at 71%. At the bottom were Australia, Belgium and Sweden at 36%, the Netherlands at 34%, France and the United States at 33%, Great Britain at 29% and Canada at 26%.
In 15 of the 32 countries, more people disagreed than agreed, by our count. In the United States, 60% disagreed; in Canada, 64%. Ipsos’s own summary reads: “Whether you are positive or sceptical about AI depends on where you live.”
Share of adults who agree that products and services using AI make them excited, by country, from the Ipsos AI Monitor 2026 (online survey of 23,532 adults, 20 March to 3 April 2026). Colours mark the sample type Ipsos reports for each country; the count of 11 of the 12 most excited countries is our arithmetic.
A post by Kevin Lin (@quasicoh) at 00:28 UTC on 10 November, ‘AI sentiment by country. Notice anything?’, with a chart of the share who agree that AI products and services make them excited, citing the Ipsos AI Monitor 2026. It had about 138,700 views by 08:30 UTC. We checked all 32 values against Ipsos’s report and they match; the chart’s colours group countries as Western, Asia, Latin America, Africa and Other.
The Sample Behind the Ranking
Ipsos says its samples in 17 countries, including the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Germany, France, Japan and South Korea, can be considered representative of adults under 75. In 15 others, including mainland China, India, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Brazil and Mexico, the samples are more urban, more educated or more affluent than the population.
By our arithmetic, the simple average agreement is 63.5% in the 15 countries with those samples and 40.2% in the 17 representative ones. South Korea, at 74%, is the only representative sample in the top 12. Ipsos also notes that its 32-country average “has not been adjusted to the population size of each country”.
That does not make the gap an artefact: Ipsos does not say how answers in China or India would differ in a fully representative sample. It does mean the chart compares the online, more connected part of some populations with the adult population of others.
Where Excitement Fell
Ipsos also prints each country’s 2025 figure. Of the 28 countries with both years, the share excited fell in 19, rose in 8 and was unchanged in one, by our count.
The largest falls were in Germany, from 45% to 37%, Great Britain, from 37% to 29%, and France, from 40% to 33%. The United States fell from 38% to 33% and Canada from 31% to 26%. South Africa rose the most, from 61% to 68%.
For AI companies selling to consumers, the least excited countries in this survey include the United States, Great Britain, Germany, France and Canada. Our earlier coverage found 26% of US workers used paid AI in one survey, and a Reuters/Ipsos poll in October found 84% of US voters see AI as a threat to American workers.
Two other stories in our coverage this week sit in countries from the survey. In Australia, where 36% are excited and 56% are not, the government accepted all 18 recommendations of a review of an AI-driven cyber incident involving OpenAI. In Argentina, where 43% are excited and 46% are not, Pope Leo XIV told workers that AI can put countless jobs at risk.
The survey measures feelings about AI products, not use or spending. It does not show whether excitement leads to adoption, or whether nervousness leads to regulation.
The Structural Read
As we read it, the chart answers its own question only in part. Excitement is highest where Ipsos surveyed the online, more connected part of the population, and lowest in countries where its samples represent all adults under 75; the report does not separate the two effects.
Ipsos, Global Attitudes on AI 2026
“People in Asia and LATAM are on average more likely to think AI has more benefits than drawbacks and are excited about products and services using AI”
Three Implications
FOR AI COMPANIES The least excited countries in the survey include the United States (33%), Great Britain (29%), Germany (37%), France (33%) and Canada (26%).
FOR THE TREND By our count, the share excited fell in 19 of the 28 countries Ipsos surveyed in both 2025 and 2026, led by Germany and Great Britain at 8 points each.
FOR READING THE CHART Ipsos says its online polls are accurate to plus or minus 3.5 points for samples of 1,000 and 5.0 points for samples of 500.
The framework says: “In any product cycle, there are two curves to follow. The first is what your underlying technology can do. The second is what your users can actually do with it.”
As we read it, the Ipsos figures are a measure of how people feel about the second curve, country by country. The framework predates this survey and does not discuss it.
What Is Not Established
Ipsos does not publish results for the full population in the 15 countries with urban or affluent samples, so the size of any sampling effect is unknown. Ipsos puts the precision of its online polls at plus or minus 3.5 points for samples of 1,000 and 5.0 points for samples of 500, so differences of a few points between countries may not be meaningful.
The X chart groups countries as Western, Asia, Latin America, Africa and Other. That grouping is the poster’s, not Ipsos’s, and the post itself does not say what the reader should notice.
This Week In The AI Supercycle
The Great Convergence of Capital, Power, and Geopolitics
This week’s issue: for two years the AI build-out was priced as a supply story, and last week as a credit story. This week it was priced as a permission story, and the answer arrived as a cost, not a ban.
The viral chart is accurate to the Ipsos AI Monitor 2026: 83% excited in China, 33% in the United States, 26% in Canada. By our count, 11 of the 12 most excited countries were surveyed with samples Ipsos calls more urban, educated or affluent, and excitement fell in 19 of the 28 countries with a 2025 figure.
A note on sourcing. Every Ipsos AI Monitor figure and Ipsos quotation is from the Ipsos AI Monitor 2026 report and Ipsos’s web page of 2 June 2026; the quoted question is from Kevin Lin’s X post, and the Reuters/Ipsos and US paid-AI figures are from the earlier surveys linked in the text. We checked each of the 32 values in the X post’s chart against page 16 of the report. Counts of countries, changes from 2025 and the averages by sample type are our arithmetic, unweighted, from Ipsos’s published figures.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
