Seven in Ten Portuguese Adults Now Use Generative AI Tools — Deloitte's 2025 Digital Consumer Trends Survey Logs a 71% Two-Year Surge, 85% of Generation Z, 44% of Boomers, and ChatGPT as the Brand 76% Already Recognise

Deloitte released the Portuguese edition of its biennial Digital Consumer Trends survey on Tuesday, 28 April, and the headline finding is the kind of adoption curve that is usually associated with smartphones rather than enterprise software. Seventy per cent of Portuguese adults reported in 2025 that they have already used a generative AI tool, against 41% recorded in the same survey two years earlier. The 71% relative increase in two years places Portugal in the upper range of European adoption rates and confirms what app-store rankings and traffic data have been suggesting for twelve months: GenAI is no longer a story about early-adopter tech professionals — it is mass-market consumer behaviour.

The generational breakdown is sharp. Eighty-five per cent of Generation Z respondents — the cohort born from the late 1990s onwards — report having used a generative AI tool, against 44% of boomers. Millennials sit closer to the Gen Z mark than to the boomer mark, and Generation X falls in between. ChatGPT is by some distance the dominant tool: 61% of respondents have used it specifically, against awareness of the brand at 76% of the adult population. Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Anthropic's Claude and the open-source Mistral and Llama derivatives all register in single digits as named tools, although their integration inside other consumer products (Microsoft 365, Google Search, the Portuguese banks' chatbots, the SAPO products) means actual exposure is materially higher than the named-tool data suggests.

What people are doing with it

The use-case inventory inside the Deloitte survey breaks down across four big buckets. The largest is information retrieval and explanation — a category that includes school work, hobby learning, summarising news articles and 'asking quick questions you would previously have Googled'. The second is content drafting — emails, work documents, social-media posts — and is the category where the over-35 segment shows the steepest relative growth. The third is image generation, where the curve is being driven by social-media use rather than professional creative work. The fourth, smaller but rising, is interpersonal and emotional support: relationship advice, life decisions, simulated conversation.

The trust layer inside the Deloitte numbers is the part that matters most for Portuguese policy. Portuguese respondents are about twenty points below the European mean on questions about whether they trust the outputs of GenAI tools and whether they fact-check. A meaningful share of users who say they 'use GenAI for important decisions' also say they do not verify the answers against another source. This is the data point the BCG study from January 2026 was already pointing at when it found that 61% of Portuguese respondents wanted formal AI training to become available. The Deloitte release reinforces that finding by showing that adoption has run faster than literacy — a configuration the OECD has been flagging as the highest-risk pattern in any AI-rollout cycle.

The business reading

For Portuguese employers the implication is direct. Seventy per cent adoption among consumers means staff are bringing GenAI into work environments whether or not the company has a published policy. The compliance question — what data is allowed in which tool, where intellectual-property leakage starts, who is accountable for AI-assisted output — is now a 2026 line-item rather than a 2027 planning exercise. The Deloitte authors recommend organisations move from passive prohibition to active enablement plus governance: which is the exact framing the European AI Act, due in full effect across 2026, also requires.