From Compliance to Confidence: AI Diffusion, GDPR and Organisational Trust in Europe

This article examines the relationship between artificial intelligence adoption, data protection regulation and organisational trust in Europe. Rather than treating regulation as an external obstacle to innovation, it argues that legal frameworks can become confidence infrastructure when organisations have the capacity to translate legal duties into practical routines. Organisational trust is framed as a condition of action under uncertainty, shaped by legal clarity, professional expertise, governance capacity and calibrated reliance on automated systems. The analysis uses Eurostat data on enterprise AI adoption in 2024 and 2025 and compares EU Member States through a transparent ordinary least-squares model. The model indicates strong path-dependence: previous adoption explains most cross-national variation in 2025 AI use. Robustness checks excluding the Netherlands, which Eurostat flags as a 2025 break in time series, do not materially alter the result. Residual differences nevertheless reveal acceleration and drag, suggesting that diffusion also depends on skills, sectoral composition, institutional capacity and governance readiness. The findings show that lack of relevant expertise, uncertainty about legal consequences and concerns about data protection and privacy operate as measurable adoption frictions among enterprises that considered but did not use AI. The article concludes that Europe’s AI challenge is not a simple trade-off between competitiveness and compliance; GDPR safeguards and phased AI Act risk governance can support organisational confidence when translated into AI literacy, data protection routines, human oversight, documentation and intelligible decision-making.