Intensity of Artificial Intelligence Use and the Intensive Margin of Exports: Evidence from Firms in 12 Euro Area Countries in 2025

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) goes hand in hand with higher productivity, higher product quality, and lower trade costs. Therefore, it can be expected to be positively related to export activities. This paper uses firm level data from 12 member countries of the Euro Area collected in 2025 to shed further light on this issue by investigating the link between the intensity of use of AI and the intensive margins of exports measured as the percentage share of exports in total sales. Applying a new machine-learning estimator, Kernel-Regularized Least Squares (KRLS), which does not impose any restrictive assumptions for the functional form of the relation between margin of exports, the intensity of use of AI and any control variables, we find that firms which use AI more intensively do export a higher share of total sales. AI intensity and export intensity are positively related.