In a Metron Analysis survey conducted in October 2025, 47% of respondents said they use artificial intelligence applications. By January 2026, the first diaNEOsis survey on AI put that figure at 65%, a striking jump of eighteen percentage points.
The most recent diaNEOsis survey, from May 2026, pushed the number even higher, to 69%.
That latest survey found that 6 in 10 Greeks report using such tools several times a week, while nearly 1 in 4 say they use AI on a daily basis. Education, including higher education, is one of the key sectors where these applications have taken hold. According to a UNESCO survey, two-thirds of higher education institutions have already adopted or are in the process of developing policies governing AI use. That study collected 400 responses from UNESCO networks across 90 countries, with nine out of ten participants reporting that they use AI tools in their professional activity, primarily for research and writing.
Recently, students at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) told us they use AI applications daily for their coursework. One of them remarked that “you can’t get through this school without AI,” prompting the natural question of how students in comparable programs managed their academic workloads just five years ago.
Michalis, 22, an undergraduate at NTUA, told us: “There hasn’t been a single day I’ve worked on school stuff without using AI. That’s been the case for the past year. I first came across these tools in February 2024. It saves you an incredible amount of time and gives you the ability to keep up with how demanding the program is. From research and understanding concepts and theory, to writing code and analyzing data. School was doable before AI, but I can’t imagine getting through five years without it. It feels like AI has taken some of the weight off.”
A similar picture emerged from Despoina, a graduate student in psychology, and Michalis, a speech therapy graduate: “I used it for my thesis and saved a huge amount of time finding sources that were more targeted to my topic. Its help with translation was invaluable. An AI can translate a multi-page paper in seconds, with precise terminology. I don’t think I couldn’t have finished without it, but I would absolutely use it again for the same reasons.”
Panos Tsiareas, a PhD student in economics at Princeton, adds an important dimension about the need to critically evaluate what AI produces: “I think it’s 100% necessary because you can now test and explore many working hypotheses much faster, and that lets you quickly identify dead ends and steer your research more effectively. That said, because AI gives you a huge number of results and possibilities in terms of research methods, you have to be much more careful and not simply trust everything it feeds you. You inevitably become a constant critic and a necessary reviewer of the advice and outputs it provides.”
What Professors Are Saying
Antonis Kalogeropoulos, associate professor of political communication at the Free University of Brussels, pointed out to us that AI has led many of his colleagues to revert to older forms of student assessment: “There are uses of AI that are permitted and uses that are prohibited. Because identifying the prohibited uses is difficult, most professors are abandoning written assignments as an assessment method and returning to written or oral exams.”
The overall attitude toward AI is favorable, though with a clear call for frameworks and guidelines. Dimosthenis Kollias, an economist at the GSEE Labour Institute who researches AI use in the professional sector, put it this way: “Nothing is strictly necessary in life. If you want to walk up to the sixth floor, you can do it, but there’s a new elevator now, and if you learn how to use it, you’re helping yourself. In Greece, business adoption of AI is among the lowest in the EU, ranking fourth from the bottom. That can and should change. There is reason for hope though: 8 out of 10 young people use it, the highest rate in Europe. Just another one of those lovely Greek paradoxes.”
