A nationwide survey of nearly 500 Hungarian business leaders, IT professionals and system administrators found that 92% of respondent companies already use some form of artificial intelligence. However, deep organizational integration is still uncommon: at roughly two-thirds of firms AI use remains experimental or confined to a few narrow areas, while only 27% report broad deployment across multiple business functions.
Which platforms and how common are in-house solutions?
Among generative AI tools, ChatGPT is the most widely used (69% of respondents). Google Gemini is used by 56%, Claude by 37%, and Microsoft Copilot by 29%. Additionally, 22% of companies reported employing custom, in-house AI solutions, suggesting movement toward tailored applications for specific business needs.
Marosán Andrea, CEO of Serverelite, warned that unmanaged individual ChatGPT or Gemini accounts at companies can lead to loss of data control and increased risk.
Main application areas
The most significant usage areas are programming (64%), data analysis (50%) and document processing (48%). In contrast, AI plays a minimal role in HR (5%), manufacturing (4%) and logistics (3%).
Survey respondents said the primary motivations for adopting AI are saving time and costs, reducing human labor, and eliminating errors arising from manual work.
Infrastructure and deployment models
Most companies (62%) run AI workloads in public cloud environments for rapid scalability and to avoid initial capital outlays. Thirty-three percent use on-premises servers and 17% use private clouds.
Serverelite’s CEO highlighted substantial infrastructure gaps: only 16% of respondents consider their existing server capacity fully adequate for AI tasks, while 46% are dissatisfied or skeptical about current hardware capabilities. The survey also found that 58% of firms do not use GPU acceleration for compute tasks.
Costs and other barriers
Respondents identified the top technological barriers as high costs (36%), insufficient memory (29%) and limited compute capacity (27%). Financial caution is evident: 42% of companies spend less than HUF 50,000 per month on AI services, while only 2% report monthly expenditures above HUF 1,000,000.
Conclusions: progress but significant work remains
Serverelite interprets the results as evidence that Hungarian companies have crossed the threshold into the AI era — the 92% usage rate is encouraging, but many deployments remain ad hoc or experimental. The next major challenge is to scale processes and implement AI at a strategic, system-wide level. Achieving that will require infrastructure upgrades, expanded GPU capacity and realistic budgeting. Company leadership should first clarify specific AI use cases and then assess infrastructure needs to make informed decisions about further investments.
