Fact Sheet #18: European hubs of AI skills demand

The highest shares were observed in Luxembourg, Denmark and Sweden, while several Eastern European countries lagged behind but showed rapid growth (Büchel et al., 2026a). Country averages, however, could potentially hide substantial variation within countries. Recent OECD evidence shows that AI diffusion across European regions is driven more by frontrunner regions extending their lead than by laggard regions catching up, with the most innovative regions adopting AI first and fastest (Kergroach/Héritier, 2025). If the adoption of AI is concentrating in a limited number of regions, the demand for the skills required to develop and adapt AI applications should follow a similar pattern. However, testing this requires analysing data at a smaller scale than the national level.

To this end, this fact sheet provides a detailed regional analysis of the in-depth AI skills demand in the EU-27, aiming to uncover European hubs of demand for AI skills. The analysis was based on a dataset from Lightcast (2026) that contains the full texts of approximately 182 million unique job postings that were advertised in the 27 EU Member States from 2022 to 2025. It used a multilingual, rule-based classification model that identifies EU job postings requiring in-depth AI skills (Büchel et al., 2026b). In-depth AI skills go beyond the general AI skills required to use AI applications effectively, instead enabling employees to develop or adapt AI-based solutions themselves, for example (Büchel et al., 2026a).  

Regional AI skills demand in the EU

The regional analysis was conducted at NUTS 2 level – the EU’s standardised regional classification for statistical comparison across countries (Eurostat, 2024). NUTS 2 regions generally correspond to population sizes of 800,000 to 3 million inhabitants and form the main territorial level used to classify regions under EU cohesion policy (European Commission, 2003). Figure 1 shows the share of AI job postings in each of the EU’s NUTS 2 regions in 2025.