The Union's entries are mostly rules rather than deployments: the AI Act's high-risk obligations, now deferred into 2027 and 2028, alongside the AI Continent Action Plan's €200bn InvestAI.
Announced 2025, €200bn mobilised through InvestAI. Its pillars are computing and data, skills, regulatory simplification.
Services 65.9% · Industry 22.2% · Agriculture 1.6% of gross value added — World Bank, 2025
29% of EU vocational teachers use AI tools often, and the Union has put more than €294 million into digital-skills programmes.
European Union2026Cedefop finds AI job exposure lower on average in VET occupations than non-VET ones and projects a fairly modest 5% AI-driven employment decline in the EU. It still urges giving VET students AI skills, since graduates without them may look less employable.
European Union2025Cedefop's pilot European Vocational Teacher Survey of 735 VET teachers in 23 EU Member States finds 29% using AI tools often or very often. Yet 31% say AI skills for teachers need major work in spotting relevant tools, and a similar share feel unready to judge AI's ethical risks and biases.
European Union2022Adult learning participation in the EU-27 favours the already-qualified: in 2022 just 25.1% of low-qualified adults took part, against 41.5% at medium level and 65.7% with tertiary qualifications. Adults holding a medium-level vocational qualification took part less than general-education peers at that level, 40.7% against 44.1%.
The AI Act bans predictive policing and untargeted face-scraping, with its high-risk policing rules delayed to December 2027.
European Union2026The EU AI Act's high-risk AI rules for Annex III systems, covering migration, border control and law enforcement, missed their original 2 August 2026 start. The Digital Omnibus on AI, Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, moved them to 2 December 2027, taking effect on 27 July 2026, six days before the original deadline.
European Union2026The EU's Digital Europe Programme has put over €294 million into digital skills funding for upskilling, reskilling and skilling the workforce. An EU-funded AI Skills Academy launches in 2026.
European Union2025EU AI Act bans in force since 2 February 2025, and unaffected by the 2026 delay to high-risk rules, cover predictive policing based only on profiling or personality traits and facial recognition databases built by untargeted internet or CCTV scraping. Police use of live remote biometric identification in public places is also barred outside narrowly defined purposes.
20% of EU enterprises used AI in 2025, up from 13.5%, while the AI Omnibus defers high-risk obligations to 2027 and 2028.
European Union2026Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, the 'AI Omnibus', took effect on 27 July 2026, delaying AI Act high-risk duties: stand-alone Annex III systems from 2 December 2027 and AI in Annex I regulated products from 2 August 2028, instead of 2 August 2026. Its AI Act simplification gives small mid-caps relief once limited to SMEs, widens regulatory sandbox access with an EU-level sandbox and eases database registration for exempted systems.
European Union2025AI adoption in EU enterprises with 10 or more employees reached 20.0% in 2025, 6.5 percentage points above 2024's 13.5%. Uptake climbs with company size (17% small, 30.4% medium, 55.0% large) and spans 42.0% in Denmark to 5.2% in Romania.
Rules for autonomous tractors are delayed to August 2028.
European Union2026The EU's Digital Omnibus on AI, Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, took effect on 27 July 2026. It shifts the AI Act deadline for high-risk AI in Machinery Regulation products, such as harvesting robots and autonomous tractors, from August 2027 to 2 August 2028.
The AI Act's high-risk rules for hiring are deferred to December 2027.
European Union2026The EU AI Act treats AI in recruitment and employment as 'high-risk', but the Digital Omnibus (Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, in force 27 July 2026) pushed those duties from August 2026 to 2 December 2027, and embedded product AI to 2 August 2028. Article 5 prohibitions have applied since February 2025: banned now, regulated later.
European Union0.66
United Kingdom0.73
Czechia—
Hungary—
Estonia—
Belarus—
Albania—
Germany0.75
Netherlands0.77
Switzerland—
Andorra—
Croatia—
Russia—
Belgium0.67
France0.70
Guernsey—
Italy0.62
Malta—
Serbia—
Spain0.65
Austria0.72
Gibraltar—
Iceland—
Slovakia—
Sweden0.75
Bosnia and Herzegovina—
Denmark0.78
Finland—
Greece—
Ireland0.69
Latvia—
Moldova—
Montenegro—
Poland0.60
Ukraine—Every entry on this page is a named organisation putting AI to work in a real job, taken from the State of Applied AI record. Each one is traced to the report it came from and dated, and where a figure is the organisation’s own the entry says so rather than presenting it as an independent result. Readiness, ecosystem and policy figures, where shown, are attributed on the card to the body that published them.
The record is maintained continuously by the Industrial Research Unit of the Straits Institute for Applied AI: entries are added as they are found and verified, not on a schedule, and nothing is published without an open source behind it. It currently holds 1114 entries across 249 countries.
