By Dr. Tawhid CHTIOUI, Founding President of aivancity School of AI & Data for Buisness & Society
March 2025. In the hushed atmosphere of a London conference center, a hundred European leaders, including government officials, business executives, union representatives and digital experts, scrutinize the slides of a freshly released report by the consultancy Forrester. The title appears in stark black letters: « European Employees Are Falling Behind US Workers On AI Skills. » Then comes the figure that stuns the room: only 22% of European employees report having received AI training in their company, compared to 43% in the United States. The chart speaks volumes. An uneasy silence fills the room, broken only by a murmur: Is Europe losing the digital battle without even putting up a fight?
Beyond the statistic lies a strategic shift. The gap is not merely about the technologies deployed or the startups launched. It cuts to the core of any sustainable transition: human capability. And behind what seems like a technical transatlantic gap lies a deeper issue of sovereignty, competitiveness and social justice. Europe, steeped in humanist values, may be too slow to adapt its model to the rapid transformations of the digital age.
Digital Sovereignty: The New Battleground for Economic Power
Artificial intelligence is no longer a mere lever of technological innovation; it has become a tool of power, a channel of influence, and a barometer of structural dependencies. As the United States and China engage in a fierce race through massive investments, strategic regulations and global talent acquisition, Europe risks slipping into the role of a passive consumer of technologies designed elsewhere. Without control over AI-related skills, the continent condemns itself to adopting external solutions — potentially opaque, often unsuitable, and invariably tied to extra-European interests.
This loss of technological control is not theoretical: it directly undermines Europe’s economic and political autonomy. In an age where intelligent systems govern decision-making, supply chains, risk management, and customer relationships, failing to massively upskill the workforce amounts to outsourcing sovereignty to private foreign actors. In short, neglecting AI today is to forfeit the ability to govern tomorrow.
Sectors such as customer service, digital marketing, logistics and financial analysis are already undergoing rapid transformation. In these domains, the ability to use AI assistants, language models or predictive systems is becoming a decisive employability criterion. Conversely, untrained workers risk being relegated to residual or automatable tasks, widening internal digital divides across generations, regions and professional categories.
What’s at stake is not only the future of Europe’s labor market — it’s the very preservation of an inclusive and autonomous socio-economic model in the algorithmic age.
A New Digital Divide That Threatens Europe’s Social Fabric
This strategic dependency on external technologies is rooted in structural inequalities in training, weakening the European social model. As AI skills become essential across multiple sectors, Europe is falling dangerously behind in disseminating this critical knowledge. According to PwC, 70% of large US companies have already integrated AI into their internal training programs, compared to just 41% of their European counterparts. This imbalance is exacerbated by a stark difference in investment: training budgets in the US are on average 30% higher, supported by aggressive fiscal incentives aimed at speeding up strategic tech adoption.
But beyond the numbers, it is the lack of political coordination within the EU that hampers continent-wide upskilling. Only 6 out of 27 EU member states currently have a dedicated national AI training strategy for the workforce. This lack of harmonization undermines the coherence of efforts and blocks the emergence of a shared digital skills framework — crucial to ensuring both competitiveness and inclusiveness.
The most affected are SMEs, which make up 99% of Europe’s economic fabric. Too often, they lack the financial means, qualified human resources, or visibility needed to access existing training schemes. Administrative complexity, combined with a fragmented training offer, leaves them on the sidelines of the algorithmic revolution.
The systemic risk is clear: a digital elite concentrated in a few major firms capable of investing heavily, while the vast majority of workers and organizations fall behind. This dynamic risks fostering a new polarized socio-economic order, with the rise of a « technocratic aristocracy » and a digitally vulnerable majority, increasingly marginalized by rapidly obsolete skillsets. Without regulation and ambitious training strategies, AI may amplify social and territorial inequalities rather than drive inclusive progress.
Rethinking Education to Save Digital Europe
Given the scale of the gap and the depth of its effects, Europe’s response cannot be fragmented or timid. What is needed is a systemic overhaul of the educational and professional training model, equal to the civilizational challenges posed by artificial intelligence. It is not merely a matter of adjustment, but of fundamentally rethinking how Europe educates, supports and transforms the skills of its citizens throughout their working lives.
The Forrester report, supported by studies from the OECD, WEF, and AI4EU, stresses the urgency of deploying large-scale, contextualized, sector-specific reskilling programs. These programs must be short, modular, and financially accessible, addressing the constraints of both employees and employers. The goal: enable rapid, practical upskilling, especially for those without a technical or scientific background.
In parallel, the proposal for a common European AI certification, acting as a shared language across countries and sectors, could establish a minimum operational skillset recognized continent-wide. This would require tight cooperation among governments, higher education institutions and businesses, to ensure academic rigor, business relevance and adaptability to technological change. Initiatives like the European Qualifications Framework (EQF) can serve as a foundation, enhanced with AI-specific components such as algorithmic ethics, human oversight, and explainability.
This educational renaissance must also reinforce public-private partnerships, encouraging hybrid programs that combine academic excellence with real-world industry experience. Higher education institutions, such as aivancity, can no longer train in isolation; they must become collaborative platforms, particularly in sectors most disrupted by digital transformation (healthcare, finance, logistics, industry, public services, etc.).
Finally, a proactive support policy for SMEs is essential. This includes targeted tax incentives, streamlined access to funding, and dedicated guidance for internal transformation. Training alone is not enough: skills must be deployed in ecosystems where AI becomes a real opportunity, not an unreachable luxury.
Ethics and Regulation: Improving AI Acceptability to Foster Widespread Adoption
The skills gap cannot be disentangled from the issue of social acceptability of AI. Forrester highlights a striking perceptual gap: 59% of US employees believe AI will improve their work, compared to just 36% in Europe. This skepticism, fueled by anxiety and lack of awareness, hinders adoption — especially of generative AI tools, which are already widely used in tasks such as report automation, writing assistance, predictive analysis, data visualization, and even coding.
But beyond cultural distance, this also reveals a critical and ethical disconnect, growing more concerning as these technologies enter decision-making processes. The training deficit is not just an economic issue — it raises fundamental questions of justice, governance and rights. As expertise concentrates, digital knowledge itself becomes a new vector of inequality — between countries, regions, sectors, and professions. In this context, the uneven distribution of skills contradicts Europe’s commitments to equity and inclusion.
On the regulatory front, Europe has taken a leading stance with the AI Act, which mandates algorithmic transparency, legal accountability and effective human oversight. Yet this ambitious framework risks remaining aspirational if employees lack the skills to fulfil their supervisory role. Without massive, targeted continuous training, the principle of human oversight may remain a legal fiction.
The legal risks are tangible. Deploying AI in underprepared environments exposes companies to severe pitfalls: untraceable automated decisions, undetected algorithmic bias, and non-compliance in regulated sectors like healthcare, finance or HR. AI doesn’t eliminate responsibility — it shifts it, requiring organizations to actively manage the opacity of algorithms.
In this context, training is not just a strategic imperative — it becomes an ethical lever. Responsibility must be shared across governments, companies, professional bodies and training providers, to build an ecosystem where rights, transparency and technological performance coexist. It’s not only about legal safeguards — it’s about ensuring the legitimacy of AI in the eyes of European citizens.
Reclaiming the Initiative: Europe’s Urgent Priorities
The Forrester report serves as a wake-up call: artificial intelligence is no longer a technological trend ; it is now a strategic barometer of sovereignty and social justice. If Europe fails to swiftly address its digital skills gap, it stands to lose far more than competitiveness. It may lose control over its own value chains, rely on foreign players for innovation, and widen already existing social and territorial divides.
Facing the dual dominance of the US and China, Europe must abandon its reactive stance and assert a bold, ethical and inclusive technological ambition. This challenge must be addressed as a political project in its own right: reaffirming strategic sovereignty, safeguarding social cohesion, and ensuring that Europe’s democratic values shape the digital ecosystem, rather than be sidelined by it.
A critical analysis of the current situation highlights several urgent, concrete priorities. First, scale up existing initiatives such as AI4Europe and the AI Skills Alliance, with increased funding, broader geographic reach and more integrated governance at the European level.
Second, embed AI literacy into secondary education, progressively and contextually, to create a shared foundation of digital knowledge across generations and social backgrounds. The goal is not mass-producing coders, but empowering digitally competent citizens capable of intelligent interaction with automated systems.
Third, develop European AI excellence hubs, modeled on but distinct from US and Asian tech clusters, grounded in interdisciplinarity, regional anchoring, resource sharing and cross-border collaboration. These ecosystems must reflect Europe’s diversity and innovation potential, not merely mimic foreign models.
Finally, AI must be fully integrated into public vocational training policies, with strong state backing. The US provides a benchmark: 45% of its AI-trained employees are supported through public or public-private programs. Europe must pursue a similar strategy, built on accessibility, quality and scalability, to prevent AI from becoming the preserve of an already privileged elite.
Conclusion: Reinventing Digital Sovereignty, Collectively
Europe stands at a critical juncture. In a world where artificial intelligence reshapes economic, cultural and geopolitical dynamics, mastering digital skills is no longer optional ; it is a strategic necessity. What was once a competitive advantage is now the minimum requirement for sovereignty, not just in technology, but in politics, society and education.
This is not just about innovation. It’s about retaining the ability to chart one’s own destiny. Training broadly in AI means refusing to outsource the future. It means building an economy capable of inventing, a society capable of understanding, and a democracy capable of deciding, in the age of intelligent systems.
Such ambition demands a clear and collective vision: transnational cooperation, social inclusion, rigorous digital ethics and responsible innovation must anchor a cohesive European project. Europe has no shortage of talent, values or regulatory foresight. What it now needs is the resolve to act, with lucidity and determination.
Awakening Europe’s digital potential is a formidable challenge. But it is inescapable. This is more than a technological issue; it is a civilizational cause. And our collective ability to rise to it will determine not just Europe’s role in the world, but whether it remains faithful to what it has always claimed to represent: an active humanism in the face of brute power, and enlightened freedom in the age of blind automation.
Références
• Forrester. (2025). European Employees Are Falling Behind US Workers On AI Skills. www.forrester.com
• PwC. (2024). AI Workforce Readiness Report 2024. www.pwc.com
• World Economic Forum. (2023). The Future of Jobs Report 2023. www.weforum.org
• European Commission. (2024). National AI Skills Strategies in Europe. digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu
• Morozov, E. (2015). The Net Delusion. PublicAffairs.
• Cardon, D. (2019). Culture numérique. Presses de Sciences Po.
• AI Act (2024). European Parliament. www.europarl.europa.eu
