Generative AI at Work: From Exposure to Adoption across 35 European Countries

Original Abstract

Generative AI diffuses at pace across European workplaces, but unevenly. Using the 2024 European Working Conditions Survey of more than 36,600 workers across 35 countries, we examine who adopts generative AI and whether early adoption has begun to reshape the task content of jobs. Adoption averages 12\% but ranges from under 3% to 25% across countries. Although occupational exposure strongly predicts uptake, AI does not diffuse passively along exposure lines. At the worker level, individual skills, non-routine cognitive job content within occupations, and employee say in organisational decisions steepen the exposure-adoption gradient; at the country level, so do digitalisation and workplace training provision. A gender gap persists, concentrated in the most exposed occupations. A shift-share design finds no detectable effect of early adoption on worker-reported technology-related task restructuring, consistent with a transitional phase in which AI is fitted into changing work processes rather than actively reshaping them.