This study was conducted by tracking publicly available job posts.
These are ratios, not raw counts. Every headline figure compares builder hiring to governance hiring from the same source, the same window and the same method, so whatever LinkedIn over- or under-counts, it does so on both sides, and the bias largely cancels. That’s why we report Sweden as 16-to-1 rather than as a count of roles.
This is the flow of new hiring, not the stock of existing teams. A company that built its governance function last year and isn’t currently advertising won’t appear here.
English-language search terms undercount roles posted in local languages, so the true gap is likely somewhat narrower, but the direction and scale are consistent across all eight countries.
The dataset: 3,519 classified AI-related postings, resolving to 446 governance roles and 3,004 builder roles, across Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and Sweden, deduplicated by job identifier and collected over 30-day windows in mid-2026.
Job ads are written by recruiters, not compliance teams. A posting that never names the Act can still land on someone’s desk as AI Act work, and a posting that names it three times can turn out to be a rebadged privacy role. So read the mention rates as a signal of how explicitly the market is organizing around the law. They can’t tell you whether any one company is ready.
This is one 30-day window, and it opened days after the Council approved the Digital Omnibus. Some of the hiring restraint in these numbers is probably companies deciding to use the extra time, not companies ignoring the law. The postings over the next few months will show which it is. We’ll run the analysis again and publish what changed.
The dataset: 3,519 classified AI-related postings, resolving to 446 governance roles and 3,004 builder roles, across Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and Sweden, deduplicated by job identifier and collected over 30-day windows in mid-2026.