The AIEL Monitor

Sweden, in depth

39% of Swedish jobs are in the most AI-exposed occupations (the top 25% by generative-AI exposure), the 2nd-highest of 36 countries (EU average 30%). The rank depends on where the line is drawn: Sweden is 2nd at this quarter cut and at a 30% cut, 3rd at a third, and 5th if only the top 20% of occupations count, so read it as among the most exposed rather than as a precise placing. The occupation-by-occupation detail lives on the DAIOE page, and Swedish employment is set against exposure over time in the Occupations Explorer below.

Sweden, in depth · our live measure

How often Swedish employers ask for AI skills in their job ads, by year, by occupation, and soon by whether they want AI built, integrated, or simply used. We name the series by what the employer does, never by what the job is: ads that ask for AI skills, ads that name an AI skill. We deliberately avoid the phrase "AI jobs". We read every open and historical Swedish job ad (JobTech / Platsbanken, 2006 onwards) with a versioned, citable term list, so the level and its 22-fold rise since 2006 are reproducible. Employers repost, so the archive holds 11.2 million records but 8.1 million distinct advertisements; we count each advertisement once. Two corrections since the first release both raised the rise rather than lowered it: repeat postings inflated the denominator, and a handful of early ads matched product names that did not yet exist.

What this measures, and what it does not. This is demand written down in advertisements: whether the employer asks the person being hired to know or do AI, in the role's own requirements. It is not employment, which the outcomes module reports separately, and it is not AI use inside firms, which the adoption module reports. A rising line means employers ask for AI skills more often than they did; on its own it says nothing about whether AI created or removed any job. Not all hiring is advertised, so this is the advertised margin of demand rather than demand itself.

The same measure at monthly resolution, 246 months built on 16,113,466 ads. The faint line is the raw month and the bold lines are 12-month trailing means: broad AI demand in blue, the narrower skill floor in orange. A single month carries little weight, because Swedish hiring falls sharply every July and again in December, so the trend is the line to read. The broad measure now stands at 1.20% on that basis, against 0.59% for the floor.

The two lines differ in where we read. The lower line counts an ad only when AI is named in the job's own requirements, so ads that mention AI while describing the company are left out; the upper line counts a named AI skill anywhere in the ad, company description included. The gap between them is the reason we publish a range rather than a number.

This chart, like the whole Monitor, counts each distinct advertisement once. That matters for the 2022 to 2023 dip: Swedish employers, mostly staffing, care and door-to-door sales agencies, repost the same advertisement many times, and that practice grew sharply and then receded. Counted this way the share drifts 7% from 2021 to 2023, against the 30% collapse a raw record count shows. The rise since 2024 survives either way.

Of the 33,655 most recent job ads, 1.64% name a specific AI skill and 0.81% ask for one in the job itself (each figure give or take about a tenth of a percentage point). These numbers run a little higher than the chart's, for two reasons we have measured: the live feed carries a somewhat different mix of ads than the yearly archives, and the archives store slightly shortened ad texts. Once we can calibrate the two against each other, they will join into one line that runs to today.

The national figure is an average over a very uneven distribution. In the occupations where AI demand concentrates, one advertisement in seven asks for it; in several of Sweden's largest occupations, essentially none do.

Occupations with at least 400 advertisements in 2025. Names are our English renderings of the employment service's Swedish occupational labels. The measure is the strict floor, so an occupation reads zero when no advertisement asks for AI skills in the role itself, not when the word AI never appears. The line marks the national figure, 0.55%.

The split between building AI, putting it in place and simply using it is not a national constant. It is an occupational structure, and it separates research and software roles from the professions where AI arrives as a tool.

Occupations with at least 25 distinct AI-skill advertisements in 2025; repeat postings of the same advertisement are counted once. Rows do not sum to 100: the remainder is advertisements the classifier places in the AI-literacy penumbra or judges not to be AI demand at all, which is how medical secretaries appear at zero on all three tiers despite passing the lexical measure. 88.9% agreement with hand-labelled ads on the four-way split, 93.8% on the grouping shown.

A separate band counts ads that mention the vocabulary of AI governance: responsible AI, AI ethics, AI safety, AI governance and the AI Act. It has been computed since the series began and never shown, and it is the fastest-growing thing in the whole build. There were none in 2018 and 156 in the whole of 2025; the first half of 2026 alone has 185, which is 6.3% of all AI ads against 3.5% a year earlier.

Read this as language, not as jobs. Unlike our headline series, this band counts any mention rather than a requirement of the role, and a hand-check of every ad in the 2026 band found that 95% mention governance only in passing, usually an employer’s boilerplate about building responsible AI in posts for engineers, project managers and designers. What is rising fast is how often the language of AI regulation appears in Swedish hiring copy, which is worth knowing. It is not a count of governance jobs, and we do not have one.

The standing objection to any long AI series is that today’s vocabulary is being read into yesterday’s ads. The ads answer it. In 2006 the words were 35% data mining, expert systems and their kin, terms almost nobody advertises for now (0.4% in the latest period). Machine-learning vocabulary took over from about 2016, and the generative vocabulary is absent before 2022 and is 20% of all term matches today. The list is not anachronistic; the language turned over, and the measure follows it.

Shares of 59,635 term matches. Up to 27% of matches in a period fall outside these four families and are not plotted. For display, product names and words with an older everyday sense are counted only from the year they acquired their AI meaning, so the chart does not show a 2006 ad matching a model released in 2023; the published series is frozen and unchanged.

Where the demand sits, in the employers' own words. The same titles head the list year after year: machine learning engineer, data scientist, AI/ML developer. One entry is a measurement artefact worth naming: medical secretary (medicinsk sekreterare) appears because those ads mention speech-recognition software, and our classifier judges almost all of them to be describing a tool the job uses rather than an AI skill it asks for. The newcomers column is the language at work: job titles crossing three ads in a year for the first time.

Top titles and the newcomer list are the advertisements' own headlines, as employers wrote them (lightly cleaned: employer and place names removed), with an English gloss where the employer wrote in Swedish; top titles are counted among ads that ask for AI skills in the role itself, and a newcomer's year is the first in which at least three ads carry that title. The cooled list still uses the employment service's occupation taxonomy (our English renderings), where an occupation "clears the bar" with at least five AI-skill ads in a year. A vacancy posted more than once counts each time.

Every ad that asks for AI skills in the role itself, 2023 to mid-2026, classified by what the worker is hired to do with AI. A language-model classifier applies the lab's written labelling rules; it agrees with our hand-labelled reference ads 89 per cent of the time on the four-way split and 94 per cent on the grouping shown here. The headline: employers still mostly hire people to build AI, but the fastest-growing tier is people hired to simply use it.

Sweden, in depth · by firm size

Sweden is among the EU leaders at 35% in 2025, up from 25.1% a year earlier (Eurostat). SCB's firm survey decomposes that headline by size: adoption climbs steeply with the size of the firm, from 31% of small firms (10–49 employees) to 72% of large ones (250+), every class up sharply since 2021. The all-firms figure (35%, highlighted) is the same number the cross-country bar shows.

Sweden, in depth · by worker

Firm surveys count employers who have started. This counts people, and it counts them the way the Swedish professional trade union Akavia does: the share of professionals using AI daily or weekly. Between the only two rounds that asked the question the same way, that share went from 28% in May 2024 to 68% in May 2026. Counting any use at all, however occasional, gives 89% on the same round. Nearly everyone now works somewhere AI is used at all (92% in 2024, 97% in 2025). The spread by profession is wide: communication professionals are furthest ahead and lawyers furthest behind, and central government trails the private sector by 33pp. Men 72%, women 65%.

Bars are May 2026, with the change measured against May 2024, the one earlier round that asked the question identically. Cell sizes differ a great deal: communication professionals rest on 80 respondents (71–93% interval), against 1202 for the largest group.

The Swedish number above is one professional union's members; no representative Swedish figure exists at this level. The nearest comparison is American: 37.8% of employed adults used generative AI for work in the reference week (Real-Time Population Survey, Q1 2026), a whole-workforce rate. Sweden publishes no equivalent: the national survey asks about work-related use but counts it across the whole population rather than the employed. That gap is the reason this level is the module's weakest, and a thing worth measuring rather than citing. Measures recognised, deliberate use: respondents who had never heard of generative AI are routed past the survey module and counted as non-users.

Data shared with the lab by Akavia. Figures describe Akavia's members in six professions, not the Swedish labour market as a whole, and the sample is not an unrestricted random sample of the population. The question wording also changed twice over the period, so the trend is not a clean time series: part of any change reflects the wording rather than behaviour, and the size of that part is not knowable from these data.

Sweden, in depth · by person

Broadest of the three: the share of everyone aged 16–74 who has used generative AI at all, at work or outside it, from SCB's population survey: a probability sample with published margins of error, so this is the firmest number in the module. It rose from 28% in 2024 to 42% in 2025 (±2). Age divides it far more than anything else does: 67% of 16–24-year-olds against 7% of 65–74s, a 60-point span. The gap between men and women is narrowing, from 10 points in 2024 to 7 (45% against 38%). Figures refer to the first quarter of the survey year.

The US counterpart at this level is 57.9% (Real-Time Population Survey, Q1 2026). Read it as a reference point, not a ranking: it covers ages 18–64 where SCB covers 16–74, and Swedish 65–74-year-olds use generative AI far less (7%), which pulls the Swedish figure down relative to a US-style base.