A new report has revealed just how transformative Artificial Intelligence could be for the Spanish job market over the next 10 years, with millions of jobs expected to be destroyed and new ones created.
People everywhere are worried about the rise of AI, particularly when it comes the possibility of it taking over their jobs, and workers in Spain are no different.
The study ‘Artificial intelligence and the labour market in Spain: Occupational exposure, effects on employment and business adoption’, published by the Funcas Research Centre and prepared by Francisco Rodríguez, has for the first time revealed the impacts of AI on Spain’s job market specifically.
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The report estimates that between 2025 and 2035, AI will take over between 1.7 and 2.3 million jobs in Spain.
It added that the most optimistic estimate would be around 700,000 jobs, while the most pessimistic is that total job losses could exceed 3.5 million.
This huge discrepancy in numbers shows that there is still so much uncertainty – even among the experts – surrounding how quickly AI will be implemented in businesses.
The job positions that the report believes are most at risk from AI takeovers are those in administration, mid-level management and senior technical roles.
These people all perform repetitive tasks such as information processing, document writing, and data management, and this is what AI does best.
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It’s not all doom and gloom, however.
The good news is that la inteligencia artificial o IA (Artificial Intelligence or AI in Spanish) will also create many more jobs.
It is estimated that new positions linked to AI could reach around 1.61 million before 2033, leaving the net loss of jobs at approximately 400,000.
According to the report, the biggest issue with this is that the jobs that disappear and those that are created are not the same and they require a whole different skill set, so accessing the new occupations may be difficult for those same people that lose their jobs.
The second piece of good news to come out of the report is that between 2.8 and 3.5 million workers will not lose their jobs. Instead, they will work more productively thanks to AI tools, able to accomplish more work in less time.
The situation in Spain is different to many of its European neighbours. This is because Spain places greater importance on physical tasks in traditional professions, which are more difficult to automate and train AI to replace
The study places the actual risk of automation in the Spanish labour market at 5.9 percent, well below the OECD average of 12 percent.
AI is not just something that’s a long way off anymore, it has already been implemented into many Spanish companies. In the first quarter of 2025, 21.1 percent of Spanish companies with ten or more employees were already using at least one AI technology, compared to 12.4 percent in 2023.
This figure represents a jump of 8.7 percentage points in just two years. By sector, technology companies have integrated the use of AI into their processes the most at 58.7 percent, followed by the services sector at 25.7 percent, industry at 17.5 percent and construction at 11.4 percent.
