Artificial intelligence is on the horizon, but Italia is ill-prepared
Proxima Observatory’s 2026 Education and Employment Report: Italy ranks last in Europe for employment among 20–29-year-olds. The cost of human capital lost due to the outflow of young people abroad is estimated at €159 billion
Key points
- The employment record that doesn’t tell the whole story
- Within ten years, the manufacturing sector could lose 4.3 million jobs
In two years, the proportion of Italian companies with at least ten employees using artificial intelligence technologies has tripled: from 5% in 2023 to 16.4% in 2025. But the figure that reveals the nature of the problem is another: a lack of adequate skills is holding back 58.6% of companies, which have considered investing in AI but have not done so. The technology is here. The skills to use it are not.
Among workers aged 22–25, the rate of entry into new jobs with high exposure to AI has fallen by 14% in the post-ChatGPT era. AI is eroding the on-the-job training opportunities through which younger generations used to build their skills in the workplace. A paradox: just when the market has structurally fewer young people to employ, the tool that should increase productivity is squeezing the space in which that productivity is learnt. This is what emerges from the 2026 Training and Work Report by the Proxima Observatory, part of the Enzima12 group, presented on Tuesday 9 June 2026 in Rome.
The lack of continuing education for adults costs Italia 26 billion a year
Overall, the annual cost of the lack of continuing education for adults in Italia amounts to twenty-six billion euros. The equivalent of an entire budget. A figure that does not appear in any public accounts, does not feature in any company balance sheet, and does not emerge in any sustainability report. Yet it accumulates, year after year, with the regularity of a debt that no one has formally incurred but which the entire economy continues to pay.
The employment record that doesn’t tell the whole story
In 2025, Italia recorded its highest employment rate since ISTAT began compiling statistics: 62.5% among those aged 15–64, representing over 24 million people in work. An understandably appealing narrative. But the record, broken down by age group, tells a different story.
Over 80% of the rise in employment in 2024 is attributable to the over-50s. The number of people in work aged over 50 has exceeded 10 million for the first time – almost double the figure for 2004. In younger age groups, however, there is stagnation or a decline. The mechanism is well known: pension reforms have raised the effective age of exit from the labour market, retaining older workers who, under a different system, would already have retired. The record level of employment is, to a large extent, a side effect of demographic ageing.
