Snowflake Study on the AI Labor Market in Spain

The study, conducted in June and July 2025 and surveying 200 senior professionals from large companies in Spain, revealed that 71 percent of companies are already in advanced stages of AI adoption. Despite this widespread adoption, a significant number of respondents indicate that the true scalability of their projects is hampered by three major challenges: lack of trust in AI (37 percent), talent shortage (20 percent), and data quality (19 percent). Other notable challenges cited include high costs (11 percent) and regulation (10 percent).

“This finding highlights that trust is a major challenge for AI scalability,” said José María Alonso, country manager for Spain and Portugal at Snowflake. “Our research shows that companies in Spain not only need to develop their AI capabilities, but also ensure their explainability, robustness, and ethical alignment so that users and stakeholders can fully trust their decisions and results.”

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‎„Our research shows that companies in Spain not only need to further develop their AI capabilities, but also ensure their explainability, robustness and ethical alignment.”

José María Alonso,
Country Manager for Spain and Portugal,
Snowflake.

Strategies for attracting and retaining talent

Snowflake's latest study indicates a shortage of AI talent in Spain. An overwhelming majority of local organizations (96 percent) say that the availability of professionals directly influences their AI investment decisions. To address this situation, companies are choosing to retrain employees (46 percent) and increase salaries or other benefits (45 percent) in order to attract and retain talent.

"It's not just about finding AI experts, but professionals who understand how to apply AI strategically to ensure that it is understood and relevant to business objectives. It's clear that to take advantage of the opportunity presented by AI, organizations need to rely on data platforms that simplify their data architectures, enabling existing teams to be more productive and reducing dependence on highly specialized and hard-to-find talent profiles," explains José María.

Other strategies that companies are using to address the current AI talent shortage include adjusting job requirements to expand the pool of candidates (41 percent), outsourcing AI-related work to third parties or consultants (41 percent), and hiring people with different career paths unrelated to AI (39 percent).

According to the study, some of the roles that organizations in Spain have had the most difficulty filling are those that combine technical skills with strategic, legal, and ethical knowledge, such as AI consultants (29 percent), legal experts in AI (29 percent), and AI solution architects (29 percent). The demand for experts in AI ethics (24 percent) is also significant.

Modern, easy-to-use data platforms that can democratize data can help organizations overcome challenges such as a lack of specialized personnel and mistrust of AI by centralizing business data in a fully governed environment with an AI layer overlaid. This should be accompanied by good management practices across the organization, such as role-based access to ensure that the right business department and users can access the right data and use AI to power their analytics.

"AI is increasingly blurring the lines that have always existed between technical and business teams. These traditional boundaries were never due to a lack of desire to collaborate, but rather a lack of common language and tools. With AI, natural language is now the universal language for data, empowering business leaders to become more active participants in data analysis, while enabling data analysts and engineers to elevate their roles, becoming more strategic partners within their companies," adds José María.

Methodology

The research was conducted by Censuswide with 200 respondents in Spain: corporate data directors, AI directors, and IT directors in companies with more than 250 employees (aged 25+) between June 27, 2025, and July 3, 2025. Censuswide complies with and employs members of the Market Research Society, which is based on ESOMAR principles, and is a member of the British Polling Council.

Source: Snowflake