This study examines who adopts generative AI and whether early adoption has begun to reshape the task content of jobs across 35 European countries. Adoption ranges from under 3% to 25%. Occupational exposure strongly predicts uptake, but AI does not diffuse passively along exposure lines. At the worker level, skills, abstract task content, and employee organisational influence steepen the exposure-adoption gradient; at the country level, so do digitalisation and workplace training. A gender gap persists, concentrated in the most exposed occupations. A shift-share design finds no detectable effect of adoption on worker-reported task restructuring, consistent with an initial integration phase.
@article{arxiv.2604.18849,
title = {From Exposure to Adoption: Generative AI in European Workplaces},
author = {Golo Henseke},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.18849},
year = {2026}
}