Competencies for AI adoption in public administration: A demand-side study based on job postings from Germany

Digital competencies have become a central field of interest for politics, academics, and business in the last decade. The relevance and range of AI competencies for e-government have already been addressed by several studies, although generalisable empirical analyses based upon quantitative approaches are rare. The aim of the research presented in this study is to understand which competencies are needed for AI adoption in public administration from the employer’s perspective. For this purpose, a large-scale analysis of N=62,028 public job postings from Germany between July and November 2023 was conducted. Based on a conceptual framework of AI in public administration, text mining methods were used to extract AI competency requirements. The results show that AI currently is not a dominant topic in the light of public job offerings in Germany, with only 0.91% (n=565 job postings) including the term artificial intelligence (“Künstliche Intelligenz”). While this supports the assumption that AI has not yet proliferated as a cross-sectional technology within public administration and remains in an early stage, it also emphasises the need for effective measures to achieve the political goals in national and European strategy documents.