According to a local AI job market survey published by Snowflake, Companies in Spain are prioritizing the adoption of AI with the aim of achieving more efficiency. This is stated by 43% of the 200 surveyed by the company, all of them at the management level of large companies in Spain.
Furthermore, the survey results highlight that the adoption of AI is also complemented by other strategic drivers, such as competitive advantage (25%), product and service innovation (22%) and cost reduction (10%).
The study also shows that Spanish companies are aware that to boost productivity through the adoption of AI they must first build a solid database. In fact, respondents almost unanimously agreed that data management is a key priority for their AI initiatives. This is what 99% of them say.
On the other hand, Spanish companies consider that among their main priorities to improve the efficiency of their data management processes are the integration of AI capabilities directly into data flows (39%) and the optimization of the performance and scalability of data operations (34%).
Other priorities expressed by respondents in this regard are reducing data infrastructure costs for AI (31%), improving data quality and governance (30%), and automating data preparation and processing (27%).
This data-centric AI strategy is changing the demand for talent, with respondents saying the top technical skill to help businesses accelerate their AI adoptions is data engineering (52%), as well as workflow integration and automation (43%).
But the study also shows that technical skill is not enough. Their results reveal the rising value of non-technical skills to enable companies to close the gap between technology and business, and advance the adoption of AI. Thus, the most valued competence, according to 40% of the study participants, is experience in a specific sector, followed by the ability to think about the product strategically (32%).
In light of this, organizations are actively seeking hybrid professionals who on the one hand have technical skills, but who also have the business vision to apply AI to solve real problems and generate value that can be measured.
This also implies that to advance the adoption of AI, professionals of the future, with the aforementioned profile, must have easy, connected and reliable data platforms, which can centralize data from different sources under a single environment, unified with an integrated AI layer. But it must also be complemented by robust data governance, including implementing role-based access policies to ensure that each user can only access information relevant to their specific tasks.
José María Alonso, Regional Director for the Mediterranean area and Country Manager for Spain and Portugal at Snowflakehas also recalled that «While AI is transforming the way we work and allowing us to extract valuable insights from across the organization, its usefulness depends on the quality of the data it uses. The main conclusion of our research is that companies in Spain understand that the true potential of AI can only be unlocked by ensuring that the data that feeds it is accessible, of high quality and is seamlessly integrated into each workflow. The fact that almost all respondents highlight data management as a priority underlines this reality and the maturity of the Spanish market.”.
