On 5 October 2026 the European Commission published the call for tenders for the setup and operation, for three years, of the European AI Observatory, the instrument envisaged by the Apply AI Strategy to measure the uptake and impact of AI in the key sectors of the European economy. Tenders may be submitted until 3 November 2026. This contribution gathers the main references, without claiming to be exhaustive.
The Observatory in the Commission’s Apply AI Strategy
The Apply AI Strategy was presented by the Commission on 8 October 2025 in Communication COM(2025) 723. The Commission describes it as its overarching sectoral strategy on artificial intelligence: it aims to enhance the competitiveness of strategic sectors and the EU’s technological sovereignty, with particular attention to small and medium-sized enterprises. In its introduction the Communication reports that AI technologies are used by 13.5% of businesses and 12.6% of SMEs in the EU.
The Strategy is structured in three parts: sectoral flagships for ten industrial sectors and for the public sector; cross-cutting measures on SMEs, skills, advanced AI capabilities and trust in the market; and a single governance mechanism. The Observatory belongs to this last part. According to the Communication, the Commission will set up an AI Observatory “to provide robust indicators to assess the impact of AI in the currently listed and future sectors, monitor developments and trends and the changes it may bring to the labour market”. The Observatory will also support the organisation of sectoral discussions and will be used for political analysis and decision making, as well as for informing the AI community and the broader public.
Alongside the Observatory operates the Apply AI Alliance, built on the former European AI Alliance as the point of contact between the Commission and stakeholders in strategic sectors. In the table of actions annexed to the Strategy, the setting up of the Observatory was scheduled for the second quarter of 2026.
The call: open procedure, EUR 2.5 million, deadline 3 November
The call, published on 5 October 2026 also on TED (Tenders Electronic Daily), the EU public procurement database, is managed by the Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DG CNECT) under the title “Supporting the AI Observatory” and the reference EC-CNECT/2026/OP/0173. It is an open procedure for a service contract, classified as research and development consultancy services, with an estimated total value of EUR 2.5 million and a maximum duration of 36 months. The contract will be awarded on the basis of the best price-quality ratio; no framework agreement is envisaged.
The deadline for receipt of tenders is 3 November 2026 at 16:00 (Brussels time) and the public opening is scheduled for 4 November 2026. The contracting authority is not bound to reply to questions submitted after 23 October 2026. In the answers published on the Funding & Tenders Portal, the Commission ruled out, for operational reasons, any extension of the deadline and specified that the project references required for one of the selection criteria must prove experience in data analysis, data visualisation and open data.
The Observatory’s tasks: indicators, sector reports and website
The Commission’s page describes the Observatory as a new initiative to monitor and boost the uptake of AI in key sectors across the EU. The contractor will carry out four tasks.
The first is the development of a monitoring framework based on key performance indicators to track the sectoral uptake of AI. The framework is also to cover the related domains, namely AI investments, AI-related patents, skills and talents and computing infrastructure, and to monitor their impact on the EU economy and society.
The second consists of a set of sector-specific qualitative monitoring reports identifying and assessing AI use cases across the core processes of strategic sectors. The third concerns reports on the cross-cutting challenges identified in the Strategy and beyond.
The fourth is the development and management of the Observatory’s website, which is to display interactively the key performance indicators, overview fiches for each strategic sector, a tracker of the Commission’s policy actions on AI, a selection of reports and links to the national AI strategies of the Member States.
Data and links: Eurostat, the Digital Decade and skills needs
The Communication states, in a footnote, that the Observatory will make use, among others, of the official statistics on AI uptake by enterprises in different economic sectors and of other statistics on the impact of AI on society already published by Eurostat and the Member States.
The link with the Digital Decade is explicit: based on the monitoring activities, the Commission will make a proposal, in the context of the Digital Decade, of a public and private AI investment target. For the measurement of investments, the Strategy refers to a methodology developed with the OECD. As regards work, the Commission has committed to monitoring the impact of AI on the labour market, including differences across demographic groups, sectors and regions; the results will inform the broader European Skills Intelligence Observatory announced in the Union of Skills.
On the institutional side, the AI Board established under Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 remains the main discussion forum with Member States and will continue to follow national strategies. Among the domains the Observatory is to measure is computing infrastructure, which is the subject of other European instruments such as IPCEI AI, the first Important Project of Common European Interest dedicated to artificial intelligence.
Outlook
The closing of the call on 3 November 2026 will be followed by the evaluation of tenders and the award; the contract will last up to three years. The public pages of the call do not set out the final list of indicators or a launch date for the website. Also still to be defined are the coordination with Eurostat statistics, with the future skills observatory and with the AI investment target that the Commission has announced it will propose within the Digital Decade framework.
In dialogue with the 2030 Agenda
Goal 8. Decent Work and Economic Growth: the Observatory is to monitor the changes AI may bring to the labour market and to the economy overall.
Goal 9. Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure: the monitoring framework covers AI uptake in industrial sectors, investments, patents and computing infrastructure.
Goal 4. Quality Education: AI skills and talents are among the domains to be measured, and the labour market results will feed into the European Skills Intelligence Observatory.
Sources
- European Commission, Establishing the European AI Observatory: Call for tenders, 5 October 2026
- EU Funding & Tenders Portal, Supporting the AI Observatory, EC-CNECT/2026/OP/0173
- EUR-Lex, Communication from the Commission “Apply AI Strategy”, COM(2025) 723 final, 8 October 2025
- European Commission, Apply AI Strategy
- European Commission, Apply AI Alliance
- European Commission, Europe’s Digital Decade
