What does Europe buy when it buys AI?

Public registers record what is bought, not whether it contains AI. I measured what that gap hides, in 14.5 million purchase records.

The count

Counting AI by keyword gives the wrong number.

43–82%

of the public purchases that mention AI are AI purchases. The rest include a “Directorate for Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence”, file codes that start with “AI” and catering for AI conferences.

4–29%

of the AI bought is described in other words or only by a brand: speech recognition for a hospital, licences of ChatGPT and Copilot. Keyword counts miss all of it.

Rule of thumb

A keyword count is a guess. Read by meaning, and measure the error.

Source: Ramos-Sánchez (2026), Unseen AI: what Europe’s public sector buys, and what its procurement registers cannot show, white paper v1.1, chapter 2. TED and the national registers of Spain, Italy, France, Germany and the Netherlands, about 14.5 million records; precision measured on a random sample of 2,317 purchases reviewed by hand.

The gap

Governing AI is almost never what is bought.

1 / 100

AI purchases buys its governance: an impact assessment, an audit, compliance support or an AI Act course.

€13,000

is the median governance purchase, about what a typical AI purchase costs. Cost is not the obstacle.

Rule of thumb

Governance that leaves no trace cannot be checked.

Done in house or written into the contract, it does not show in the register. No one can tell from the public record how seriously the AI the public sector buys is governed.

Source: Unseen AI, chapter 5: 40 governance purchases among 3,836 AI purchases in TED and Spain’s national register, January 2024 to October 2026.

The deadline

The AI Act needs what the register cannot show.

months to 2 December 2027. From then, public bodies that deploy high-risk AI listed in the AI Act, such as emergency triage, owe a fundamental rights impact assessment.

Aug 2028

AI inside medical devices that need a third-party conformity assessment becomes high-risk. Today the register cannot tell who either group is.

Rule of thumb

Make AI visible first: a label on every notice.

Set by the buyer and declared by the supplier, whatever the brand, with a link to the AI Act's EU database for high-risk systems.

Sources: AI Act, Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, Article 27 and Annex III, with the dates set by the Digital Omnibus, Regulation (EU) 2026/1744; recommendation 1 of Unseen AI, chapter 7.

The tool

Search what Europe buys by meaning.

The AI Procurement Observatory reads the public IT purchases of six European registers by meaning, not by keywords, and marks the ones that are AI.

An open-weights embedding model places every purchase in a space of meaning, so a search finds what a notice describes in any language and whatever words it uses.

Ask in your own words, not in keywords.

Search several terms at once, in any language.

AI labels estimated with the method of Unseen AI.

Free and open, built on public registers.

Open the Observatory