Nearly One in Five German Firms Say AI Makes Replacing Academics Easy, Ifo Survey Shows
13.06.2026 - 10:51:29 | boerse-global.de
A fresh survey from the Ifo Institute, conducted in May 2026 among almost 3,000 companies actively using AI, has thrown a spotlight on how the technology is reshaping the value of formal qualifications. According to the data, 19.2 percent of respondents said they could replace university graduates either "easily" or "very easily" with less-qualified workers who are backed by AI tools. The sentiment was strongest in the retail sector, where 28.6 percent of firms shared that view.
Ifo researcher Anna Ruffert noted that the technology is now capable of partially offsetting longstanding experience and formal credentials. Around 15 percent of businesses even saw a path to swapping experienced staff for inexperienced hires, as long as those newcomers received AI support.
This shift in the labor calculus comes at a time when Germany's regulatory machinery is gearing up. On 2 August 2026, national authorities will gain full enforcement powers under the EU AI Act. Additional training obligations have already been in place since early 2025 under the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) for specific sectors. Companies face potential penalties of up to 10 percent of annual turnover for violations. Yet despite these pressures, industry body Bitkom reports that 43 percent of firms still offer no dedicated AI training programs.
Data trust remains a major barrier. The "Trendradar – Die Skills der Zukunft" study, published on 12 June 2026 by the Zukunftsinstitut and Haufe Akademie, identified 15 action fields for businesses, with scaling AI solutions and governance ranked as the most urgent. Two-thirds of organizations (67 percent) admitted they do not fully trust their own data.
Human capabilities remain a central concern for leadership. A separate IWG study of executives in Germany and the United States, carried out in March and April 2026, found that 90 percent of respondents fear a drop in innovation if soft skills are neglected. While 65 percent believe AI cannot replicate empathy, and more than half see leadership as an exclusively human domain, technological literacy is rising in priority. Among German managers, 77 percent consider tech skills crucial for promotion, and 45 percent of HR professionals now automatically screen out applicants who lack AI know-how. At the same time, 66 percent cited soft skills as the most important hiring criterion.
On the academic front, sociologist Steffen Mau of Humboldt University Berlin argued at the Haufe HR Online Conference for loosening what he calls "credentialism"—the overemphasis on formal certificates. His proposal: shift attention to an individual's learning curve rather than rigid diplomas.
While these workforce debates unfold, technology suppliers are pushing ahead. SAP AppHaus and NTT Data Business Solutions expanded their partnership to embed AI into cloud ERP transformations, aiming to scale market-ready applications on the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP). DXC Technology announced a multi-year global partnership with Anthropic, integrating the Claude AI model into its orchestration platform, which boosted deployment speed and achieved code-generation rates above 95 percent for certain platforms. IT services provider Happiest Minds Technologies reported cutting development timelines by up to 60 percent using autonomous agent systems.
