AI-Supported Creativity in the EU Agri-Food Sector: Skills, Challenges and Opportunities under the Triple Transition

The EU agri-food sector is undergoing a digital, green, and social transition that is reshaping how agricultural products, food, and beverages are produced, processed, governed, distributed, and valued. While artificial intelligence is increasingly presented as a means to support productivity, sustainability, traceability, quality control, and decision-making, less attention has been paid to the skills and competences required for AI to support creativity in a human-centred way. This working paper asks which skills and competences are needed for AI-supported creativity in the EU agri-food sector, and how these should be understood in relation to governance, infrastructure, and sectoral inequalities. Based on desk research and qualitative state-of-the-art synthesis, the paper reviews EU policy documents, institutional reports, academic literature, sectoral studies, statistics, and selected grey literature, with a primary focus on EU-level developments from 2020 to 2025. The analysis shows that AI’s value lies less in replacing human judgement than in expanding adaptive capacity, scenario-building, coordination, and context-sensitive problem-solving. It also finds that uneven infrastructure, skills gaps, labour vulnerabilities, regulatory tensions, data-governance challenges, and risks of algorithmic bias may limit inclusive adoption. The paper contributes a sector-grounded but transferable framing of AI-supported creativity, identifying implications for EU policy, skills development, and training frameworks under triple-transition conditions.