Six chapters. One honest picture.
Six chapters cut the same 2.86 million individual-level employment records by ecosystem, gender, brain drain, benchmarking, seniority, and region. The full picture of who builds AI in Austria, where they sit, and where they go.
The Ecosystem
The question is no longer whether Austria has AI talent. It is whether the base is growing fast enough, retaining enough, and diffusing broadly enough.
Gender
A cliff, not a slope. The pipeline enters near-balanced and collapses upward — at +0.30pp/yr, parity is 50 years away.
Brain Drain
82 % of AI careers stay in Austria — split between same-firm retention and domestic moves. The real story is frontier leakage: 17 % of Build, 23 % of NLP/GenAI, 44 % gone within twelve months.
Competitive Benchmarking
Top-10 on quality. Mid-pack on quantity. Second-slowest salary growth in Western Europe. The gap is horizontal, not vertical.
Seniority
Not a graduate cohort, a mid-career professional class. A 60 % Analyst+Manager backbone — and a 6 % entry-level floor with a hidden pay inversion at the top.
Region & Bundesland
Vienna alone holds 60% of Austria's AI workforce. Vienna–Graz–Linz together over 70%. Beyond the corridor, AI thins fast.