Artificial intelligence and automation could put more than 1.3 million Moroccan jobs at net risk of displacement by 2030, according to a new report from the African Center for Strategic Studies and Digitalization, which frames the challenge as a structural transformation requiring urgent national coordination across education, industry and public policy.
The report identifies nearly 1.5 million jobs as facing direct automation pressure, while a further 3.1 million roles are expected to undergo significant changes in content, requiring workers to acquire substantially new skills. In total, approximately 4.6 million positions could be affected. Morocco’s capacity to generate new digital employment over the same period is estimated at only around 180,000 jobs, producing the net displacement figure of roughly 1.32 million.
A central concern raised in the report is the mismatch between the skills Morocco’s economy will need and what its education system currently produces. The country graduates around 22,000 digital professionals annually — far below the 250,000 to 480,000 individuals the report estimates would need to be trained or retrained each year to keep pace with AI-driven change.
The challenge is compounded by Morocco’s large informal economy, which employs approximately 67.6% of the workforce. Workers in this segment typically lack access to institutional reskilling programs, leaving them disproportionately exposed to displacement with limited pathways back into formal employment.
The report’s recommendations center on a national strategy integrating education reform, active labor market policy and industrial transformation. Among the proposals are a national skills framework built around short, targeted training programs aligned with real-world AI applications, and a deliberate effort to build domestic AI capabilities rather than rely on imported solutions — described in the report as an “AI Made in Morocco” approach aimed at technological sovereignty.
The findings align with Morocco’s national AI roadmap, Maroc IA 2030, which was launched in January 2026 and explicitly acknowledges the dual nature of AI as both an economic opportunity and a labor market risk. The government’s Digital Morocco 2030 strategy projects the creation of 240,000 digital jobs and a contribution of roughly $10 billion to GDP by the end of the decade — figures the new report implicitly challenges as insufficient to absorb the scale of displacement now underway.
