The Intersection of AI and ESG: Exploring Overlapping Skills in the Romanian Labour Market

The twin transition between digital transformation and sustainability is reshaping industries and skill requirements in the modern labour market. This study explores the intersection of AI and ESG skills in the Romanian labour market, an area of critical importance as organisations start to integrate advanced technologies with sustainable practices. By analysing 791 online job postings from early 2025, the research employs TF-IDF (Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency) and cosine similarity to quantify skill overlap and illustrate the distribution of shared competencies. By applying a topic modelling analysis, a natural language processing (NLP) technique, we identify ESG-related data-driven initiatives, notably a key topic that encompasses digital and data-related terms in practical ESG applications and climate change challenges. Although this topic represents a small proportion of the total tokens, it highlights the emergence of a digital data-driven ESG domain, reinforcing the relevance of the twin transition in enhancing AI applications within ESG frameworks. Despite the potential of AI in driving sustainable development, advanced AI applications remain scarce in these roles, with ESG professionals primarily utilising tools like Python and SQL for data processing and reporting. Furthermore, the study found no evidence of ethical governance skills in AI job postings. Future research should expand datasets and observation periods while incorporating international comparisons to assess Romania’s position in this evolving field. The study highlights the need for targeted interdisciplinary training programs to enhance the intersection between AI and ESG competencies, ensuring the Romanian labour market can adapt to global advancements.