This report takes stock of the Belgian data economy in a pragmatic, source-driven way. It brings together official statistics and market evidence to quantify how Belgian organisations collect, store and analyse data; how value is created and traded on the data market; how data impacts GDP and sectors; where skills, culture and infrastructure enable -or constrain- progress; and how recent waves such as generative AI may shift the curve. The result is a concise, comparable picture of Belgium within the EU landscape, written for policymakers.

The challenge

Measuring the “data economy” is notoriously hard because data’s value depends on context, recombination and reuse. Belgium also faces fragmented indicators across agencies and studies. Our challenge was to frame a coherent narrative and set of metrics -spanning the organisational data value chain (from acquisition to use/monetisation), the national data market (supply, demand and monetisation), macroeconomic impact, labour and skills, data culture and openness, and enabling infrastructure – while benchmarking Belgium consistently to EU peers.

Approach & results

We organised the work in seven connected parts and triangulated official business surveys, national ICT evidence, EU market studies and recognised policy frameworks to form a coherent, comparable picture of Belgium’s data economy. At the organisational level, we mapped the full data value chain – from acquisition and preprocessing to storage, analytics, use and monetization – so we could compare practices across sectors and firm sizes. The analysis shows that Belgian organisations are broadly active in storing and analysing data and make extensive use of cloud services. Two strong user profiles stand out: regular optimisers that focus on internal efficiency and advanced users that also integrate external sources and newer technologies. Motivations to store data are primarily operational and strategic – planning, control and performance – while direct monetisation remains secondary. AI adoption is rising fastest in language-intensive and workflow-optimisation use cases, with take-up shaped by firm size and tempered by expertise gaps and heightened privacy, legal and ethical considerations.

We then sized and profiled the national data market by looking at both sides of the equation: suppliers that create data-related products and services, and users that rely on data to run and improve their businesses. Belgium’s market composition tilts toward professional services alongside strong contributions from finance, manufacturing, the public sector and information and communications. Data monetisation emerges as a growing, though still relatively hidden, layer of activity as organisations explore licensing, aggregation and curated datasets. Compared with leading European peers, Belgium’s supplier base is smaller in relative terms, even as demand for data-enabled solutions broadens across the economy.

To translate market dynamics into economic significance, we estimated the macro impact of data across sectors. The public sector, finance and professional services capture a large share of the value created, with manufacturing and transport also material contributors, while health remains below potential. A parallel assessment of labour and skills indicates a relatively low share of data professionals in the workforce and a declining intensity of such roles per data-using firm – an outlier trend among neighbouring countries. Although the measured skills gap narrowed recently, this was driven more by a pause in demand growth than by a surge in supply, pointing to the need for targeted capability building.

Finally, we assessed data culture and infrastructure. Open-data audits highlight strong performance on economic statistics but significant room for improvement in social domains; enterprise data-sharing with third parties beyond government is still limited; and public sentiment reflects high privacy concerns and a demand for transparency. Connectivity is mixed: very-high-capacity fixed networks are widely available, yet fibre-to-the-premises and 5G adoption lag European frontrunners. National initiatives -broadband acceleration, gigabit mapping- are in place to close these gaps. The results provide a clear roadmap: strengthen governance and interoperability (including FAIR practices), expand open and high-quality public data, upgrade networks, deepen data and AI skills, and enable responsible data monetization – so Belgium’s organisations can convert widespread data activity into sustained competitiveness and public value.