Horizon Europe Series | Blog 1 of 4
At Choirfarm, we spend most of our time thinking about choirs: how they grow, how they find audiences, how the people running them manage to do so much with so little. But one thing we have learned, the longer we work in this space, is that choirs do not exist in isolation. The people who sing in community choirs also direct amateur theatre. They sing in festivals. They teach music in schools. They run drama groups and organise folk nights and coordinate local arts events. The choir economy, as we think of it, overlaps almost entirely with the wider world of performing arts.
That is why this series of blogs reaches beyond choirs, even though choirs are where we started. And it begins with a question we think everyone working across that ecosystem — whether you run a sixty-voice community choir, manage a regional theatre, coordinate a folk festival or teach singing in schools — ought to be asking right now.
Why does performing arts not have its own AI tools?
The sector is larger than the conversation suggests
When people talk about AI and the future of work, they tend to picture offices. Knowledge workers. Digital pipelines. The assumption baked into most AI tools is that the user sits at a desk, works through a screen, and deals primarily in text, data and documents.
That assumption leaves out a significant portion of Europe's working population.
Europe's cultural and creative sectors employ between 8 and 8.7 million people. They represent around 3.8 percent of the EU workforce and roughly 3.95 percent of EU value added. The sector is made up of approximately 1.2 million enterprises, over 99.9 percent of which are small and medium-sized. Performing arts — theatre, music, opera, dance, choral performance and everything that surrounds and sustains them — is one of the largest and most publicly invested areas within that whole.
In 2023, general government expenditure across the EU on cultural services reached €81.1 billion, equivalent to one percent of all public expenditure. The European Commission describes performing arts as a sector with "transformative power" in society. Eurostat data from 2022 shows that more than half of residents aged 16 and over in most EU countries participated in cultural activities during the previous year.
This is not a niche hobby economy. It is part of Europe's economic base, civic fabric and social infrastructure. And yet it is almost entirely absent from the conversation about AI and the future of work.
Why the future-of-work argument points toward performing arts
The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 projects that job disruption will affect 22 percent of all jobs by 2030, with 170 million new roles created and 92 million displaced globally. By 2030, nearly six in ten workers will need some form of reskilling or upskilling.
That data gets quoted often. What gets quoted less is what the same report says about which skills will matter most in a more automated economy. The WEF is clear: employers continue to rank human-centred capabilities very highly. Collaboration. Communication. Resilience. Creative thinking. The capacity to learn and adapt. These are not soft extras on top of a technical core. They are increasingly the capabilities that distinguish people in a labour market being reshaped by automation.
This is where performing arts enters the future-of-work argument — not just as a sector to be protected, but as a place where the skills hardest to automate are practised, at scale, across all ages and communities.
When you rehearse with an ensemble, you are learning to listen, to subordinate your individual contribution to a collective result, and to respond in real time to other people. When you put on a performance, you are managing complexity under pressure, communicating across different roles and skill levels, and delivering something live where failure is visible and immediate. When you run a choir or organise a local arts festival, you are coordinating volunteers, managing relationships, planning resources, and holding together a community that depends on you.
These are not leisure activities that happen to resemble work skills. They are the development of exactly the capabilities that the WEF says employers will value most as AI takes over more routine tasks.
If Europe is heading into a more automated future, performing arts becomes more important to the economy and to civic life, not less. The activities that build human presence, ensemble working, empathy, live creativity and communal meaning do not get automated away. They become the things that define what remains distinctively human about working life.
The problem: performing arts has been left out
None of that changes the fact that performing arts organisations are, right now, significantly underserved by the AI tools that exist.
Most AI development assumes a workflow that looks like office work: a desk, a screen, a knowledge base, a CRM, a digital sequence of tasks. Performing arts looks almost nothing like that.
Think about what running a community choir actually involves. You are managing a roster of singers whose availability changes week to week. You are sourcing and booking rehearsal venues, often across multiple sites. You are communicating simultaneously with a music director, accompanist, venue staff, concert promoters and the choir members themselves. You are organising concerts with multiple moving parts — programme notes, front-of-house volunteers, ticketing, audience communications, hospitality — often with a committee of volunteers and no paid administrative support whatsoever. And you are doing this alongside a day job.
Now scale that up across a performing arts ecosystem. Theatres. Orchestras. Festivals. Dance companies. Amateur dramatic societies. Music education organisations. Each involves its own distinctive blend of artistic creation, rehearsal and preparation, live production, education and community engagement — compressed into tight timelines, delivered by stretched teams, often with a significant volunteer workforce.
European policy work consistently finds that performing arts employment is characterised by precarious contracts, high levels of self-employment, low income and unusually thin organisational capacity. In 2019, 32 percent of workers in the EU cultural and creative sectors were self-employed, compared to 14 percent in the total workforce. Many organisations depend on volunteers for core functions. Budgets are lean. Staff teams are small.
That means the organisations most in need of useful AI support are also the least likely to have the time, budget or internal capacity to adopt it well. Generic AI tools do not fill this gap. They ask performing arts organisations to translate their work into a format those tools understand — which is the wrong way round, and adds work rather than reducing it.
What the right AI tools would actually do
The case for AI in performing arts is not about replacing artists. It is not about generating content faster. It is about reducing the operational burden that currently competes with creative and community work — and doing so in ways that are practical, trustworthy and designed for the realities of live cultural practice.
That means tools that help with rehearsal scheduling, performer communications and venue logistics. Tools that support programme and repertoire planning. Tools that assist with audience development and grant reporting. Tools that help arts educators understand what AI means for their students' careers without requiring a postgraduate degree in machine learning to use them.
It means research into what AI readiness actually looks like across different performing arts contexts — not assuming that the results from corporate AI adoption studies transfer to a community choir or a regional folk festival.
And it means paying serious attention to the ethics of AI adoption in live cultural settings, where questions of trust, community, human presence and artistic integrity are not peripheral concerns but central ones.
Europe is actively responding — and that is where this series connects
The good news is that Europe is not standing still. The European Commission's Horizon Europe programme has specifically recognised the gap between broad cultural policy and practical AI adoption in the cultural and creative sectors. Under the 2026 Heritage call — HORIZON-CL2-2026-01-HERITAGE-03 — there is direct funding available for projects that embed AI across cultural and creative sector workflows in human-centred, ethical and scalable ways, developed in genuine partnership with the sector.
This is not a criticism of where European policy has been. It is a recognition that the agenda is moving in exactly the right direction, and that the opportunity now is to shape what a performing arts project within that agenda could look like.
That is what Choirfarm is working toward. We are building a consortium to apply for this call, with performing arts — including the choir ecosystem we know best — at the centre of the project scope.
The next three blogs in this series explore what that project would engage with:
- Who works across performing arts, and what human-centred AI could mean for each of them
- Why festivals in particular represent one of the best possible research and development environments for this work
- What the project we are shaping could actually look like, and how to get involved
If any of this connects with your work — whether you are a choir director, a festival organiser, an arts researcher or someone building technology for the cultural sector — we would very much like to hear from you.
research at choirfarm dot com
This is the first in a four-part series on AI and performing arts, produced by Choirfarm in connection with our work on a Horizon Europe consortium bid. The series is aimed at everyone working across the performing arts ecosystem — from community choirs to professional production companies — and at researchers, technologists and funders interested in this space.
