We elaborated on the concept of smart regions in Russia with a special emphasis on the possibility to deal with the divide between the work market and the university education market in these systems. Attention was also paid to the possibility of using the leading experience of such systems in other regions of Russia, as well as using the potential of AI to solve the most relevant problems. This study’s methodological character involved the description of the theory of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the development of the digital economy, and the concept of smart regions, which are set onto the problem of the divide between the markets of work and university education. The main approaches utilised in this work are the system and process approaches; the main methods that allowed substantiating the research results are analysis, synthesis, generalisation, and observation. We considered the theoretical features of the concept of smart regions, analysed the level of their development in the Russian Federation and dwelt on the specifics of their development with an emphasis on the possibility to reduce the divide between the markets of work and university education and the potential of using their leading experience in other regions. The focus was made on developing the main blocks of the system of coordination of the parameters of the higher education market and the job market within the programmes of smart city and smart region with the use of AI regulation. The main advantage of this paper consists in the generalisation of the results of Russia’s smart regions’ development from the position of solving the problem of the divide between the markets of work and university education and substantiation of the potential for the use of AI regulation.