AI in the Polish economy looks different depending on where you measure it: people use AI about as often as the rest of Europe, while Polish companies are among the furthest behind in the EU. Below we go through what 2025 showed, what the 2026 legal changes mean and whether AI actually pays off.
Table of contents
Key facts
- Poles use AI at roughly the same rate as the rest of Europe. The AI diffusion rate for Poland in the second half of 2025 was very close to the European average and to the figure for the United States.
- Polish companies rank second from last in the European Union. In 2025, only a small share of enterprises with 10 or more employees used at least one AI technology, well below the EU average. Only Romania sits lower.
- The smaller the company, the wider the gap. Large enterprises in Poland are fairly close to the EU average, among medium ones the difference is already clear, and among small ones Polish companies fall furthest behind.
- The vast majority of Polish companies use no AI technology at all, and the share that has ever even considered using it is many times lower than in the EU.
- The labour market tells a completely different story. In 2025, clearly more job postings in Poland required AI skills than in the United States and the United Kingdom.
- 2026 brought the legal framework. The Polish Act on Artificial Intelligence Systems has been in force since 11 August 2026, with its main part applying from 28 October 2026. The EU AI Omnibus moved the obligations for high-risk systems listed in Annex III to 2 December 2027.
AI in the Polish economy showed two faces in 2025 that barely fit together: people come out respectably, while Eurostat data on enterprises paints a very different picture. Stanford HAI has published the AI Index Report 2026, the most comprehensive annual collection of hard data on artificial intelligence, in which Poland appears more than a dozen times. The report, however, measures people above all: users, employees, graduates and job candidates, so we set it against data on companies and show what 2026 changes.
The world in 2025: adoption stopped being an experiment
Most organisations used AI in at least one business function, against a clearly smaller group a year earlier. For generative AI the rise was similar. Many respondents pointed to three or more areas of the company where AI is already at work.
Europe recorded one of the highest year-over-year increases and moved ahead of every other region in the world. Two years earlier, in 2023, the figure was clearly lower. This is not a trend anyone gets to sit out.
On the consumer side it went even faster. Generative AI reached most of the population in three years, faster than the personal computer and faster than the internet at the same stage.
There is one thing in this data worth remembering before planning anything for 2026. AI agents, meaning systems that carry out tasks on their own, are still marginal. Across most business functions a majority of respondents do not use them at all, and scaled deployments sit in single-digit shares almost everywhere. The highest rates are in the technology sector: in software engineering, in IT and in service operations. 2025 was the year of the chat window, not of process automation.
Poland in the AI Index: people and skills look good
The AI diffusion rate, calculated by the Microsoft AI Economy Institute from telemetry data, rose clearly for Poland in the second half of 2025 within six months and put it in 22nd place among the thirty largest economies. For comparison, the European average is very similar, while the United States sits in 24th place. The leaders are the United Arab Emirates, Singapore and Norway.
The remaining Polish figures in the report add up to a consistent picture of a country that has something to work with:
| Indicator | Poland | Context |
|---|---|---|
| Share of job postings requiring AI skills (2025) | 2.92% | more than the US and the UK; leader Singapore |
| AI hiring growth relative to the whole market (2025) | 12.32% | 10th place in the ranking |
| AI talent concentration among LinkedIn members | 1.00% | in the top fifteen; leader Israel |
| Relative AI skill penetration | 1.14 | above the global average, which stands at 1.00 |
| New ICT bachelor’s graduates (2023) | 14,688 | up from 12,817 in 2022; more than Australia, Canada and France |
| New ICT master’s graduates (2023) | 4,571 | up from 4,164 in 2022 |
| Data centres (2025) | 144 | in the top fifteen worldwide |
| Public AI-related contracts in Europe (2013-2024) | 162 | 4th in Europe, ahead of France (161) |
The figures in the table come from the Stanford HAI AI Index Report 2026.
Attitudes add to that. Most Poles trust their own government to regulate AI responsibly, clearly more often than the global average and far more often than in the United States, where the score is the lowest in the whole sample. Asked about priorities, most Poles choose advancing science and medicine through AI over protecting industries through regulation, more often than people globally. That is one of the highest results in the entire survey.
In other words: we have the people, we have the graduates, we have stronger demand for AI skills than the United States, and we have a society leaning towards progress rather than braking. Now let us look at what companies do with all that.
Poland in Eurostat data: companies are far behind
Eurostat measures something different from Stanford: not people, but enterprises. In 2025, only a small share of Polish companies with 10 or more employees used at least one AI technology. The EU average is clearly higher. A year earlier both figures were lower, so we are growing, but more slowly than the EU, and the gap is widening rather than closing.
Among the twenty-seven member states Poland ranks 26th. Only Romania comes lower. Bulgaria and Greece are just ahead of us. At the other end of the table sit Denmark, Finland and Sweden. Germany and Czechia are clearly higher than Poland.
The smaller the company, the wider the gulf
This is the most important table in the whole set, because it shows exactly where the problem sits.
| Company size | Poland | European Union | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| 250 employees and more | 45.81% | 55.03% | 9.2 pp |
| 50-249 employees | 14.77% | 30.36% | 15.6 pp |
| 10-49 employees | 5.79% | 17.0% | 11.2 pp |
The figures in the table come from Eurostat data on the use of artificial intelligence in enterprises (2025).
Large Polish companies are keeping up. They are nine points behind the European average, but they play in the same league. Medium-sized companies use AI more than twice as rarely as their European counterparts. Small companies almost three times as rarely. This is not a problem of the Polish economy as a whole, but specifically of the Polish small and medium enterprise sector.
What Polish companies actually use AI for
| Technology | Poland | EU |
|---|---|---|
| Generating text, speech or code | 5.23% | 8.76% |
| Generating images, video or audio | 2.75% | 9.55% |
| Process automation and decision support | 2.60% | 5.35% |
| Written language analysis (text mining) | 2.10% | 11.75% |
| Image recognition | 1.84% | 3.78% |
| Machine learning for data analysis | 1.83% | 5.10% |
| Speech recognition | 1.59% | 7.22% |
The figures in the table come from Eurostat data on the use of artificial intelligence in enterprises (2025).
The biggest difference is not in the flashiest technologies, but in the ones most useful in everyday work. Text analysis, meaning the automated reading of contracts, tickets, product descriptions and correspondence, is used far more often in the EU than in Poland. That is a big gap on something available off the shelf today.
The way it gets deployed says a lot too. Ready-made commercial software used without any changes accounts for most of the companies that reached for AI at all. Building or modifying a solution was outsourced to an external provider by only a handful of companies, while barely more built something with their own staff. AI in Polish companies is mostly a subscription, not an implementation.
Broken down by purpose: marketing and sales, business administration and management, accounting and finance, production processes, ICT security, research and development, and logistics. In every one of them Poland sits below the EU average, and logistics is where the fewest companies reach for AI.
The barrier is not where people look for it
Eurostat asks companies what holds them back. The Polish answers look calm at first glance: only a small group of companies point to a lack of relevant expertise, and likewise to costs being too high, unclear legal consequences and data protection concerns. In the EU the same barriers are reported by many times more enterprises.
This does not mean Polish companies have it easier. It means fewer of them ever got to the point where a barrier appears. One figure confirms it: the share of companies that have ever considered using AI stands at 3.9% in Poland and 11.1% in the EU. Before a problem with cost, skills or legal compliance shows up, someone has to sit down and work out whether it pays off. In Poland that conversation most often never happens.
What is happening in 2026
The Polish AI act is already in force
The Act of 3 July 2026 on Artificial Intelligence Systems was published on 27 July 2026 (Journal of Laws 2026, item 1003). Its core entered into force on 11 August 2026, while articles 8-18 and chapters 3-5, 8 and 9 start applying on 28 October 2026.
The act creates the national framework for applying EU Regulation 2024/1689 and establishes a new body: the Commission for the Development and Security of Artificial Intelligence, known as KRiBSI. It is the market surveillance authority for AI systems in Poland and the single point of contact.
The EU gave more time on high-risk systems
On 27 July 2026 the so-called AI Omnibus entered into force, having been published in the Official Journal of the EU on 24 July 2026. It moves the deadlines for high-risk systems: the rules covering stand-alone systems from Annex III will apply from 2 December 2027 instead of 2 August 2026, and those for AI embedded in products regulated by separate legislation from 2 August 2028.
For most small and medium companies this means that the tools they use day to day, meaning text assistants, customer service chatbots or document automation, do not fall into the high-risk category and there is nothing to wait for. The postponement covers recruitment, credit scoring, education, critical infrastructure and similar uses.
Does it actually pay off
The AI Index gathered the productivity research and the result is uneven, but it is not zero. The gains are largest where the work can be measured: in customer support, in software development and in the volume of marketing output. In tasks that require deeper judgement the effects are weaker.
The most interesting one for a European company is the study by Aldasoro and co-authors from 2026, covering 12,000 European enterprises between 2019 and 2024. AI adoption raised labour productivity there, with no drop in employment in the short run. The second result of that study is the crucial one, though: budget spent on training delivered a clear additional gain. Simply buying licences makes no difference.
The other side is worth knowing too. A survey of 6,000 executives across four countries showed widespread adoption alongside minimal measured productivity impact so far. Many organisations expect AI to reduce their headcount within a year, though quite a few expect no change at all. In the United States, employment of young software developers aged 22 to 25 fell clearly compared with 2024. The number of documented AI-related incidents rose to 362 from 233 in 2024.
What follows from this
Poland has the graduates, it has a labour market that asks about AI more often than the American one, it has people using these tools at the European average level, and since August 2026 it has a national legal framework. The only thing missing is implementations inside companies. The vast majority of Polish enterprises use no AI technology at all, and among companies with 10 to 49 employees almost none use it. The difference between Poland and Denmark does not come from access to technology, which is identical, but from the fact that over there someone sat down and worked out what specifically in the company can be automated.
At Web Systems we work on exactly that part: we do not sell subscriptions, we build AI-based solutions wired into what a company already runs, meaning its shop, ERP system, document flow or customer service. We have been running the company since 2006, there are six of us and we maintain our own infrastructure across dozens of machines, so an implementation here usually ends with maintenance rather than a handover of files. If you want to check whether there is anything in your company worth automating, see how we handle the development of artificial intelligence applications, or write to us through the contact form. The initial quote is free.
Sources
- Stanford HAI, Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2026 (data from McKinsey, Microsoft AI Economy Institute, Lightcast, LinkedIn, OECD, Ipsos, Cloudscene).
- Eurostat, dataset isoc_eb_ai, use of artificial intelligence by enterprises, 2025 data (updated 15 June 2026).
- Act of 3 July 2026 on Artificial Intelligence Systems (Journal of Laws 2026, item 1003).
- European Commission, AI Omnibus enters into force.
