BCG Report: AI Could Boost Poland's GDP by 8 Percent by 2030

More than 80 percent of Polish businesses already use AI-based solutions, and 95 percent operate on cloud services. Yet only 5 percent of organizations, described as "future-built," are able to systematically turn these investments into measurable financial gains, according to data cited in the Digital Business Transformation Monitor, published by Forbes Polska.

The scale of the gap between the number of deployments and real results is one of the report's main findings. Companies in the "future-built" group, meaning those that have built their entire organization around data and automation, post 1.7 times higher revenue growth, 1.6 times higher EBIT margin, and 3.6 times higher three-year shareholder returns than the rest of the market. This shows that simply deploying a large number of AI tools does not automatically translate into a competitive advantage.

Where the experiment ends

Andreas Maierhofer, CEO of T-Mobile Polska, believes companies are now moving from a testing phase to deployments treated as a serious strategic priority. In his view, the era of pilots launched out of pure technological curiosity is coming to an end, and AI is becoming a tool for building market advantage rather than an add-on to existing processes.

Artificial intelligence is no longer an experiment today, it is becoming one of the key elements of building competitiveness - Andreas Maierhofer, CEO, T-Mobile Polska

Maierhofer points to three main barriers limiting the full use of AI in Polish companies: the fast pace of technological change, which makes long-term planning difficult; projects carried out in departmental silos without integration across the whole organization; and technical debt that requires modernizing IT infrastructure before advanced automation becomes possible.

The scale of the economic potential

Piotr Pachołek, a partner at Boston Consulting Group's Warsaw office, cites estimates suggesting that widespread adoption of artificial intelligence could increase Poland's GDP by as much as around 8 percent by 2030. That figure is comparable to the current contribution of the entire IT sector to the Polish economy, which accounts for about 5 percent of GDP.

Estimates suggest that widespread adoption of artificial intelligence could increase Poland's GDP by as much as around 8 percent by 2030. For now, we are at an early stage of this journey - Piotr Pachołek, Partner, BCG

BCG data, based on a study conducted last year among a sample of 1,250 companies, also shows that the effects of AI deployment are most visible in the financial sector. Among financial institutions using generative AI, 90 percent reported revenue growth of at least 6 percent, and half reported a doubling of team productivity. This is one of the few areas where the effects of AI deployment can already be measured in hard numbers rather than just survey declarations.

Skills matter more than technology

Ireneusz Borowski, managing director of Dassault Systèmes in Poland, notes that the main obstacle is no longer technology itself, but organizations' ability to manage change and a growing skills gap among employees. Companies need to develop methods that help teams absorb new tools and build skills, rather than relying on software deployment alone to solve productivity problems.

Today the biggest barrier is not technology, but change management and the growing skills gap - Ireneusz Borowski, Managing Director, Dassault Systèmes Poland

The report points to clear differences between industries. E-commerce, professional services, the IT sector, and banking and finance are adopting AI fastest. Public administration, healthcare, and education are lagging behind, where deployment faces regulatory barriers, limited budgets, and greater caution toward automating processes that directly affect citizens and patients.

Data centers as the foundation

A separate part of the report focuses on the infrastructure behind AI development in Poland. Krystian Pypłacz, a data center market expert from the Polish Data Center Association (Polski Związek Centrów Danych), says that in 2025 the gross value added generated by this sector in Poland exceeded PLN 10 billion, and the industry sustains close to 41,000 jobs. The data comes from the report "Napędzając Gospodarkę" ("Powering the Economy"), prepared by the Polish Data Center Association together with PwC Poland.

According to the same report, as many as 75 percent of data center companies plan to increase employment over the next 12 months. This signals that the growth of cloud services and AI models in Poland is driving investment not only in software, but also in physical server, power, and network infrastructure.

For Polish companies, the report's conclusions are fairly clear: simply having AI tools in an organization does not guarantee a competitive advantage. What will matter is whether companies can move from isolated, one-off deployments to an integrated, organization-wide strategy, paired with IT infrastructure modernization and investment in employee skills. The gap between the results of the "future-built" group and the rest of the market shows that the stakes of this transformation are high, and the distance between leaders and the rest of the market could widen in the coming years.