Half of Poland's Municipalities Still Lack a Systematic AI Strategy

Poland's local governments are entering the AI era unevenly and cautiously. A report titled "Polish Cities and Artificial Intelligence," prepared by the Miasto Foundation (City Foundation) and the Związek Miast Polskich (the Union of Polish Cities), finds that despite widespread use of tools like ChatGPT, Copilot and Claude among municipal staff, the vast majority of municipalities have no systematic strategy for adopting AI.

The report, cited by the newspaper Rzeczpospolita, describes concrete rollouts in more than a dozen cities. Katowice launched a virtual chatbot in late 2025, available around the clock on the city's website, which answers administrative questions and helps residents navigate the Biuletyn Informacji Publicznej (BIP, Poland's public information bulletin portal). Poznań went further, deploying an e-consultant and voicebots based on natural language processing that schedule appointments, send reminders about deadlines, and provide information on benefits and outstanding tax payments.

Implementation Leaders

In Poznań, automated notifications about overdue taxes are meant, according to the city, to reduce the number of reminder letters sent out while improving collection of local taxes. The city has also launched an Intelligent Security Analysis System that generates cybersecurity summaries and recommendations. Gdańsk took a different approach, rolling out Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat for all city office employees as part of its collaborative work environment.

Kraków uses AI for drafting documents, editing content and translations, and is piloting advanced image analysis to count pedestrians and vehicles for safety and urban planning purposes. The city stresses, however, that it operates under internal AI safety guidelines, and that key decisions and responsibility remain with staff, not algorithms. Łódź is planning to launch a municipal AI Center to coordinate rollouts across city departments, while Gdynia is piloting the Polish PLLuM model for searching data in the BIP and for drafting and analyzing documents by officials.

Adopting AI is not meant to reduce staffing levels - Joanna Nowak, representative of the Poznań City Office

Barriers Across the Rest of the Country

The picture that emerges from the report is far from a uniform success story. Outside a narrow group of leaders such as Poznań, Kraków or Gdańsk, most Polish local governments are only just starting to look into AI tools, or use them informally, without any strategy or oversight. The report's authors point to fragmented data locked in outdated IT systems, high infrastructure costs, and the risk of hallucinations, meaning AI generating false information, as the main technical barriers.

Skills and legal barriers turn out to be just as significant. More than half of the surveyed local governments admit they lack staff capable of implementing and overseeing AI systems, and a similar share point to legal uncertainty over responsibility for decisions supported by algorithms. Competition for IT specialists from the private sector, which offers higher salaries than local government budgets can match, remains a problem as well.

All the cities surveyed stated that their AI rollouts are not tied to any layoff plans, and that the algorithms are meant to support, not replace, municipal staff. That is a significant declaration given growing public concern over automation of jobs in public administration, though it remains hard to verify whether these commitments will hold up over time as the scale of deployment grows.

Time Pressure Ahead of the AI Act

The situation is complicated by the approaching deadline for Poland's national law on artificial intelligence systems, which implements the EU's AI Act. Earlier reports indicated that many Polish government offices don't even have a full picture of the extent to which they use AI tools, making it harder to prepare for new obligations around transparency and algorithmic risk assessment. For local governments that are only just testing individual chatbots, regulatory pressure could become an additional deterrent to moving fast without first getting their legal groundwork in order.

For residents, the practical impact of these rollouts is already being felt in cities that have adopted chatbots and voicebots, cutting wait times for responses on simple administrative matters. Whether the rest of the country catches up largely depends on whether the national government and central local-government bodies offer the shared funding and standards that most surveyed cities are calling for.

Sources: Chatbot Instead of a Clerk? How Polish Cities Are Adopting Artificial Intelligence (regiony.rp.pl)