Nearly 3.7 Million Poles Work in Jobs Most Exposed to AI

Poland's labor market is entering a phase in which artificial intelligence no longer affects only simple, repetitive tasks. According to data cited in the latest report, the 20 occupations most exposed to AI's impact currently employ close to 3.68 million people, or nearly one in five workers in the country.

Who is most at risk

At the top of the list of at-risk professions are financial specialists, lawyers, programmers and mathematicians, groups long considered resistant to automation because of their high qualifications. They are joined by public administration officials, secretaries and part of corporate management staff, whose duties largely rely on processing information and following standard procedures.

Exposure to AI's impact is distributed unevenly between genders. Among people working in the most at-risk occupations, women form a clear majority, 2.16 million versus 1.53 million men. The report's authors attribute this to the structure of employment, in which women more often work in sectors based on data processing, customer service and administration, tasks most easily taken over by language models.

IMF forecasts and the scale of it

On top of the domestic data come global forecasts from the International Monetary Fund, according to which AI could eliminate as many as 5.5 million jobs in Poland over a 5 to 10 year horizon. This is a considerably harsher scenario than earlier estimates, and it now covers not just manufacturing and warehousing but also accounting, auditing and parts of financial services.

In total, up to 32 percent of employment in Poland could be affected by task-related automation reductions. At the same time, the report's authors stress that the figures should not be read directly as the number of jobs that will disappear, but rather as a measure of how large a share of duties in a given profession is suited to being taken over by AI systems.

Artificial intelligence has the potential to significantly transform Poland's labor market, simplifying or eliminating some tasks - Ignacy Święcicki, Polish Economic Institute (Polski Instytut Ekonomiczny)

Who stands to gain

The picture isn't one-sided. According to the cited data, 27 percent of workers, or 4.64 million people, could benefit from AI's development by taking on new tasks related to overseeing, implementing and optimizing tools based on language models. Another 40 percent of the labor market, about 6.87 million people, is unlikely to feel a significant impact from the technology in the coming years.

Representatives of professions requiring direct contact with other people and manual work, such as doctors, nurses, plumbers, electricians, hairdressers and chefs, can feel relatively safe. These are largely the same groups that earlier labor market analyses identified as the most resistant to automation.

The low labor cost barrier

Experts from the Polish Economic Institute point to a factor specific to the Polish economy, namely relatively low labor costs compared with Western Europe. Paradoxically, this very factor may be slowing automation, since in many industries it still pays off more for companies to employ people than to invest in AI deployments, even though these tasks could already be automated technically.

On the other hand, that same barrier is disappearing faster at large corporations and in the financial sector, where the cost of AI tool licenses is falling and competitive pressure is rising. That explains why banks, insurance companies and credit intermediaries are among the first to cut staff in occupations tied to document handling and standard procedures.

What this means for workers

For people working in occupations near the top of the list, experts' recommendation is consistent: develop skills that are hard to automate, higher order analytical abilities, project management, or overseeing AI systems, rather than performing tasks these systems can already take over. For companies, this means planning workforce reskilling before cost pressure forces crisis mode decisions.

The scale of the phenomenon and the gap between domestic and international forecasts also show that data on AI's impact on the labor market keeps shifting with every new report. That's good reason to treat individual figures as a direction of change rather than a precise prediction of how many jobs will disappear in a given year.

Sources: A wave of layoffs is coming in these professions (gazetaprawna.pl), One in five workers in Poland holds a job most exposed to AI (pie.net.pl)