Over 13,000 AI Companies Now Operating in Poland, First Such Statistics Show

Until recently, there was no way to accurately count how many companies in Poland actually work in artificial intelligence. A change to the PKD business classification system (Poland's official classification of economic activities), which took effect last year, allowed entrepreneurs for the first time to explicitly indicate that their business involves AI, machine learning, or robotics. The effect of that change is now visible in fresh data prepared by Dun & Bradstreet for Rzeczpospolita: more than 13,000 AI-sector companies are now operating in Poland.

What the New Classification Changed

Previously, companies working in artificial intelligence, machine learning, automation, or robotics were hard to isolate in official statistics - they were lost within the broad category of IT services. New PKD classification rules have been in force since last year, under which entrepreneurs can specify a precise business profile, including AI-based applications or artificial intelligence itself as the company's main activity.

This allowed Dun & Bradstreet analysts to estimate, for the first time, the real population of AI businesses in Poland. As Rzeczpospolita, which commissioned the analysis, points out, the numbers are striking - given that artificial intelligence has only recently existed as a standalone classification category, a 6 percent share of the entire IT market signals a very fast pace of formalization for the industry.

The Scale of Poland's IT Market

These figures need to be seen against the size of the entire domestic IT sector. IT companies in Poland now number nearly 225,000 entities, and 21,000 new businesses in the sector were registered in 2025 alone. This confirms a trend observed for several years: Poland's IT market is growing faster than most other sectors of the economy, and artificial intelligence is increasingly becoming not an add-on to the offering but its core.

Anna Kulikowska of Polcom, quoted in the analysis, points to a shift in technology's role in the economy. In her view, the Polish economy is entering a phase in which digitalization stops functioning merely as a support for growth and starts becoming its main driver.

Poland's economy is entering a phase where technology stops being just a tool supporting growth and becomes a key driver of it - Anna Kulikowska, Polcom

The Gap Between Large and Small Firms

The data, however, reveal a clear split in this picture. While large and medium-sized enterprises are increasingly embracing AI-based solutions, only 31 percent of the smallest businesses use advanced technologies. The picture is even worse for businesses run by people over 60, where the share drops to 26 percent.

This gap, both generational and size-based, has practical consequences. Micro and small businesses make up the vast majority of Polish companies, so their lag in AI adoption could, over the long run, limit the competitiveness of the entire economy, even as the statistics for the IT sector itself look impressive.

What It Means for Jobs and Business

For Polish tech companies, the new data confirms that the AI market has stopped being a niche reserved for a handful of well-known startups. Over 13,000 entities registered with an AI profile mean real competition for customers, talent, and funding - and, at the same time, easier access to local AI-based solution providers for companies outside the IT sector that are only beginning to implement automation.

For local governments and institutions responsible for supporting entrepreneurship, the new statistics also provide the first concrete benchmark for measuring digitalization progress in the coming years - previously, the lack of a precise classification made it impossible to track whether support programs for the AI sector were actually reaching a growing number of beneficiaries or just a handful of large players.

The Dun & Bradstreet analysis does not specify exactly which industries outside IT itself most often register AI businesses, but the direction of change is clear: the PKD classification has caught up with market reality, in which algorithms have stopped being an add-on to IT offerings and become a separate, fast-growing segment of the economy.