Polish Firms Lag Far Behind EU on AI Adoption

New Eurostat data show how far Polish companies lag behind the rest of the European Union in adopting artificial intelligence. In 2025, only 8.4 percent of companies with at least 10 employees used AI, compared with an EU average of 20 percent. Experts stress that the problem isn't a lack of access to tools, but a lack of knowledge about how to apply them in practice.

The increase between 2024 and 2025, from 5.9 to 8.4 percent, shows that Polish companies are closing the gap, but more slowly than the rest of the EU. At the current pace, reaching the EU average will take Poland years, and the gap relative to leaders like Denmark and Finland is even wider than the gap to the average itself.

Knowledge, Not Technology

Professor Piotr Sankowski, director of the IDEAS research institute, tells Bankier.pl that Poland's AI adoption indicators are several years behind Western Europe. According to him, the key barrier isn't access to technology but a lack of trust in the solutions and a lack of knowledge about how to translate AI's capabilities into concrete business problems.

Poland's indicators for AI adoption in companies are several years behind - Prof. Piotr Sankowski, director of the IDEAS Research Institute

Sankowski points out that many business problems can be solved with domestic solutions, without having to rely on large language models built abroad. In his view, Europe suffers from a lack of its own companies capable of developing models on a scale comparable to American corporations, and France's Mistral operates on a much smaller scale than its overseas competitors.

Global Adoption Context

The problem isn't unique to Poland. McKinsey & Company's report "The State of AI in 2025" shows that while 88 percent of companies worldwide use AI in at least one business function, two-thirds of them remain stuck at the experimentation and pilot stage. Only about a third of companies have deployed AI at a scale that delivers measurable benefits across the entire enterprise.

OpenAI's own data from June 2026 show that the number of active users of agentic AI grew fivefold in the first half of 2026, though among companies only 23 percent are scaling the technology across business functions, while 39 percent are still in the experimentation stage.

The Investment Gap

The disparities are also visible in investment data. According to the Stanford AI Index 2026, private AI investment in the United States reached $285.9 billion in 2025, while all of Europe invested $21 billion and China $12.4 billion. A gap of this scale means European companies developing language models, including Mistral, are competing with American giants on far smaller budgets.

What This Means for Poland

For Polish companies, this means the path to the EU's 2030 average, 75 percent of companies using AI, cloud, or data analytics, requires above all investment in education and building trust in specific applications, not just purchasing licenses for more tools. Experts note that many problems can be solved with smaller, domestic solutions tailored to the local market, rather than waiting for large models from foreign vendors.

Without a shift from treating AI as a technological curiosity to a systemic business approach, the gap between Poland and leaders like Denmark and Finland will keep widening, despite companies' growing spending on new technologies.

Sources: Bankier.pl (bankier.pl), Pulshr.pl (pulshr.pl)