Over Half of Polish Managers Expect AI to Cut Jobs in Their Departments

More than half of Polish managers responsible for IT decisions at their companies expect artificial intelligence to reduce headcount in their departments within the next three years. That is the finding of a new survey by SAP Poland, which also shows that corporate enthusiasm for AI is colliding with the reality of rollouts running slower than promised.

The study, "AI Readiness Index: The Road to the Autonomous Enterprise," was carried out for SAP Poland by the research platform UCE Research. The survey covered 411 managers from companies with at least 50 employees who have real influence over IT decisions in their areas. Participation required prior use of at least one AI solution in daily work, meaning respondents are not casual observers of the trend but people with direct hands-on deployment experience.

Fears over jobs

The survey's key finding concerns the future of employment. 54 percent of the managers surveyed said that over a three-year horizon they expect their department's headcount to shrink as a result of AI systems increasingly automating tasks. That share places Polish managers among cautious optimists about the technology, while at the same time signaling a real risk to some positions.

At the same time, 56 percent of respondents predict that AI adoption will mean employees have to handle more tasks in the same amount of time. In other words, some managers see AI less as a tool that lightens the load on teams and more as a mechanism that raises expected output without adding staff.

Rollouts slower than promised

The survey also reveals a gap between declarations and practice. As many as 49 percent of managers admit that AI implementation at their organizations is progressing more slowly than originally planned. That figure tempers the narrative of a lightning-fast AI transformation of business that the media hype around the technology might suggest.

The survey also found that among organizations that have actually deployed AI solutions, 65 percent of managers say they provide employees with training or upskilling programs related to the new technology. That suggests some companies are trying to cushion the effects of automation by retraining their teams rather than simply cutting jobs.

Systems can take over more and more repetitive tasks, which frees employees to focus on work that requires experience, creativity and expert judgment - Katarzyna Rusek, Vice President and HR Director, SAP Poland

Strategy without measured results

Related data from the same SAP Poland research cycle show that 70 percent of managers say AI is already built into their area's strategy. Even so, only 28 percent of companies actually measure the return on investment from these technologies. That gap means many organizations are making AI deployment decisions without hard data on their real profitability, which further complicates any assessment of whether the announced job cuts will actually materialize.

For the Polish labor market, the survey results carry practical weight. Managers who make day-to-day decisions about IT budgets and team structures mostly do not treat automation as a distant hypothesis but as a scenario they will have to confront within the next three years. At the same time, the same survey shows that the road to that scenario is bumpier than technology vendors' promises would suggest.

The SAP Poland survey fits into a broader trend of uncertainty, observed for months now, around AI's impact on employment in Poland. This time it is not employees worried about their own jobs who are speaking up, but the managers themselves who are responsible for deployment decisions, which lends these forecasts extra weight, since they are the ones who will in practice decide the scale of any cuts.