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17.8% of Polish companies use AI. What the figure says about the market in 2026
Short answer
According to GUS, Poland's statistics office, 17.8% of Polish enterprises used AI technologies in 2026. That is twice the share a year earlier, when it was 8.7%. Polish firms use AI most often in marketing and sales (11.1% of firms) and in office work and decisions (9.6%). More than 80% of Polish firms still do not use AI, so the advantage of a rollout is still there to win.
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- 01Call30 minutes with an engineer, free
- 02PrototypeA working system on your process and data, free
- 03ImplementationTarget and fixed price in the contract; 50% at signing
- 04Acceptance50% once the agreed target is met
- analysis with an engineer and a free prototype
- €0
- team in ChatGPT or Claude, up to 10 people
- from €1,150
- automation, agent or application for one process
- from €3,000
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Author: Syntalith · 4 min read
Statistics
AI in Polish companies: statistics 2026
17.8%
of Polish enterprises used AI in 2026. A year earlier the share was 8.7%.
11.1%
According to GUS (2026), 11.1% of Polish enterprises use AI in marketing and sales.
39.8%
According to GUS (2026), 39.8% of people in Poland aged 16 to 74 used AI tools in the previous 3 months.
20.0%
According to Eurostat (2025), 20.0% of EU companies with at least 10 employees used AI, against 8.4% in Poland.
Source: Eurostat (2025) ↗
48%
According to the European Commission (2026), 48% of small and medium-sized companies in the EU name a lack of expertise as a barrier to AI.
Source: European Commission, Flash Eurobarometer 578 (2026) ↗
Figures checked: 22 October 2026
How many Polish companies use AI: GUS figures for 2026
According to GUS, Poland's statistics office, 17.8% of Polish enterprises used artificial intelligence technologies in 2026. A year earlier the share was 8.7%. It rose by 9.1 percentage points, so it more than doubled in one year.
Share of enterprises with at least 10 employees.
This article used to give 8.4% according to Eurostat. That figure is for 2025. The result for 2026 comes from the GUS survey published on 21 October 2026.
What Polish companies use AI for
Most Polish firms use AI in marketing and sales. Office work and preparing decisions come second.
Share of all enterprises. One firm can use AI in several areas.
Generating images, sound and video grew fastest: by 7.0 points in one year. Generating text or speech grew by 4.4 points.
Poland compared with the European Union
The latest EU comparison is for 2025. Eurostat then gave 8.4% for Poland, against an EU average of 20.0%. Only Romania had a lower result.
Firms with at least 10 employees. Eurostat figures for 2026 are not yet available.
Źródło: Eurostat, 20% of EU enterprises use AI technologies (2025) ↗
Set the Polish result for 2026 against the EU average for 2025 and the gap falls from 11.6 to 2.2 points. That compares figures from two different years. A full comparison will come only with Eurostat's publication for 2026.
Across the EU, firms used AI most often to analyse text (11.8%), to generate images, video and sound (9.5%), to generate language (8.8%) and for speech recognition (7.2%).
People use AI more often than companies
According to GUS, 39.8% of people in Poland aged 16 to 74 used AI tools in the previous 3 months. That is 17.1 points more than a year earlier.
In the 3 months before the survey.
These are two different populations: people and enterprises. Together they show that many employees already know ChatGPT or Claude from a private account. When the company gives them no tool and no rules, part of the work with company data ends up on private accounts.
What holds Polish companies back
According to the European Commission (2026), half of the small and medium-sized companies in the EU name high investment costs as a barrier to AI. 48% name a lack of expertise.
Cost
50%
of small and medium-sized EU companies name high investment costs. The first two steps with us cost €0, and you know the price of the system before the contract.
Expertise
48%
of small and medium-sized EU companies name a lack of expertise. A team rollout includes training on the tasks people do every day.
Source: European Commission, Growing use of AI in European companies (2026).
The opportunity while AI use is low
The national average does not tell you how many of your competitors use AI. It shows only that 82.2% of Polish firms do not use it yet. In many sectors this is still a time when one well-chosen process gives an advantage.
The advantage rarely comes from the model itself. Anyone can buy a model. An orderly process, data on client cases and a team that can work with the system are harder to copy.
An accounting firm answers client email
€3,022 a month today
Accounts staff retype cost invoices
€1,745 a month today
A shop answers questions about orders
€2,792 a month today
A customer service team writes replies
€5,817 a month today
The amounts are scenarios of the cost of manual work from our use-case pages, counted at €34.90 an hour (Eurostat, EU 2025). Each page shows the assumptions, the formula and the payback.
Where to start in your company
- 01Count the bottleneckWhere the team loses the most hours on repetitive work: email, documents, quotes, replies to clients.
- 02Choose one processOne with volume, repeatable steps and a person responsible for the result.
- 03Check it before you buyA test on 20 to 100 cases the team has already handled shows the result before the decision.
- 04Measure after the startWorking time before the rollout and after 30 days. You choose the next process from the numbers.
We describe the GUS figures by region in the article AI in Polish companies by region.
Worked example · Scenario
Where to start: one process counted in euros
Firms that start pick one repetitive piece of work and count what it costs. This is that count for client email in an accounting firm.
€3,022
a month for a firm spending 20 hours a week on client email
Payback: 1.2 mo.
Today our system at foap.com drafts a reply to every email that needs one (October 2026). That email time grows with the number of emails, that checking takes 15% of the old time and how many hours of email a firm of each size has are our assumptions. €34.90 an hour is the EU average hourly labour cost for 2025 according to Eurostat, for companies with 10 or more employees. We count the model at €9.87 per 1,000 emails (Claude Sonnet 5.5, 3,000 + 500 tokens per email, at the ECB rate of 1.1205 USD per euro on 22 October 2026), at 3 minutes of work per email.
See the full calculation →
