AI is more and more courageously enters Polish companies

More and more Polish companies are recognizing the benefits of AI – such as improved quality of services or cost savings – which translates into increased investment into this technology. According to the EY report “How Polish companies are implementing AI” over the past year the percentage of companies that have successfully implemented AI-based solutions at their company has increased from 20% to 25%.

Polish companies are catching up

Despite the 5% growth mentioned in the introduction, Poland is still falling behind more innovative economies in terms of artificial intelligence implementation. This dynamic, however, gives hope that this will change. Polish companies increasingly see investment in AI as essential to remain competitive.

Nearly a third of them (31%) plan to significantly increase spending on such solutions in the near future – an increase of almost half compared to 2023. What’s more, 59% of companies now give high priority to the development of AI-based technologies – a year ago it was 53%.

The percentage of companies that do not plan to implement artificial intelligence in the next two years has also decreased significantly (from 9% to 5%). These are all clear signs that the Polish economy will be catching up when it comes to implementing AI-based solutions.

Implementing artificial intelligence requires investment in many areas. The largest expenditures are in AI system integration (45%) and the purchase of off-the-shelf solutions (44%). Companies are also investing in cybersecurity (34%), developing custom solutions (34%) and data management (31%).

Benefits that implementation of AI-based solutions provides

Polish companies are moving to the actual use of AI tools, as more and more of them recognize the benefits that the application of these tools provides. As many as 78% of companies admit that they have achieved their intended benefits thanks to artificial intelligence. The most frequently cited by businesses are:

• improved service quality (42%);
• increased scale of operations (36%);
• reducing costs (31%).

Thus, in the case of Polish companies, artificial intelligence is now primarily intended to increase the efficiency of the company’s operations, and to a much lesser extent, for example, to support the creation of new products and services.

It is worth noting that depending on the size of the company, there are differences in the benefits of implementing AI. While 46% of medium-sized companies indicate improved service quality as the main benefit, in large organizations this percentage is 37%. Large companies, on the other hand, indicate cost reduction as a benefit to a far greater extent than medium-sized companies (40% vs. 23%).

Shortage of experts biggest challenge in implementing AI in Poland

Implementing AI-based solutions, however, requires overcoming certain obstacles. The biggest of these, however, is no longer high costs – the percentage of companies indicating these has dropped from 38% to just 18%. Polish companies are also getting better at dealing with technological barriers (13% of indications, a drop of as much as 18%) and those related to data security (15%, a 12% drop).

The biggest obstacle to implementing artificial intelligence that companies now point to are organizational issues – they noted 22% of indications ( a 2% drop). First and foremost is the lack of AI specialists – Poland faces a shortage of experts in data science and machine learning, which delays the implementation of AI-based technologies.

External experts for help

Polish companies are increasingly opting for a hybrid approach to artificial intelligence implementation – the key element of a successful AI implementation is becoming cooperation between internal teams and external providers. More and more companies appreciate the value of such cooperation, seeing it as an opportunity to gain access to specialized knowledge and speed up the implementation process.

This model has grown in popularity over the past year, with 35% of companies choosing it. At the same time, we have seen a decline in the number of companies performing implementations entirely on their own. And when it comes to in-house teams responsible for implementing AI-based technologies, 32% of companies have decided to create a new team, while 29% have spun them off from existing structures.

Summary

Artificial intelligence is becoming an integral part of modern business, and EY experts are convinced that in the coming years we will witness a dynamic development of the AI market in Poland. More and more companies will decide to implement solutions based on artificial intelligence, which will contribute to even greater digitalization of the Polish economy.

And if you are looking for AI and machine learning experts then feel free to contact us.