Central Europe’s digital economy is growing nicely, but few people have noticed that most of its firms are not actually using it.
When Janusz Dziurzyński, president of ABSL (the lobby group for Poland’s business services centres), took the stage at the association’s summit in Wrocław in June, he had plenty to boast about. The sector exported an estimated 48.4 billion US dollars of services in 2025, up from 42.3 billion US dollars the year before, it employs around half a million people, and (if the association’s own survey of centre bosses is to be believed, and there is no great reason to doubt it) nearly 85 per cent of centres now use generative AI widely. Business services, Dziurzyński said, are the first to go through changes that the rest of the Polish economy will see soon. Wrocław’s mayor, Jacek Sutryk, went further, describing his city as a European centre for (among other things) AI projects.
The rest of the Polish economy, it seems, is in no great hurry to follow. Eurostat’s annual count, published in December 2025, found that just 8.4 per cent of Polish firms with ten or more employees used any form of AI that year, the second-lowest share in the EU and well under half the bloc’s average of 20 per cent (Denmark managed 42 per cent). That was an improvement, to be fair, on 5.9 per cent a year earlier. When the Polish Economic Institute, a state-linked think-tank, surveyed 1,000 firms in mid-2025, 55 per cent of micro and small companies described investment in AI as unimportant.
Some assembly required
Last week the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD; a club of mostly rich countries) published its Digital Economy and Society Outlook 2026, and it goes some of the way towards explaining that gap. Its chapter on technology diffusion, written by Giorgia Bergamo, Nicolas Benoit and Nils Adriansson, reports that around 12 per cent of firms across the club now combine cloud computing, data analytics and AI (in the information and communication sector the figure is 39 per cent), and it names Poland among the countries where firms instead tend to rely on a single technology, usually cloud or analytics, bought on its own. “Combining frontier digital technologies effectively requires not only access to digital infrastructure, but also data readiness, specialised skills and complementary investments in organisational change,” the report says. Access, in other words, is the easy bit.
The same chapter has large Polish firms using AI at roughly five times the rate of Polish firms as a whole. That is not really a surprise and not limited to Poland, in that big companies have the money and the IT departments. What is less welcome is the forecast that while cloud adoption will converge across firms of all sizes by 2030, AI will not, and by the end of the decade adoption among large firms across the OECD could be nearly 80 per cent higher than the average for all firms. “As adoption broadens,” the report says, “the key distinction becomes how well firms use AI rather than whether they use it.”
In Warsaw in February 2025 Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, stood next to Donald Tusk, Poland’s prime minister, and promised to spend 2.8 billion zloty (about 700 million US dollars) on cloud and AI infrastructure in Poland by June of this year, with the stated aim of bringing advanced AI to every sector of the Polish economy. The data centres are certainly getting built, and use of the cloud is, according to the OECD at least, the one technology smaller firms are catching up on. What seems to be the blockage is what comes next (skills, mostly).
Nor are the service centres much help, for reasons that have little to do with goodwill. ABSL’s own study of Warsaw found that 79 per cent of the city’s 418 centres are foreign-owned, so the AI know-how built up inside them often belongs (contractually, and usually culturally) to parent companies abroad, and that is where most of it goes. Investment promotion counts jobs and exports, and by those measures the model works very well indeed. The OECD’s nowcast put ICT sector growth in 2025 at nine per cent in both Lithuania and Hungary, the fastest in the club, yet the same chapter shows Hungary sourcing around 38 per cent of its domestic ICT demand from abroad (second only to Luxembourg) and Lithuania’s share rising from about 24 per cent to 35 per cent since 2010, which the authors put down to roles as “assembly hubs or specialised service providers within global value chains.” Across Central and Eastern Europe, there’s work to be done, but it’s not the region’s firms who are commissioning it.
Photo: Dreamstime.