Poles feel “technological anxiety”? These phenomena inhibit the transformation
Transformation in Poland often looks like a spectacle in which the curtain rises with great momentum, and instead of a coherent history, the eyes of viewers appear a scene straight from the battlefield – chaos, scattered props and actors who do not know which way to go. In strategies, reports and presentations of management boards are full of slogans of innovation and courage. But when it comes to real technology implementation, it turns out that we are dealing more with a declaration than with a transformation.
According to the CSO survey from 2024, only 5.9 percent Polish enterprises declared the use of artificial intelligence in its activities. This is a number that shows how small the actual range of new technologies in Poland is. Most companies remain at the stage of consideration and basic investments, and the barriers that entrepreneurs mention are, above all, a lack of competence, lack of knowledge and high costs.
EY report Digital Transformation 2024 confirms that Polish companies enter the digitization into the strategy, but in practice their activities are fragmentary. They modernize processes, implement individual solutions, but rarely rebuild entire business models. Similar conclusions are brought by the AI Chamber 2024 report on SMEs – most companies are just experimenting with AI and ML, doing so carefully and on a small scale.
Against this background, the United States and China are clearly distinguished. The McKinsey Technology Trends Outlook 2025 report shows that in these countries technology is increasingly treated as a catalyst for changing entire models of action. Companies implement AI not to just accelerate existing processes, but to re -define the offer, sales channels and value chains. Falsets also can also be seen in Western Europe. In Germany, the development of industry 4.0 means a deep reconstruction of entire production chains, and in the Scandinavian countries the digitization of public services has become the basis of the new model of the functioning of the state. Poland, although it speaks loudly about innovation, is still stopping half a step.
