Dear All,

As a Digital Poland Foundation we have created The map of Polish AI (in english only)

It's the most comprehensive undertaking on the Polish market for and about the artificial intelligence industry. It contains information on practically all companies operating in Poland which offer services in the field of modern technologies. We believe that map will be a necessary help for both domestic and international investors looking for interesting projects in Poland. The study is the first and, so far, the only one that widely and painstakingly presents national companies using AI. We hope that this document will encourage you to discuss and speed up the progress on the Polish AI strategy.

Its not only map companies in Poland & R&D Center (e.g. Google, ByteDance, Samsung) but also present the true state of AI in Poland.

Link to document

https://www.digitalpoland.org/en/#report

Link to PDF: https://www.digitalpoland.org/assets/reports/map-of-the-polish-ai---201…

 

Here is Executive Summary:

Booming number of companies

1. There are companies which introduced AI as early as in the late 90’s. However, this technology was more widely introduced in business only after 2010. In recent years, there has been a clear AI boom – half of Polish AI companies have introduced the technology over the last two years.
2. AI is clearly the domain of large metropolitan areas in Poland. 85% of AI companies which participated in the survey are located in six major urban areas. Warsaw accounts for 43% of AI companies.
3. In terms of financing, two out of three companies (66%) declare that they rely fully on their own funds to fuel development, but 23% have received VC funding.

Business applications

1. The demand for AI services in Poland is limited and this creates a natural tendency to reach for clients abroad. 73% of companies receive at least some of their revenue from clients abroad. 33% receive most of their revenue from foreign clients.
2. There are two main obstacles faced by companies implementing AI services. 41% point out that their potential clients do not understand their own needs and, in effect, do not see the potential benefits arising from AI. 38% of companies cite insufficient data as an obstacle. There is a need to much more educate CEOs  and managers about AI.
3. There is a need to raise the awareness of AI by educating non-experts in order to improve the implementation of the technology.
4. Two services most frequently provided by Polish AI companies are analytics, big data and business intelligence (43%), together with sales, marketing and advertisement (37%).
5. Companies often also provide services in areas, such as financial services and insurance (28%), internet of things and industry 4.0 (27%). This may reflect the relative competitiveness and openness to innovations in the Polish financial and industrial sectors.
6. The major application of AI is image processing and recognition with 62% of companies using AI in this area. Other popular applications are data exploration (55%), recommender systems (52%) and natural language processing (43%).

Human Resources

1. Polish companies usually operate using small AI teams. Over half have AI teams consisting of 5 or less employees. Only 10% of companies have a sizeable team of over 20 specialists working with AI.
2. Nearly all (85%) companies plan to expand their AI team, but usually want to hire up to 5 people. Only 13% of companies plan a dynamic expansion by recruiting more than 10 AI specialists.
3. The experts who were consulted for the report point to a mismatch between the availability of AI specialists and the demand for their skills. This mismatch may be an important bottleneck in the development of the AI sector in Poland. In order to bridge this gap, there should be more education of specialists and non-experts. The latter means training managers to understand AI and being able to identify areas were the technology can be applied.

Technology

1. The trends in Poland regarding the technical aspects of AI reflect global trends. The most widely used language is Python, with 87% of companies using it. 38% use R language, but its popularity is low among companies which introduced AI over the last two years.
2. AI companies also use other popular languages, such as C/C++ and C# (50%) and Java (30%), which is a sign that many of them build complete solutions around AI capabilities.
3. Polish companies use popular frameworks – TensorFlow (69%), Keras (49%) or PyTorch (38%).

Cooperation with the Scientific Community

1. Globally, the AI sector has very close ties with academic teams. This is also the case among Polish companies.
2. Half of them employ PhDs in their teams and 6% have more than 5 people with a scientific degree on their payroll. Also, 39% of companies publish papers based on their work and 8% have already over 10 publications.
3. Overall, 77% cooperate with the scientific community, however, the extent and scope of cooperation varies depending on the size of their AI team. Among companies with a larger team (6 or more specialists), 88% cooperate with academia (versus 63% of companies with up to 5 AI specialists). They most often directly employ academic researchers (73% vs 23%) and cooperate with university research teams (49% vs 20%).
4. AI companies usually cooperate with the scientific community in order to engage researchers and students in the day-to-day operations of the company. 48% engage people from the scientific community in the development of their own AI solutions and 31% create internships or classes for students.
5. Only 13% of companies are involved in providing courses or studies and 11% engage in student research groups.
6. Generally, companies expect that universities will provide them with fresh graduates and expert researchers, but usually do not undertake the effort to help the scientific community grow their teams within the universities. In the long-term perspective, this may be a hindrance in the development of the Polish AI sector, because academic research teams play a central role in the development of AI in the economy. 

best,

Piotr Mieczkowski

Executive Director,

Digital Poland Foundation

www.digitalpoland.org