A year in Poland's AI scene: from AI breakfasts to the PAIH Business Forum

We think 2025 will be remembered as the year AI moved from demos into budgets and everyday work. We spent a good part of it out of the office: at SoDA meetings from Łódź to Gdańsk, at two AI breakfasts, at infoShare and, in November, at the PAIH Business Forum in Warsaw. In between there were networking evenings in Silesia and cluster events in Austria.

Here is a short summary of where we were this year and what we take from it into 2026.

Back in SoDA: Łódź, Gdańsk, Katowice, Kraków

At the start of the year we returned to SoDA, the association of Polish software development companies. The first big stop was SoDA Conference 2025 in Łódź on 10–11 April, where two members of the management board of our Polish company spent both days. The conference ran under the motto “NEW REALITY: Adaptation & Resilience”, and a visible part of the programme was about how software companies should implement AI in their own work and in the way they cooperate with clients.

After Łódź came the smaller formats, which we find at least as useful: SoDA Open networking evenings for IT company leaders in Gdańsk (11 September) and Kraków (20 November), the summer garden party on 1 August, and the SoDA Meetup in Katowice on 7 October. That evening took place on a theatre stage and was entirely about AI: how it changes software development, where it stops being useful in business relationships, and how to build a company that will still be standing in ten years. It was also the unofficial opening of a week of AI events in Katowice, with the AIBA Conference starting the next day. SoDA's brunch in Warsaw, which sums up this year's cycle of meetings, falls on the day this post goes out.

AI breakfasts in Warsaw and Katowice

The format we enjoyed most this year was the AI breakfast. On 23 April we joined the Polish AI Breakfasts meetup at Lazarski University in Warsaw. It is a nationwide community that brings together AI practitioners, startups, investors and companies, and the programme included a panel on Polish large language models. The topic matters to us: models such as Bielik and PLLuM make it realistic to build Polish-language applications where language quality and data location are important.

On 7 November we were in Katowice for a special evening edition of Śniadanie AI Śląsk (AI Breakfast Silesia) at D9 Space. The format is simple and works well: a series of talks of a few minutes each, questions after every talk, then networking. It is a good reminder that the most useful knowledge about AI today comes from people who have just tried something in a real company.

Big stages and regional networks

In May we went to infoShare 2025 in Gdańsk (27–28 May), one of the largest technology conferences in Central and Eastern Europe. In Silesia we joined the BeefUp business networking meetings in Katowice in June and August, and on 10 September a networking meetup of the Digital Business Alliance in Gliwice. At home in Lublin we are members of the Lublin Business Club (Lubelski Klub Biznesu) and attended its gala in November.

Our Austrian company was active too. After SALZ21 in Salzburg in March, our CEO took part in Connect Day 25 in Vienna on 13 May, a matchmaking day for startups, corporates and investors, and in EBSCON 2025 in Graz on 8 October, the Silicon Alps conference on electronic and software based systems, held this year under the theme “Creative Destruction”.

PAIH Business Forum: export conversations

From 5 to 7 November the Polish Investment and Trade Agency (PAIH) held its PAIH Business Forum at the PGE Narodowy stadium in Warsaw. The president of our Polish company used it for four one-to-one meetings with experts from PAIH's foreign trade offices: the United States and Silicon Valley, Japan and Canada on 5 November, and China on 6 November.

Meetings like these help a Polish company look at a foreign market through the eyes of people who work there every day: what local clients expect, how to find partners and which support instruments are available. For us they continue a direction we started with our trip to Japan and our work with non-EU companies entering Europe.

Regulation in the background

All of this happened against a changing legal background. Since February, the EU AI Act prohibits certain AI practices and requires companies to ensure a sufficient level of AI literacy among the people who work with AI systems. Since August, the rules for general-purpose AI models apply as well. In our view the AI Act is not a reason to stop, but a reason to be deliberate: which data a system uses, who is responsible for the result and how it is documented. For connected products, RED cybersecurity and the Data Act arrived in the same year.

What we take into 2026

• AI is becoming a process question. The best sessions this year were less about models and more about how work changes: in software teams, in sales, in the relationship with clients.
• Small formats teach the most. Short talks with honest questions at a breakfast or a meetup often gave us more practical insight than a keynote.
• The Polish AI community is growing up. Polish-language models, regular meetups in Warsaw and Katowice and a strong software industry make Poland a good place to build AI solutions.
• Export and AI go together. We believe a software partner will increasingly be judged on whether it can put AI into real systems, not only on engineering quality.

We have been building with large language models since 2023, starting with a system that matches anonymous professional profiles, and in 2026 we want to spend even more time understanding our clients' processes before proposing technology. You can read more on our artificial intelligence services page.

Thank you to SoDA, PAIH and all the organisers who hosted us this year; next week we continue at Founders Mind in Warsaw. If you are wondering where AI could help in your company, get in touch. We are happy to start with a conversation about your processes rather than about models.