Consulting
Half a Million People, One Job: Inside Poland's Business Services Machine
Warsaw — While Prague built its reputation on Big Four delivery centres and boutique product studios, its northern neighbour quietly assembled something an order of magnitude larger: a business services sector employing over half a million people across more than 2,100 centres.
By Petra · Market & Czech Economy Specialist · Published
At the end of the first quarter of 2026, 500,500 people worked across 2,179 service centres belonging to 1,303 companies in Poland, according to the Association of Business Service Leaders' (ABSL) Business Services Sector in Poland 2026 report, produced with Colliers, Mercer and Randstad. Employment grew 1.8% year on year — modest by the sector's own recent history, but notable against a wider Polish enterprise sector where overall employment fell over the same period.
A hub built on scale, not just cost
Poland's advantage was never simply price. Kraków alone hosts an estimated 55,000–100,000 IT and business-services professionals depending on methodology, and both Kraków and Warsaw have each crossed the 100,000-employee threshold for the sector, with Wrocław and the Tri-City area of Gdańsk, Gdynia and Sopot following behind. More than four in five of the jobs in Poland's business services centres sit inside foreign-owned operations — this is not a domestically driven industry, but one built by global companies choosing Poland to run functions that used to sit closer to headquarters.
The composition of that work has shifted markedly. ABSL's data shows nearly 60% of services delivered by the sector are now knowledge-intensive, and more than half involve complex mid-office tasks such as multi-dimensional planning, cybersecurity and advanced analytics — a long way from the back-office data entry that defined earlier waves of nearshoring. Between January 2024 and March 2025, 61 new centres launched, and IT and R&D accounted for the large majority of that activity (42.6% and 26.2% respectively), adding 5,400 jobs.
The slowdown that isn't a slowdown
The headline growth number for 2026 — 1.8%, against 6.2% a year earlier — invites a reading of Poland's nearshoring boom running out of road. ABSL's own framing argues the opposite: of the 8,860 net new jobs added over the year, only 3,240 came from newly opened centres, the slowest pace of greenfield openings in a decade. What's changed is not appetite but method. Roughly 80% of employers in the sector report increased investment in automation or AI tools, even as most say that investment hasn't yet produced a measurable workforce impact — a gap ABSL attributes to the difference between buying software and building the organisational capability to use it well.
That capability question is becoming the sector's defining challenge. Employers describe the labour shortage shifting from entry-level headcount, which is now broadly available, to specialised senior talent for knowledge-intensive operations — architects, automation leads, people who can translate AI tooling into changed workflows rather than just faster typing. Part of that engineering bench has been reinforced by Ukrainian developers who relocated west after 2022, a flow covered in our separate report on Ukraine's wartime IT sector.
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How this compares with the Czech model
Poland's trajectory sits in useful contrast to the consulting hub this publication profiled in Prague, where Big Four firms and boutique studios built delivery capacity around a smaller, more specialised talent base. Poland pursued scale first — its business services sector now contributes an estimated 5.7% of GDP and 7.6% of private-sector employment, figures the Czech sector, concentrated in a much smaller population, cannot realistically match in absolute terms. What the two markets increasingly share is the same transition: from headcount-based delivery toward centres that compete on specialisation, automation maturity and how much of a client's actual decision-making they're trusted to own.
Poland's ICT exports are projected to reach roughly €12 billion in 2026, and the country continues to graduate around 15,000–20,000 IT professionals a year from technical universities in Warsaw, Kraków and Wrocław — figures drawn from the Polish Investment and Trade Agency and market-research aggregators rather than ABSL's own headcount survey, and a pipeline scale that keeps Poland structurally ahead of every other CEE nearshoring destination even as growth in headcount terms cools.
For Czech and regional consulting buyers, the practical implication is straightforward: Poland is no longer competing primarily on hourly rate. It is competing on the ability to run entire knowledge-intensive functions — and increasingly, on which country's talent base can absorb AI tooling into real productivity rather than just procurement line items.