Almost 50 Polish companies have joined the country’s AI Chamber, a newly-formed lobby group that aims to promote the responsible development of AI across central and eastern Europe.
Poland is well-known for its first-class tech talent — but due to a lack of local VC funding, as well as political and cultural issues, its AI startup ecosystem is falling behind other Western countries. Some global successes have links with Poland – like voice AI startup ElevenLabs that recently raised a $80m round from a16 and Sequoia — but most of the ventures in the country are still early-stage.
The new group is being set up to try and help these companies network, lobby for more favourable policies and improve understanding of European and national regulations around AI. The group includes dozens of startups such as space scaleup Iceye and fintech Finiata.
“We need an independent institution which would be able to gather different entities with different interests — be it SMEs, startups or NGOs — to exchange ideas about AI,” says Tomasz Snażyk, head of industry lobby group Startup Poland, and the new chamber’s CEO.
What will the AI chamber focus on?
He says that its main focus is AI’s “social impact” and its “responsible development” across the region.
Some of the chamber’s planned activities include conducting research on the CEE market, publishing reports on the adoption of AI and trying to increase the use of AI solutions in different areas of the economy.
In the short term, the chamber will, for example, engage in creating working groups and research that will focus on ways to use AI to improve education and health systems across CEE. It also wants to study how AI could help entrepreneurship and policymaking across the region.
For now, the chamber is made up of Polish tech companies, startups, NGOs and associations — but hopes to widen its reach to other countries in the region. Snażyk says that they already have their eyes set on the Czech Republic, where they see the largest startup potential.
He wants the membership to increase 4x over the next year.
This is not the first startup-led AI initiative in Poland — earlier this year, a team of entrepreneurs, including Google X and SpaceX alumni and local AI startup founders, created an AI working group at the country’s ministry of digital affairs. But the group was heavily criticised for not including any NGO or university representatives in the team.
“We’re building it for longer than just for one political term,” says Snażyk. “It’s not a group tied to a certain time or parliamentary term — and we don’t want to be dependent on any politician.”
