For more than two decades, Poland has been building its position as a regional leader in the business services sector. Hundreds of BPO and SSC centres, thousands of full-time jobs, tens of thousands of graduates feeding the labour market every year. This development model seemed stable – based on growing work volumes, cost advantages and good infrastructure. Today, however, the sector’s foundations are beginning to wobble. And not because of competition from India or Romania, but because of… artificial intelligence.
AI is beginning to take over tasks that were previously performed by highly skilled employees in service centres. Automated finance and accounting systems, HR chatbots, document recognition engines, generative language models to support purchasing processes – these are no longer concepts of the future, but real implementations. And this means one thing: the role of classic white collars in BPO is shrinking faster than expected.
The end of a secure niche
According to the Polish Economic Institute, the BSS sector employs more than 400 000 people in Poland today. A large proportion of them work in repetitive backoffice processes such as billing, recruitment, customer service or logistics. It is these areas that are most vulnerable to automation – especially now that advanced generative AI tools, RPA and natural language processing platforms are hitting the market.
In contrast to earlier waves of automation – focusing mainly on industry and physical processes – the current revolution is about intellectual work. And this is the one at a medium level of complexity: not strategic consultancy, but day-to-day operations that previously required large teams of people.
Automation in figures
Up to 40-60% of the tasks performed in shared service centres in Poland are susceptible to automation. This means that, if not today, many of the current jobs may disappear or undergo a deep transformation within a few years.
The first signs of this change can already be seen. Some of the large centres in Warsaw, Kraków and the Tri-City are stopping recruitment for classic operational positions, while developing departments responsible for automation, data architecture or AI system integration. It is less and less common to look for ‘process specialists’ and more and more often for process analysts, robot owners and data product managers.
This shift has implications not only for employees, but also for IT companies working with the service sector.
New client for the IT industry
Traditionally, technology companies provided shared service centres with infrastructure, software and people – often in a competence outsourcing model. This model worked when centres were growing at a rate of several per cent per year and needed resources to ‘scale processes’. Today, however, staff growth is no longer a priority – what matters is efficiency, automation and data quality.
For IT vendors, this means a shift in strategy. Instead of providing ‘bodies’ for processes, there is a growing need for consulting teams, AI integrators, technology consultants. A cross-departmental billing automation project or the implementation of an LLM model to support purchasing requires not just a programmer, but a process expert, a data analyst and someone familiar with prompt engineering.
In addition, service centres are starting to work more closely with cloud providers – AWS, Azure or GCP – creating a whole new architecture of relationships between IT, business and technology.
Competence in retreat and on the offensive
Changes in the employment structure are already visible. ‘Transactional’ roles – such as junior accounting specialist or HR administrator – are disappearing, and technical and analytical positions are taking their place. Interestingly, these do not always require formal technical training – a space is emerging for so-called citizen developers, i.e. business employees who create automations in low-code tools.
For the labour market, this is a challenge, but also an opportunity. Maintaining employment in the BSS sector requires massive upskilling – from data analytics, to knowledge of cloud-based AI platforms, to competence in cyber security and data management.
Risks to the development model
Until now, service centres have been the pillar of growth for many regional cities – Rzeszów, Lublin, Bydgoszcz, Łódź. Their presence guaranteed employment, an inflow of capital and the development of the local educational ecosystem. Automation may shake this model – if the number of jobs is reduced, the demand for local services will also fall and it will be more difficult to maintain economies of scale.
At the same time, if Poland fails to maintain a high level of technological competence in the BSS sector, the phenomenon of “AI-outsourcing” may occur. – i.e. the transfer of processes to countries with more developed digital infrastructure and access to specialists. Even if these countries are more expensive, the efficiency advantage of AI may obscure the cost differences.
