Romania vs Poland for nearshore AI development: a fair comparison

We are a Romanian AI engineering company, so read this knowing where we sit. That is also why we wrote it. Most "Poland vs Romania" pages come from vendors in one country arguing against the other, and few compare the two on AI specifically. What follows uses official data, says where Poland is stronger, and ends with the question we think matters more than the country.

How do Romania and Poland compare, side by side?

On most measures of scale, Poland is ahead. On English and cost structure the two are close. On EU membership they are equal. The table uses the latest official figures, read on 26 September 2026; the Edge column is our reading of them, not a statistic.

For reference, the EU averages are 20.0% of firms using AI and 65.7% of IT-services firms, so both countries sit well below the EU on AI adoption.

Where is Poland honestly stronger?

On scale and momentum. If you need many engineers, Poland is the safer bet.

• Depth. Poland has almost four times as many ICT specialists, and they make up a larger share of the workforce. A pool that size absorbs a 50-person team; Romania's absorbs it with difficulty.
• Direction. Poland's pool grew in 2025 while Romania's fell 6.2%, from 221,600 to 207,800. Eurostat marks both Romanian values as estimates, so part of that fall may be survey noise. It is still the steepest fall among comparable markets. If you plan three years of hiring, the direction matters.
• Time zone. For a team in Munich, Vienna, Amsterdam or Stockholm, Poland shares your clock. Romania is one hour ahead. That is manageable, but it is a real difference for a team built around a morning stand-up.
• AI in the local market. Polish IT-services firms use AI more than Romanian ones (42.0% against 34.2%). More local practice means more engineers who have already shipped something with it.
• More than one city. Outside Warsaw, Polish tech employment is spread across other regions. In Romania, half the sector is in and around Bucharest, so a plan for a second Romanian city needs local evidence.

The pages that argue for Poland on these grounds are right. Where they go wrong is English, where the 2025 index puts Romania slightly ahead, and in treating a country average as if it were a team.

When does Romania fit better?

When you need a few senior people rather than a large team, and when the specific team has already done the work you need.

• Small, senior engagements. A pool's depth matters when you recruit dozens. It matters much less when you need one to five engineers who have already put AI into production. At that size you are choosing people, not a labour market.
• English-first collaboration. Both countries are in EF's "High proficiency" band. Romania's slightly higher 2025 score removes the objection some comparison pages still raise. EF's index is based on people who chose to take its online test, so treat it as a signal, not a census.
• Cost structure. Both are far below Western European labour costs. On Eurostat's employer-cost measure Romania comes out slightly lower, because non-wage costs such as social contributions are much smaller there. On wages alone the two are level. Any vendor quote is well above either number, so compare the quotes you actually receive.
• Romanian operations. If your group has a subsidiary, customers or data in Romania, a Romanian team reads the documents, speaks to the local staff and knows the local systems.
• Finland. Helsinki and Bucharest share a time zone.

Which country is best in Eastern Europe for nearshore AI?

None of them, as a country. The best choice is a team that has shipped AI in production and will work inside yours. National statistics describe labour markets. An AI project succeeds or fails on a handful of people.

Consider what the averages cannot tell you. The shortage of AI skills is European, not Polish or Romanian. Among EU companies that considered AI and did not go ahead, 70.3% named lack of expertise as a reason (Eurostat, AI in enterprises, 2026 edition, reference year 2025). A senior engineer who has taken a retrieval system or an agent into daily use is scarce in Warsaw, in Bucharest and in Berlin. The country shifts the odds of finding one. It does not find one for you.

How do you choose the team, not the country?

Ask each shortlisted vendor, in either country, the same six questions. The answers separate an AI engineering team from a recruiter with an AI page.

1. Show me something you built that runs in production. Not a demo or a slide: a live system, with who uses it and how often.
2. Name the engineer. Who, exactly, joins our team, and what have they shipped themselves?
3. What is the unit of delivery? Hours, or a use case in production with an adoption number agreed up front?
4. Who pairs with our people? If none of our engineers works alongside yours from the first week, we will depend on you when you leave.
5. What do we keep? Code, documentation and the evaluation set should all be ours. Without the evaluation set, nobody can prove later that the system still works.
6. Where is our data processed, under which law? In both Poland and Romania the answer should be the EU, under GDPR, with an Article 28 processor agreement. (General information, not legal advice.)

We wrote more on this in how to choose an AI provider and whether to build AI in-house or outsource.

What does Sapio offer from Romania?

One senior AI engineer inside your team, owning one use case until it runs in production and your people use it, starting with an audit. We build and run our own production AI, including ai-aflat.ro, an assistant over 220,000+ Romanian legislative acts, updated daily. If you need a 50-person delivery centre, we are not the right choice, and Poland may well be. If you need one use case to go live and stay live, see nearshore AI engineers from Romania.

The Romania-or-Poland question comes from outsourcing, where you bought capacity and the country set its price and depth. AI work is closer to hiring a specialist than to buying capacity. You would not choose a surgeon by the country's number of doctors per head.

If you have a use case and want to know who would build it, talk to us.

Sources

• Eurostat, ICT specialists in employment (isoc_sks_itspt), updated 17 April 2026
• Eurostat, enterprises using AI technologies (isoc_eb_ai) and by economic activity (isoc_eb_ain2), reference year 2025
• Eurostat, employment in technology and knowledge-intensive sectors by region (htec_emp_reg2)
• Eurostat, labour cost levels (lc_lci_lev)
• Eurostat euro indicators, government deficit and debt, 22 April 2026
• Eurostat, statistical report KS-01-26-009 on AI use in enterprises, 2026 edition
• EF English Proficiency Index 2025
• Council of the EU, Schengen: lifting of land border controls with Bulgaria and Romania, 12 December 2024