AI Funding for Polish Companies in 2026: What Is Open, and When the R&D Relief Wins

A conversation about deploying AI in a small or medium Polish company almost always arrives at the same place. Not at whether the model can cope, and not at whether the data is tidy enough. At the question of who pays for it — and whether it can be funded from a grant. The question is reasonable. The answer rarely sounds the way it does in a consultancy's slide deck.

This text is a snapshot taken on 16 August 2026: what is genuinely open, what has just closed, what is only announced — and when entering a competition is not worth it at all, because the tax reliefs deliver roughly the same thing faster. We are not grant consultants and we do not write applications. We write as a company that carries out these deployments and regularly sees how they get funded on the client's side.

Why money is the real brake

In AI projects the cost does not sit where it sits in a classic investment. You are not buying a machine that goes into the fixed-asset register and is depreciated over five years. You are buying people's time: process analysis, data preparation, building an evaluation set, several iterations, integrations with systems that already run. On top of that comes the running cost — the model bill that arrives every month and grows with the number of tasks. We took it apart in a separate piece on the monthly cost of an agent, because that line is usually what breaks a budget approved on the deployment quote alone.

The second brake is institutional. Polish support instruments were historically built for machines, production lines and robots. Spending on software and team time can be eligible too, but almost always as part of something larger — an R&D project or the deployment of an innovation — rather than as an aim in itself. That is why the sentence "we want a grant to deploy AI" has no good addressee in 2026, while the sentence "we are running development work on a new solution" has several.

What is open in August 2026?

The table below is the state on the day of publication, assembled from the FENG call schedule in force since 31 July 2026 and from the announcements of the institutions running the calls. Dates move during the year, so check the current announcement at the source before you decide.

KPO: what became of it

KPO is in practice closed to new applications. 31 August 2026 is the cut-off date of the Recovery and Resilience Facility: by that day the beneficiary has to have completed the investments and hit the targets, evidenced by documents dated no later than that day.

For companies that signed contracts earlier, nothing disappears overnight. The Ministry of Funds and Regional Policy, addressing the settlement of KPO investments, has indicated that some administrative steps and final payments to contractors may also be made after that date, provided the undertaking has actually been completed. That is winding the programme down, however, not new money.

The flagship measure for this topic, A2.1.1 — investments supporting robotisation and digitalisation in enterprises — ran its competitive call from 6 July to 30 November 2023, with a project completion deadline of 30 June 2026. If someone offers you a "KPO grant for artificial intelligence" today, ask for the call number and its opening date. That settles the conversation in thirty seconds.

Ścieżka SMART: who it is really for

Ścieżka SMART, part of the European Funds for a Modern Economy programme, is today the main national instrument, and it pays to understand how it is built before counting your chances. A project consists of modules. For an SME either the R&D module or the innovation deployment module is mandatory — that is the crux. Digitalisation exists only as an optional module, added on top of one of those two. You cannot win SMART on "we will deploy AI in customer service" alone.

Open at the time of publication is the NCBR call for consortia: applications from 7 August to 16 October 2026, an allocation of PLN 350 m, a minimum of PLN 3 m in eligible costs and a maximum of PLN 140 m of support per project. Only an enterprise can lead the consortium; a research organisation or an NGO can join only as a partner.

For single SMEs the nearest one is the R&D call run by PARP: launch on 29 September, applications from 29 October to 29 December 2026, an allocation of PLN 500 m. After it, per the FENG schedule, comes the deployment call for SMEs — launch on 17 December 2026, applications from 21 January to 16 March 2027.

The scale of the competition shows in the last completed deployment call. It ran from 14 May to 11 June 2026, the budget was PLN 700 m, maximum support PLN 50 m, minimum eligible costs PLN 3 m. PARP received 297 applications for roughly PLN 2.8 bn — four times the allocation — and 138 projects worth over PLN 1.5 bn met the criteria of the first evaluation stage. This is not a formality but a contest in which most fall out, and that is before the second stage.

Regions, Eastern Poland, Dig.IT and EDIH

Beyond FENG there are a few more places worth checking, though none of them is an open gate for an AI project today.

Sixteen regional programmes have their own schedules and their own priorities; that is where smaller support for SME digitalisation usually lands. There is no single deadline and no single amount — you have to check your voivodeship's programme and the call search at funduszeeuropejskie.gov.pl.

Companies in Eastern Poland have measure 1.2 of the FEPW programme, Automation and robotisation in SMEs: up to PLN 3 m of funding per project, intensity up to 85% depending on the cost category and the type of aid, with the support preceded by a technology audit and an Industry 4.0 transformation roadmap. The last call ran from 1 August to 26 September 2024 with an allocation of PLN 100 m and was settled in January 2025. No further date appears in the published schedule, so this is an instrument to watch rather than to plan this quarter around.

Dig.IT, run by ARP, targets SMEs in manufacturing and production services: grants from PLN 150,000 to 850,000, up to 50% of eligible costs, as de minimis aid, reimbursed in one payment after completion and with no advances. The pilot competition closed on 28 November 2025 and there is no open call today. Watch the entry criteria, because they eliminate a good number of firms before the content of the application matters at all: at least five full financial years, an unused de minimis limit, and financial ratios within a given range.

European Digital Innovation Hubs — EDIH — are a different category. They do not give money, they give services: digital maturity assessments, technology tests before you invest, training, advisory support. For SMEs they are free of charge, because they are provided as de minimis aid. It is a good way to test your assumptions before spending your own money, but it is not deployment funding and should not be planned as such.

Tax reliefs: the part that is always available

Here begins the section most small companies skip, as far as we can see. A grant is a competition: it has a deadline, criteria, an assessment and, in the last deployment call, a success rate below half at the very first stage. A tax relief is a right: no call, no committee, no ranking list. What it does have is the duty to prove that the project fits the definition — and that is the whole of the work to be done.

The R&D relief lets you deduct qualified costs from the tax base a second time, alongside their ordinary treatment as tax-deductible costs. The rates, per podatki.gov.pl: 200% for the salaries of employees and of people on commission and specific-task contracts in the part relating to R&D, 100% for the remaining qualified costs; research and development centres have higher limits. The catalogue covers, among others, salaries with social contributions, materials and raw materials, specialist equipment that is not a fixed asset, expert opinions from academic institutions, and depreciation of fixed and intangible assets used in R&D activity.

Does building an AI solution count as R&D? Not automatically. What decides is the character of the work: creative, systematic, increasing the stock of knowledge and using it to create new applications. Designing your own algorithms, building an evaluation set and testing hypotheses whose outcome was unknown at the start sits closer to that definition than configuring an off-the-shelf SaaS according to the vendor's manual. The Director of the National Tax Information, in the interpretation of 25 April 2025, ref. 0114-KDIP3-1.4011.236.2025.2.EC, also confirmed that using AI tools in the course of the work does not by itself remove the right to the relief, as long as the creative decisions stay with the human.

If you want certainty about your own facts, an application for an individual interpretation costs PLN 40 per set of facts or future event, and the authority has three months to answer from receiving a complete application. That is the cheapest insurance in this whole text, and the only one that works retroactively against an audit.

The innovative employees relief answers the most common problem of a small firm: the R&D costs are there, but there is nothing to deduct them from, because the year closed with a loss or too little income. The unused part of the R&D relief is then used by reducing the PIT advances withheld from the salaries of people directly engaged in R&D activity for at least half of their working time. The effect is cash and monthly rather than annual — and in a small company that usually matters more than the size of the deduction itself.

IP Box works on the income side rather than the cost side: 5% tax on income from a qualified intellectual property right, and copyright in a computer program is on the list of those rights. The condition is separate accounting records that allow revenue, costs and income to be established per right; without them the general rates apply. Since 1 January 2022, under Art. 24d(9a) of the CIT Act, the R&D relief and IP Box may be applied at the same time — the qualified costs that led to the creation of a given right are deducted from the income from that very right.

The robotisation relief often gets mentioned in the same sentence as artificial intelligence, and usually wrongly. It gives an additional deduction of 50% of robotisation costs, but its catalogue is hardware: factory-new industrial robots, tooling, safety and ergonomics devices, remote management and monitoring systems, training, and finance leases with transfer of ownership. Software fits in only as an intangible asset necessary for the robot's proper commissioning, not as a standalone spend on an IT system.

The deadline is a separate matter. Per podatki.gov.pl, robotisation costs are deducted from the start of the tax year that began in 2022 until the end of the tax year that began in 2026. The Ministry of Finance has stated that it is not working on extending this preference, and the parliamentary bill removing the sunset and raising the deduction to 100% was not enacted. If you have an industrial robot in your plans, this is the last year in which the relief certainly applies.

Two traps to close this section. The R&D relief is not available to entrepreneurs taxed under the lump sum on registered revenue. And a company that chose the lump-sum corporate income tax, the so-called Estonian CIT, loses for the duration the right to the deductions under Art. 18d–18f of the CIT Act, so it will settle neither the R&D relief nor IP Box in that period. These are decisions to compare before choosing the form of taxation, not after the fact.

What cannot be stacked

The ban on double financing has a precise address in the R&D relief: Art. 18d(5) of the CIT Act states that qualified costs are deductible if they have not been refunded to the taxpayer in any form and have not been deducted from the tax base. The purpose is simple, and the courts have repeated it for years: you do not deduct a second time an expense whose economic burden you did not bear.

This does not mean a grant rules out the relief. It means you calculate the relief on the part of the costs you financed yourself — your own contribution. At 60% funding you are left with 40% of the base, which is a real effect, not a theoretical one. Watch out for the timing shift, though: if the reimbursement arrives in a later year than the deduction, you have to go back and correct the settlement. Plan that with your accountant before you file the application, not when the transfer lands.

Honestly: the hidden price of a grant

A grant is neither free nor fast. Your own contribution is the first item — the intensity of support depends on the module, the cost category, the size of the company and the regional aid map, and the rest has to be in the account or financed by a loan before the reimbursement arrives.

The second item is time. The PARP deployment call was open for less than a month: from 14 May to 11 June 2026. An application started only after the call is announced gets written in a hurry, because it really begins weeks earlier with project documentation, a cost estimate, a market analysis and a business plan. That is the work of several people inside the company, not just the consultant, and nobody reimburses those hours.

The third is the innovation bar. Ścieżka SMART requires a product or business-process innovation at least at the level of the country. "We will deploy an assistant that answers questions from our documentation" is a sensible business project and a weak competition application, because Poland already has plenty of such deployments — and what is assessed is not usefulness to you but novelty on the market.

The fourth is life after signing: targets, reporting, audits, the project durability period, and repayment of the funding with interest if the conditions are not maintained. A grant turns an IT project into an IT project with an administrative annex, and that annex has its own schedule, its own risk and its own owner on your side.

Hence the conclusion we repeat to clients most often. For a deployment of PLN 30,000–80,000, chasing a grant usually does not pay off: there is no open instrument at that scale, the entry thresholds in Ścieżka SMART are counted in millions, and the cost of preparing and servicing an application eats a large share of the expected benefit. It is faster to run the pilot on your own money, measure the effect and settle the costs through the R&D relief — and go for a grant only once the pilot turns into a project of an entirely different size.

How to choose: a simple decision tree

flowchart TB
  Q1{"Deployment budget"}
  Q1 -->|"up to PLN 100,000"| P1["Run the pilot on your own money"]
  Q1 -->|"PLN 100,000 – 1 m"| Q2{"Are you building something new<br/>or configuring something ready?"}
  Q1 -->|"above PLN 3 m of costs"| Q3{"Does the project contain<br/>R&D work?"}
  Q2 -->|"configuring"| P2["No grant fits this.<br/>Ordinary costs,<br/>check your regional programme"]
  Q2 -->|"a new solution"| P3["R&D relief on the costs,<br/>IP Box on the income from rights"]
  Q3 -->|"yes, on our own"| P4["Ścieżka SMART, PARP call<br/>launch 29.09.2026"]
  Q3 -->|"yes, in a consortium"| P5["Ścieżka SMART, NCBR call<br/>until 16.10.2026"]
  Q3 -->|"no, deployment only"| P6["Ścieżka SMART deployment track<br/>call 21.01–16.03.2027"]
  P1 --> R
  P3 --> R
  P4 --> R
  P5 --> R
  P6 --> R
  R["In every branch:<br/>R&D records from day one<br/>and separate books per IP right"]

Where we fit into this

We are not grant consultants. We do not write applications, we do not settle projects and we do not take a commission on funding awarded. If you are entering a call, hire someone who does it for a living — in these competitions the difference between an application prepared by a specialist and one written in-house shows up in the score.

What we do sits on the other side. We build deployments that in our practice often have the character of development work, and we can describe them so that they can actually be shown to someone: what was unknown at the start, which variants we tested, what the evaluation set showed, why the chosen solution differs from an off-the-shelf product. The repository history, the test results and the technical documentation are exactly the material an accountant will ask for with the R&D relief and a consultant will ask for with an application. It is produced during the project or not at all — reconstructing it a year later is expensive and not very credible.

What such a deployment looks like in practice we described using Accounting AI Agent — an agent connected to wFirma, public registries and KSeF — from the user's side and from the architecture side. If you are planning a budget for the coming months, two more texts will help: what to do when the company is not ready for KSeF, because the penalty deadline falls on 31 December, and what the AI Act requires from August 2026 — compliance is now part of a project description, including in an application.

What to do in the coming weeks

1. Fix the scale of the project before you look for a programme. Below the PLN 3 m threshold of eligible costs Ścieżka SMART is not in play at all, and that changes the whole funding conversation.

2. Check your form of taxation. The lump sum on registered revenue and Estonian CIT both rule out the R&D relief. Better to know that before the project than in April, at the settlement.

3. Start R&D records on day one of the project. Cost separation, time records for the team, a description of the work and its results. Without that the relief stays theoretical, even if the project fits the definition.

4. Consider an individual interpretation. Forty zloty and up to three months of waiting is a low price for certainty that your facts fall within the definition of research and development activity.

5. If the year closes with a loss, calculate the innovative employees relief. The deduction from PIT advances works even when there is no income to deduct the R&D relief from.

6. Check your de minimis limit. Three years counted day to day; an exhausted limit can rule you out of Dig.IT or of free EDIH services before the project is even discussed.

7. Put two dates in the calendar. 29 September 2026 — the launch of the PARP R&D call for single SMEs. 17 December 2026 — the launch of the deployment call. If you intend to enter, preparation starts weeks before the announcement, not after it.

8. If you are planning to buy an industrial robot, do it within this tax year. The robotisation relief covers costs until the end of the tax year that began in 2026, and nothing today points to an extension.

Is this tax or grant advice?

It is neither. It is a snapshot taken on 16 August 2026, made so that there is somewhere to start. Call deadlines shift within weeks and the rules of the reliefs have already changed several times, so before deciding check the current announcements at funduszeeuropejskie.gov.pl and the rules of the deductions at podatki.gov.pl, and discuss your own situation with a tax adviser and — if you are going for a grant — with a grant consultant. If, on the other hand, the question is "what exactly do we want to deploy, what will it cost per month and can it honestly be described as development work" — that is a conversation we have every day. Write to us: development@mi-code.pl.