What would Kraków look like without its technology and business services sector? Forsal.pl put that question to its readers on 7 August.
Strip out the sector and you strip out over 100,000 jobs in the city and a quarter of a million across southern Poland, and much of what stands on them: graduate careers, flight connections, the city’s tax base and its international character.
Then the harder question. AI is testing the model this success was built on. Cost does not hold: work follows value, and the sector has spent two decades moving into more complex, more highly valued work.
What holds is what was built along the way: trust, tacit knowledge, the density of the ecosystem and working relationships. Depth is developed, not given, and the machine cannot copy it.
Dziennik Gazeta Prawna and Forsal.pl were media patrons of ASPIRE 2026, which opened on the same question with the World Stage session What Would Kraków Look Like Without Us?
Read the article on Forsal.pl (in Polish) ↗
