21:00 15 September 2025
Mariusz Sobociński, IT Director at Nowy Styl: digitization is associated with burning money
Mariusz Sobociński, IT Director at Nowy Styl, describes Poland’s cautious approach to innovation, where companies often wait for proven results abroad before investing. The firm has modernized its infrastructure, moving to cloud and PaaS models, introduced containerization, MES upgrades, and nearly fully automated furniture production lines. It builds analytics capabilities with Databricks and Power BI, promoting local “self-service” data teams.
While Nowy Styl experiments with AI for production planning and software development (e.g., IBM WatsonX, GitHub Copilot), projects remain small-scale due to cost and cultural barriers. Sobociński stresses the need for standardized data, balanced human oversight, and warns that ESG reporting and excessive regulation raise costs and risk hurting competitiveness.
"In Poland, a pragmatic approach dominates: if I do not have a specific, visible business case, it is difficult for me to make investments. When something succeeds in Austria, in Germany - only then can we implement it at home. It seems to me that this is an aversion to innovation... We associate it more with burning money."
(wnp.pl)
