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Poland’s Ministry of Digital Affairs has opened a new recruitment drive for municipalities interested in testing ExtrAct, an artificial-intelligence system designed to help local officials process administrative documents. The initiative, announced on August 19, 2026, links a recent Polish research project with a practical public-sector use case: reducing the amount of manual reading required when officials handle notarial deeds, land records and related files.
The invitation is open to local-government units of different sizes. According to information provided to the Polish Press Agency’s local-government service by the ministry, there is currently no fixed participant limit and no exclusion based on the size of a municipality. Interested authorities begin by completing a form on the government’s AI portal, after which specialists discuss the office’s document flows and possible pilot arrangements.
From research project to municipal workflow
ExtrAct was developed by the Polish research institute IDEAS. The system is intended to read documents used in local administration, identify relevant details and organise them into a structured set of information. Examples include the parties to a transaction, property characteristics and legal provisions contained in a notarial deed.
The tool can also compare information with public registers and flag possible inconsistencies between sources. A central feature is traceability: each extracted item is linked to the relevant passage in the original document, allowing an official to check the basis for the result without searching through the entire file again.
This approach addresses a familiar administrative challenge. Municipal offices often work with documents that are several dozen pages long and contain a mixture of legal language, property data and formal details. Automating the first stage of information gathering does not remove the official’s responsibility, but can make the subsequent checking and processing more focused.
Early pilot produced reported efficiency gains
The first municipal implementation took place in Międzyzdroje, in north-western Poland. The official local-government portal reported in July that the system had been tested on more than 350 genuine notarial deeds, with an average length of about 27 pages. The reported overall data-extraction accuracy was nearly 95 per cent, while the result for identifying legal provisions exceeded 98 per cent.
Those figures describe the pilot reported by the authorities and should be understood as an early implementation result rather than a national performance benchmark. The pilot nevertheless provides a concrete basis for the ministry’s decision to look for additional municipalities and document categories.
Digital Affairs Minister Krzysztof Gawkowski said the tool could reduce the time needed for this type of work by an average of five times. The ministry’s broader aim is to make the system usable not only in major cities but also in smaller municipalities, where administrative teams may have fewer opportunities to develop specialised document-processing capacity.
Local processing is part of the design
ExtrAct is designed to operate locally, within the municipality’s own information-technology network, rather than relying on an external AI service provider or remote computing infrastructure. The ministry describes the system as modular and based on open software, with an architecture that allows its components to be audited.
The design also retains a human checkpoint. Officials must confirm the extracted information, and the system displays the source passage for review. It does not make independent administrative decisions. The final responsibility for the data therefore remains with the municipal employee using the software.
For municipalities, the arrangement is presented as a staged process. IDEAS will finance the initial needs analysis and adaptation work, while the local government is expected to cover direct technical implementation and later maintenance. This allows an office to assess the usefulness of the system before committing to a full operational deployment.
A practical test for Poland’s public-sector AI ambitions
The recruitment drive places the emphasis on experimentation rather than an immediate nationwide rollout. Each pilot is expected to be tailored to the municipality’s workload, document types and technical resources. The ministry says the system may eventually be adapted beyond notarial deeds to other categories of administrative documents.
That gradual approach is significant for Poland’s wider innovation ecosystem. It gives a domestic research institute an opportunity to refine a technology in cooperation with public users, while municipalities can evaluate whether local AI processing delivers measurable benefits in everyday work. It also highlights a practical issue that often receives less attention than model performance: whether public institutions have the networks, computing resources and staff procedures needed to use AI responsibly.
If further pilots confirm the initial results, ExtrAct could become an example of how Polish research and public administration can cooperate on narrowly defined, verifiable improvements. For now, the ministry’s invitation is an open call for municipalities to test that proposition in their own offices.
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