Mr. Eoin O'Reilly:

I was not aware of that. What we are seeing in our clients is that to access these artificial intelligence technologies, development in cloud, which Ms O'Meara mentioned, has been really important. We have seen Irish businesses embrace cloud at a pace that is maybe not as fast as the global pace, but that access to cloud involves a lot of the technologies that Irish businesses need to unlock the value from AI. Those tools are readily accessible through a number of vendors and I am aware that this committee will talk to the technology companies next week in this regard. Irish organisations can access them quickly and start to use them.

Having said that, ongoing investment in infrastructure, not just the technological infrastructure, is critically important in this area and across a number of areas. The Government, with its national AI strategy, is doing some good work with the sandboxes that it is introducing to allow organisations an industry trial. Our more critical ongoing investment will be around the skills arena and making sure that, first, businesses have access to the AI talent and, second, that they also have access to AI-ready workers, if that makes sense. I refer to retraining the entire workforces to be able to use those technologies.