Matt Shanahan (Waterford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome our guests this morning it is very timely to have representatives of three of the leading agencies that integrate with government. They will have a pretty important position to use their learning to influence the Government. I am more interested in high-level policy than the individual activities. We could spend all day talking about how AI cuts across all the different things.

My background is in more of a micro business area. I was looking at some of the opportunities and threats. Under opportunities, I have put down transformative for business, increased efficiency, product innovation and the next generation of employment. It is an unstoppable train and we need to be on it. The threats are the job displacement and potentially making humans obsolete. Will future decision-making be done by man or machine? There is business disruption and the whole business model changes. That is the piece we are in. Even though we all say there are great opportunities and great threats, none of us really knows where it is going because ultimately the whole nature of AI is that AI itself becomes the thinking and is creating the shift.

We accept that Ireland needs to be at the vanguard of this because we obviously host some of the world's largest technology companies based here and we want to keep that competitive advantage.

At the same time, we also have to understand it is going to have major cultural, social and economic shifts. How are we going to manage all of this? Part of it is retraining and reskilling. We have to understand there is a significant portion of our workforce who may not be able to adapt to the degree necessary to try to keep themselves in a job, let us say, and that a lot of jobs are going to be displaced. From the point of view of the witnesses, at the top threshold level, what will they be saying to the Government regarding our national capability? This includes our requirements relating to energy supply, which we know; data centres, which we need to be driving on but cannot, it appears, because of the grid; and the regulatory environment, on which at the moment we are going back to Brussels. That may not be enough. We have to be doing a lot ourselves. The key challenges here are around security and the protection of data, data integrity and information integrity. As politicians, that is going to be very significant. Even in the upcoming local elections, we can see already what is happening. In the context of those areas, what will the witnesses be saying to Government in terms of their analysis to guide Government and departmental policy here to make sure we make the right decisions appropriately and at the right time?