Niamh Smyth (Cavan-Monaghan, Fianna Fail)

Overall for AI, I am very excited by the opportunity for the highly-skilled jobs that it can provide. Ireland has had a strong academia-led approach to developing AI talent. Over the past five years, Research Ireland has committed to spending of nearly €200 million on AI research. The majority of this funding goes to centres for research and training. There is huge investment in this area. We have to acknowledge that there will be a certain displacement. It would be foolish to think there would not be. However, I hope that the establishment of the AI observatory will give us clear data and analysis to see where this going, where the jobs are being impacted and how we can mitigate this. This could happen either through reskilling in the universities or through Skillnet Ireland, which is on the case on this aspect of it. My hope is twofold, that the investment in research and academia, coupled with the observatory, will enable us to predict trends on where we are going and where job losses may come to mitigate the effects and look at retraining and reskilling those who might be most impacted.