Mr. Eoin O'Reilly:

I thank the Chair and committee members for the opportunity to come before it today. I am a partner in EY and I am head of analytics and AI practice. I am joined today by EY Ireland’s chief economist, Dr. Loretta O’Sullivan, who will speak soon.

We welcome the opportunity to address this committee on this critically important issue. In EY, we believe artificial intelligence can have a transformative, positive and far-reaching impact on all businesses, from SMEs to indigenous and multinational companies, as well as the people working in these organisations and indeed on wider society. For those who do not know about EY, it employs more than 5,000 people on the island of Ireland, with offices in Dublin, Belfast, Cork, Galway, Limerick and Waterford supporting organisations across a wide and diverse range of professional services from assurance to corporate finance, tax, law, consulting and analytics and AI.

Every day, we work with a broad range of organisations spanning every sector of Ireland’s economy from start-ups and private businesses to well-established Irish plcs and multinational foreign direct investment, FDI, organisations. Our entrepreneur of the year programme has been running for more than 25 years, promoting entrepreneurship and empowering entrepreneurs to grow their businesses on the island of Ireland and around the world. It is this continuous interaction with our varied clients here and across our global network that gives us a unique perspective on how businesses are embracing transformative technologies such as AI from the C-suite to the production floor.

EY has embedded AI into our global technology solutions for more than a decade. Globally, we have invested more than €1.3 billion in our artificial intelligence offering, encompassing services and capabilities for our clients and our people. Here in EY Ireland, we employ more than 300 people in our AI and analytics practice, which brings together experts across artificial intelligence, data analytics and business transformation. These services are to help organisations harness the potential of AI and reimagine the way they do business.

Last year, we launched EYQ, EY’s own private large language model, which operates in a similar manner to other conversational AI models such as ChatGPT or Google’s Bard, allowing our people to ideate, research and create with generative AI. We see EYQ as a co-pilot for our people, augmenting human potential by supporting ideation and research, boosting productivity, automating repetitive tasks and more.

Artificial intelligence is not a new technology, but it is increasingly coming into focus with developments around generative AI, GenAI, in recent years, as other speakers have mentioned. AI is around us every day, from interpreting human speech like Alexa in our kitchens, learning and inference based on a history of events like what we have bought and is recommended to us on Amazon or the generation of documents and information like we are seeing with ChatGPT and other virtual assistants.

From a business perspective and from our interactions with clients, there is real excitement about what AI, and GenAI in particular, can bring to their businesses, what outcomes it can drive and what it might do over the coming years. This is a technology discussion that has vaulted from the server room to the boardroom. In our survey of 1,200 CEOs from around the world, we saw that 99% plan to invest in generative AI and 70% seek to act quickly to avoid being edged out by competitors. Organisations see GenAI as a value creator, boosting productivity and efficiency but also supporting research and new product development, automating repetitive tasks and reducing silos across an organisation and, ultimately, allowing them to better serve their customers. We are seeing engagement across all business functions, from customer service and sales, manufacturing and marketing to core business services such as operations and finance. While the impact may be different depending on the type of business or the area it is focused on, the opportunity is there for almost all.

Second, investment in AI is already happening. Many of the organisations we work with here are already investing heavily in AI or assessing their current maturity to identify where they are going to start. Globally and locally, EY is working across a broad range of areas to support clients on their AI journey. This includes healthcare and life sciences, working with hospitals and on the manufacturing floor to improve yields and products. In logistics, AI is being used to optimise supply chains, reduce delivery times and ensure better efficiency on delivery windows. In finance, banks and other multinationals are making significant investments in AI to train and support the detection of suspicious activity and use AI to automate the review and analysis of complex credit agreements.

AI talent is a top priority for businesses seeking to take advantage of the opportunities of this game changing technology. Access to AI talent and the training and upskilling of existing staff so that they can harness AI in their work is key. That is why it is so important to have skills training and education for people at all stages of their career and in almost all sectors to upskill in AI.

The main challenges our clients are facing are twofold. The first is around data. The quality of AI outputs for a given organisation are proportional to the quality of the data and the digital core that underpins them. That is why getting AI ready and investing early in capturing and organising data accurately is a critical first step that most organisations are currently focused on.

Second, businesses are concerned about how they can adopt AI responsibly and safely. They want to know how they resolve concerns in areas like data privacy, intellectual property, unwitting hallucinations by AI and the essential issue of AI ethics and regulation. Many organisations will be racing to use AI in 2024, but responsible and future-proofed adoption is crucial to avoid pitfalls ahead of new regulation. In this context, the EU’s recently passed AI Act is very welcome, providing guardrails and guidance for organisations and a probably a first-mover advantage to the block.

In summary, technological revolutions are not new, but the economic impact of AI could surface more rapidly than previous technological revolutions, as the implementation and pace of adoption is faster and the scale of the opportunity is very large. This is a very exciting time for the Irish economy. We have some unique opportunities that we should consider but we need to be focused. My colleague, Dr. Loretta O’Sullivan ,will now address some of the macroeconomic opportunities for businesses and the wider economy offered by AI.