Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 15 May 2024

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation

Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Businesses: Discussion

Ms Hilary O'Meara:

Coming back to what Mr. Lee said about his clients, every client we work with has been into our generative AI studio not once but multiple times. There is an appetite for this. Some of those clients are figuring out their strategy and plan, where they might start and how fast they might go. Some are starting to learn and experiment. These use cases and test cases are very different from what has gone before. There is so much learning even in doing that. Others are moving to genuinely embedding it in their processes and services, such as the chatbot example Mr. Hannigan gave. There is a huge spectrum of where people are at.

However, we cannot be the fast followers we previously thought we could be in other technologies. This is moving so fast that if we do not get on the bus, we could get left behind. I genuinely mean that. Everybody needs to be embracing, understanding, learning, educating themselves and starting to adopt it. We need to understand the pace at which it will move and the pace at which it will disrupt and get ahead of it. I include government in this. If it is not understood, how can we make the right policy decisions? How can we support reskilling people in the right ways? It is coming very fast. We really need to keep going.