Mr. Eoin O'Reilly:

I am happy to kick off on this one. Dr. O’Sullivan may wish to come in as well. I thank the Deputy for the question. I will make some observations in a couple of areas or mention things we are saying in interactions with the Government. First, he will hear loud and clear from all of us here about skills. This is not to fixate on the AI talents, those who do AI; it is also about enabling the rest of the workforce. Some of the programmes that have been launched as part of the national strategy are really welcome but I do not think we can do enough of that in skilling up the workforce to be AI-ready. The Deputy referred to SMEs. We do a lot of work with them. I am blown away by their enthusiasm for some of the tools. Sometimes, they are less risk-averse and they will have a go. I was with a packaging company two weeks ago that was using GenAI to respond to a request for proposal, RFP. One of the employees said it took him ten minutes to prepare a proposal that would normally take an afternoon. There are great simple applications out there. That skills piece is huge and we need a continued strong focus on that.

On the regulation side, we obviously need a strong embrace with the AI Acts. Having trustworthy and responsible AI is really important. It is really important we get that right. There is perhaps a question for us, given the lead role we played in data protection, whether there is something there about which we should be thinking from the perspective of Ireland or if we could play a bigger role in Europe in regulation and compliance of AI.

To move to the multinational sector, we have to recognise that we have done very well in the attraction of multinationals and the types of jobs we have there. There is a protect piece there, quite frankly, regarding the types of work that happen in those organisations such as in finance and manufacturing. We need to make sure we are AI-enabling and protecting those investments. In the context of how those workers execute in their environments, it is really important that AI is to the forefront because there is a lot of competition in those organisations for AI investment and other countries are working very hard. There may be an opportunity, as someone mentioned earlier, around Ireland as a destination. Are there particular places for which we can make a play? From a pure numbers perspective, we should not think we will compete with India or China for pure engineering talent, but maybe there are certain areas where we have been very successful, such as in life sciences or in the financial services sector. There may be something there where we could play a bigger role.

Finally, we should not forget about the other skills relating to AI in which Ireland has a distinctive advantage. I refer to creativity, collaboration and communication. We underestimate how important those are in a technical discipline and we should be really confident about those kinds of capabilities and how we can built on that to attract more investment to Ireland.