Mr. Kieran McCorry:

I thank Deputy Stanton. First, I might just respond a little bit to the innovation point the Deputy made earlier. He is quite right in talking about the pace of change. It is tremendous. However, I would agree with Ryan from Google that there is a great opportunity here for us all to do more in this space. When we look at the opportunities to do more with regard to education and skilling, especially around the changes we are seeing with technology where, over the past 12 months, we have talked about these large language models, whereas we are now seeing a shift almost in the application of the technology to so-called small language models. There is headroom there for the overall skilling programme and what we are doing from an education perspective to focus on this and on innovation in that space. I also note that Ryan talked about scholarships that are being operated with various educational institutions. There is an opportunity to do more in that space.

That ties in to the overall reskilling question the Deputy has asked. The requirements for skilling are very broad. Almost everyone is going to be affected by this technology in some way, and we are not talking about niche skilling in terms of people being able to understand how to programme in AI or machine learning, as Sasha mentioned earlier. In fact, the way we have seen the technology evolve now is that people who have no background or expertise in that are able to avail of so-called no-code programming. The technology is evolving to allow people to do quite advanced things with technology they do not need to be expert in, but we need to open up opportunities for these people to see it. I do not think we have all of the ducks lined up for that particular element of it.

With respect to the Deputy's second question on whether these entities I mentioned are not working together very well, I think they are but this is an opportunity for them to do more. We welcome, as Jeremy mentioned in the opening statement, the introduction of the AI advisory council. I sit on the enterprise digital advisory forum as well. I think the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment has done a great job in defining the strategy but I still think there is more work to do on how we make it real for businesses, and how we outreach and communicate more to both broad society and businesses on how they can do more with regard to the uptake of this technology. I think that is a gap, and there is an opportunity to do something there.