Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 29 May 2024

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation

Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Businesses: Discussion (Resumed)

Mr. Jeremy Rollison:

On Deputy Shanahan's first question about the infrastructure and the defence thereof, we like to talk sometimes about this attack vector expanse, in that there is more to protect than there was before and there are more misuses to mitigate and we have several responsibilities there.

One is to ensure that our own technologies and tools are designed in a way that will mitigate as much of that as possible and make it hard, if not impossible, for anyone to misuse that. Insofar as bad actors are using AI for nefarious purposes, we do not want them using our stuff for that. That is one. We then have an obligation to ensure that our customers are better at using this and are not only bound by those technological visions but by what we can do contractually or legally. Then, at least, at Microsoft, we have a tremendous responsibility as to where we are using AI to help or already mitigate the misuse of AI. There are good examples of where AI is making it faster to identify patterns in such attacks and the like. It is sometimes a bit of a cat and mouse game and there is no doubt about it.

On the democratising effect, and if we look at that broadly, this was one of the ways in which I wanted to answer the question earlier about accessibility and persons with disabilities. There is a democratising aspect here of natural language possibilities which are making entry to certain job categories different than was the case before. This is happening fast. When one thinks about a year or two ago, we were talking about coding, coding, coding. Look at how quickly we have changed that with the natural language possibilities around coding. We will be optimistic there but I want to be crystal clear that I think there is a great deal of work to do because we are getting many questions from customers, citizens and consumers. There are a few areas of optimism and we will keep leaning in there but I can appreciate some of the dubious ways of looking at that there.