Dr. Ciarán Seoighe:

It is the obvious place to go. Appropriately funded research is what we want.

On other areas where the committee can help, dialogue is important because building trust between all parties is important, including this dialogue, engaging and allowing us to bring in researchers and have a conversation. As we have some real expertise in the country, it is good to tap into and use that.

Staying close to Europe on EU regulations and guiding and working closely with our colleagues there will also be important to us. We need to consider this with an all-of-government approach to things, because, as we talked about, if we are going to solve for AI and want really good AI, we need data centres, but if we want data centres, we need energy. If we want energy we need water. Therefore, an all-of-government approach is needed to solve this. The committee should remember my opening line, that the future of AI is not predetermined. It is the decisions we make and things we do now that will set the AI future we want.