Malcolm Byrne (Wicklow-Wexford, Fianna Fail)
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Members will be aware that if they are going to ask questions there is a constitutional requirement that they must be inside the Leinster House complex. I welcome everyone to this morning's meeting of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Artificial Intelligence. The purpose of this committee is to explore the ways in which AI is impacting on society and make recommendations to Government about what changes we need and how we can adapt.

We are happy to welcome our guests who will tell us how Estonia has introduced artificial intelligence into its education system. I welcome to the Public Gallery Her Excellency Kairi Künka, the Estonian ambassador to Ireland. We are joined from AI Leap by Ms Laura Kalda, chief operations officer, and Mr. Armas Riives, head of communications. They both came from Estonia to be here. We are grateful to both of them for being here to share the Estonian experience. I know it is quite an interesting one and we can learn a lot from it. I invite Ms Kalda to deliver the opening statement, which will be followed by questions and answers.

Ms Laura Kalda:

I thank the committee for inviting us. I am COO of AI Leap in Estonia, which is a small foundation working with the topic that students are already using AI in their schoolwork. The question is how we ensure this empowers learning.

Our programme deals with something the committee is probably also aware of, which is whether AI will change how students do their homework or if homework makes any sense. In the case of Estonia, schools have a lot of homework. They are homework heavy. There are also questions about thinking skills and internal questions in schools about whether they will have to change conceptually. Many of these questions have been asked. The issue is whether this is just a matter of debate or of how to approach this issue in the school system. At the same time, with the problems, there is also an opportunity. We can see that AI is capable of supporting students and there is an opportunity to equalise education for all students in all regions. You can help them prepare with AI skills and, hopefully, also improve their learning skills with the help of AI. There is also the idea that Estonia is already a digitally developed country, so we are keen to keep this going and to strengthen AI skills within the population.

What have we done so far? We are in our pilot year. We started in the fall of 2025 and we have created a tailored model for students. This means we provide upper secondary students with a separate learning-based large language model, LLM, that is free for every school. It is voluntary for schools to join and they get access to the tutoring model. For teachers, we have provided off-the-shelf pro-licences. This year we have provided them with OpenAI and Google licences and are supporting them to rethink their teaching practices. We are working within schools to try to help teachers to develop their own approach towards AI in their teaching practices. The point of having this central foundation is that we are sharing the practices different schools have developed, what they are doing and how they are approaching it with other schools, so they can learn from each other. We are hoping to achieve a system-wide impact with this whole approach.

With regard to the timeline, we are currently set to be a three-year programme. The first year is ending soon. This year, we have many upper secondary schools. Estonia is a small country, so perhaps it is easier to do this roll-out, but we have covered 99% of upper secondary schools in the first year. As I mentioned, it is a voluntary programme so schools can join in if they want to. We are currently covering 20,000 students and nearly 5,000 teachers. We launched the student app in January. We are also running an impact analysis on our students to see whether AI helps or hinders their learning processes. Next year, we will be scaling to vocational schools and new tenth graders, when we will add 38,000 students and 2,000 teachers from the vocational schools. We will be providing support for primary school teachers as well because one of the biggest criticisms we receive is from primary school teachers who tell us they need help as well.

As the committee can see, we are not approaching primary school students just yet. We are waiting for an impact study because we do not expect them to have these kinds of critical thinking skills yet. We are very cautious about younger students. We are integrating AI Leap into teaching curricula. We have universities teaching our teachers and are working with them.

In year 3 we hope to scale further in primary schools and we will see what the impact analysis says about the students. We will integrate validated solutions into international programmes and perhaps determine who will take over the licensing. As a foundation, we will end our activities by then.

On the counterparts around this, the President of Estonia took the decision to move forward with AI in schools. A year ago he said it was something the country needed to work on and launched a programme, together with the minister for education. We have to include companies, founders and the private sector. The funding is 50:50 from different sectors. We are working with universities and institutes of Estonian language, which are, of course, important to us, as well school leaders, teachers and students. A wide range of counterparts are working together.

Malcolm Byrne (Wicklow-Wexford, Fianna Fail)
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Thank you, Ms Kalda, for your presentation. We will move to questions from members of the committee first, but everyone will have the opportunity to speak. Members will have seven minutes for questions and answers in the order agreed.

Johnny Mythen (Wexford, Sinn Fein)
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I welcome the ambassador. There are a lot of claims about the process. How does Ms Kalda control the quality of answers, content filtering and data handling, especially when using LLMs from different countries?

Ms Laura Kalda:

We do not control the answers. We are teaching AI literary skills on the side to students. We tell them that they have to check their answers. We are working on improving the content. There are educational materials in Estonia. We work in LLMs and are working on getting better answers and improving the quality of LLMs. Of course, we cannot have 100% accuracy. This is something we teach students to evaluate on their own.

Johnny Mythen (Wexford, Sinn Fein)
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Ms Kalda said the IT system being used guides critical thinking rather than replacing it. Can she give an example of that? What it exactly does that mean?

Ms Laura Kalda:

I can show the Deputy what the system looks like. We worked closely with educational psychologists and teachers in developing the study app. The app does not give students answers like a typical LLM would. Rather, it guides them through the learning process. For example, if a student is studying for a chemistry test, the app will ask them what they already know and the timeline to keep them motivated. The answers will reduce cognitive upload and try to be a supportive and critical study partner, as we expect from teachers. It is a fundamentally different kind of LLM and is a Socratic tutor type of teacher. We are covering seven general principles. These are the main principles that are built into the study app. We are supporting motivation, learning-related beliefs, tasks, persistence, learning strategies, self-regulation and basic things in the education sense.

Johnny Mythen (Wexford, Sinn Fein)
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The sixty-four thousand dollar question is whether Ms Kalda has concerns that Sweden is curtailing the use of AI. Recent analysis and collective data showed that there was a decline in literacy and the impact of AI on students showed their concentration and ability to process information was reduced. The skill of handwriting is an obvious loss. Are there concerns about that?

Ms Laura Kalda:

Sweden's case is very different from that of Estonia because it had a full-blown expansion, which involved reducing the amount of books and other teaching materials. We do not do that. We are using AI as another option or tool alongside traditional methods. It is optional for schools, teachers and students. It is another type of workbook or teaching material which can be used alongside traditional teaching materials. The underlying question is that we as a country have decided not to restrict AI usage in any way. We know that 94% of upper secondary school students are using AI tools. The question is whether we can offer an alternative solution, which might be more beneficial than off-the-shelf tools.

Johnny Mythen (Wexford, Sinn Fein)
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I do not know whether Ms Kalda will be able to answer my next question. A recent change in the law enabled students to access AI tools without the permission of parents and to make schools the data processor. Was there any pushback on that from parents? What age group is involved?

Ms Laura Kalda:

The law that was changed in January concerned all primary schools and upper secondary schools. This related to whether schools could use any AI tools in their teaching materials. AI was not regulated.

Johnny Mythen (Wexford, Sinn Fein)
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What age are the pupils Ms Kalda talking about?

Ms Laura Kalda:

They are primary school and upper secondary school students.

Johnny Mythen (Wexford, Sinn Fein)
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Was there any kickback from students or parents?

Ms Laura Kalda:

No. The law regulated the system. Some schools were already using AI tools. There was a need for regulation and the laws set clear boundaries on data usage. It made the picture clear for all involved because it was like the wild west. Some schools were using some things, but the regulatory base was very shallow.

Johnny Mythen (Wexford, Sinn Fein)
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Ms Kalda said there was a separate teacher and student contract with every school. How does that work?

Ms Laura Kalda:

We launched the student app in January because we were waiting for the law. As teachers working for schools, our programme started in the fall with the teachers. We provided licences to teachers in September. In order to do that, we needed to have contracts with schools. The law then changed.

As students are not employed by the schools, the legal relationship is different. The law changed in January, which allowed us to roll out the student application system to schools. Separate agreements were required for this. There are two agreements with schools and 99% of schools provide this support for teachers, while 75% of schools provide it to students. Schools are currently more interested in providing help to teachers, but 75% of schools have the app for students. There are different tracks for teachers and students. There are different AI tools and supports.

It is two tracks that we are having.

Naoise Ó Cearúil (Kildare North, Fianna Fail)
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I thank Ms Kalda, Mr. Riives and the ambassador for being with us. Much talk about using AI in the education system is around cognitive and critical thinking. I appreciate that it is still in its infancy but has there been any evidence of an improvement or disimprovement in cognitive or critical thinking so far?

Ms Laura Kalda:

It is really in its infancy. We will have our second round of impact measurements in the second half of May. We are expecting the first results by August. This will be when we can actually say whether there has been a change or not. So far, there is nothing certain we can claim because we only launched in January.

Naoise Ó Cearúil (Kildare North, Fianna Fail)
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If that is public, it would be quite interesting for us to get a copy of it. Students were using the likes of OpenAI, ChatGPT, Gemini, etc., in an unstructured way beforehand, whereas now it is more structured. It is now a learning tool rather than a generalist tool, as it was previously. Has there been a behavioural shift and a cultural shift in students and have there been any difficulties in dealing with that?

Ms Laura Kalda:

This is a good question. The thing is they are still using the other tools as well.

Naoise Ó Cearúil (Kildare North, Fianna Fail)
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Is that at home?

Ms Laura Kalda:

Yes. We cannot really measure that. We use self-reporting questionnaires, which are not ideal of course. From what we are measuring, we know that currently 45% of students are using our tool on a weekly basis as well. Last summer, everyone was asking us why would they use this annoying Socratic tool when they could use this answering machine, but what we see from students is that a large proportion of them are worried about losing their ability to think critically. They are interested in their study results. They are interested in doing the tests and becoming smarter. The educational psychologists have said there is some promise in this tool, whereas at the same time people are saying we should not use this vanilla model.

Naoise Ó Cearúil (Kildare North, Fianna Fail)
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I can imagine myself as a secondary school student and I could definitely see using the learning AI models to help me study and to prepare for exams. However, if I had hockey training or whatever other sports training late, I would definitely be using the other tool to help me complete my homework a lot quicker. I imagine there is a conflict there and that it will continue to be a difficulty. Ms Kalda is saying she is kind of seeing that already.

Ms Laura Kalda:

The one thing to understand in our case is that we think it is less of a technological change and more of a change within the education system in general. Mostly we are working with teachers to understand things like homework load, for example, and which homework makes sense knowing that all the vanilla models are out there for students to use. It is about what actually makes sense, what we should provide students with, and whether we can switch teaching processes so that, for example, they learn some topic at home and then they come back to the classroom to discuss it. We are working a lot with this and making teachers think about what makes sense to change the whole teaching process, which is of course hard. It has its difficulties but it is shifting. We can see that between 60% and 70% of teachers were already changing their teaching practices on homework in November. The second round of our questionnaire is running now, so we will see by the end of May what teachers have done differently. We expect 80% to 90% of them will be carrying out some kind of change there.

Naoise Ó Cearúil (Kildare North, Fianna Fail)
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Separately, on the structure of AI Leap, we saw the spider diagram of the different elements involved. One thing that stuck out was companies and founders. What involvement do companies and founders have in the education system?

Ms Laura Kalda:

It has been a political choice to not have this foundation tied directly to one party. Basically, our funding is 50% covered by the Minister for education and the rest has to be provided by the private sector, such as philanthropic funds. It is mainly funding based but it tries to keep it less political.

Naoise Ó Cearúil (Kildare North, Fianna Fail)
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Is there a perceived conflict there at all?

Ms Laura Kalda:

No, at least not politically. There are issues but in general, in the case of innovation, it is a model that has been used before. We test through the pilot year on private funding. We have several philanthropic funds working with education. We pilot with private funding and then if it works state funding will take over.

Naoise Ó Cearúil (Kildare North, Fianna Fail)
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I understand that. I am thinking that from an Irish perspective it might be quite different and a little more difficult. I think there would be a perceived conflict here in Ireland anyway. It makes sense at the trial phase and with philanthropies.

Ms Laura Kalda:

This is where it is donation based. Some countries have asked us what they get for that.

Naoise Ó Cearúil (Kildare North, Fianna Fail)
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In return, yes. What benefit do they get out of it?

Ms Laura Kalda:

Nothing. It is a philanthropy fund that is donation based, with maybe some large companies.

Naoise Ó Cearúil (Kildare North, Fianna Fail)
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Are names marketed as the sponsors of it?

Ms Laura Kalda:

Very briefly. There are no promises made to the companies. They cannot influence the foundation in any way.

Gareth Scahill (Fine Gael)
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I welcome the ambassador. I will try to bring this back to an Irish context as well. Investment in the pilot programme is €4 million in the first year. Has that scaled this out to all the teachers and students?

Ms Laura Kalda:

All the upper secondary school students and teachers, yes.

Gareth Scahill (Fine Gael)
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They all have access to AI tools. Do teachers have access to authentication tools as well for checking to see if work was totally-AI generated?

Ms Laura Kalda:

Does the Senator mean to check students' work?

Gareth Scahill (Fine Gael)
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Yes.

Ms Laura Kalda:

No. They only have the off-the-shelf, plus or pro versions of LLM tools.

Gareth Scahill (Fine Gael)
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Is that being considered or is it being allowed to develop as it is?

Ms Laura Kalda:

We are not checking into the authentication tools. The reasoning behind that has been that the LLMs are changing so fast. I believe they are sceptical about how well these tools would actually work. What we are working with is that teachers would be very clear in terms of school work that students should say when and where they have used AI. We have seen this in work as well. It is becoming more tolerated that students can use AI but also say when and where they used it. We are trying to approach this transparency thing from the side of the students and the teachers just to have more honesty from themselves.

Gareth Scahill (Fine Gael)
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It is very like the Finland model, which involves trust on both sides. Regarding exams, is continuous assessment operated and how does that work with AI?

Ms Laura Kalda:

We do not deal with the examination topics at all. There have been some things tested in Estonia, such as writing tests evaluation. Some initial steps have been done. They are checking whether they can solve some issues there as well in terms of grading, but this is something we do not do.

We are working on thinking skills within the scope of the AI. All of the grading has to come from somewhere else. We are critical towards some of this as well, but in general we are focusing on the learning and teaching process.

Gareth Scahill (Fine Gael)
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One of the statistics was that nine out of ten teachers are engaging with the process. That is a great figure. It is different here at the moment. A new leaving certificate curriculum was proposed, and a large percentage of teachers do not feel they have the skill set or tools to roll out that training at the moment. How much training are they doing directly with the teachers?

Ms Laura Kalda:

There are nearly 5,000 teachers. The approach we have taken with them is to create professional learning communities in schools. The Estonian school system is very autonomous, and teachers are really autonomous. We cannot tell them that they need to teach a class in a certain way. They have goals they have to achieve by the end of the year, but they can use whatever methods they want to achieve those goals. The system is that we are training two representatives from each school. These two representatives will conduct these professional learning communities and have study groups at least monthly within their schools where they discuss these topics and share their experiences. We provide support for teaching in the context of AI. We have educational psychologists talking about how we should think about teaching. We also talk about introducing AI tools, because one year ago more than 90% of students were using AI but only 52% of teachers were using it. That is the first gap we need to change. Teachers need to understand what they are doing and what the capabilities of these tools are. This is changing rapidly and we need to help them. However, we cannot tell them what they should do. We can just help them to think this through on their own. This is the school-based approach, which has also been proven to work. We can see it working and they are discussing it. We said we were going to stop organising these groups because the school year is ending, but schools have told us to help them continue with the process because it has been great. They really appreciate it. We were also really surprised by the numbers in the case of Estonia, but we see the teachers are really struggling with AI. They are lost and different teachers have different opinions and fears. They really needed help to think this through and have this mutual understanding with their colleagues to make school-based decisions about what they should do or what they should tell students. If different teachers are telling different things to students, then the students will be super confused and it will be a mess.

Gareth Scahill (Fine Gael)
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Ms Kalda said that 90% of students were using it and about 52% of teachers. I know they have given the teachers access to it all so they will be tracking that each year to try to bring the teachers up to the same level. I return to the exams. At the end of three years, will they start incorporating the projects or continuous assessment? This is something we are seeing on the ground in Ireland at the moment, which is why I ask.

Ms Laura Kalda:

I am not sure. As it stands, we will not be approaching the assessment part of this, but whether we will see some changes is hard to predict. There has been some thinking about how we should do this assessment process in general, what should be changed and so on. This has been separate and we think we will keep it separate.

Darren O'Rourke (Meath East, Sinn Fein)
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I thank the witnesses. Is the work they are doing part of a wider process of AI and digital literacy within the education system and the school population? Senator Scahill raised the issue of assessment. Is there a quality control or verification process, for example, for students in their ongoing work or use of AI with regard to errors, hallucinations and the quality of information being generated? I presume students are using it to inform their own research and studies rather than presenting it as their own work, which is a concern in Ireland. We might come back to that.

Ms Laura Kalda:

We try to evaluate the quality of the output, but it is hard. We try to improve it continuously. We are gathering different materials that are state funded and integrating these into the LLMs. We are also creating our own materials. For us, the language issue is really important. We are working really hard. The Estonian language in the models is not perfect. This is what we are working on. With regard to assessing students' work, as was mentioned, it is kind of a trust-based approach. We are working towards being open about using AI. We presume that everyone is using it. The solution we are trying to achieve is that they will need to learn the topics they need to learn, and they will need to show this at some point. Cheating has been there for as long as the education system, so it is foremost about cheating. Another aspect is that if you need to master one topic or another by some point and you have not learned it, then you have not mastered it. It is your own responsibility to achieve that. Of course, we have different experiences. Some teachers have run their own tests in their classrooms and can see the gap has widened in some classes. It is for teachers to decide how to approach this, but as a foundation we are working towards a trust basis and being open about it, assuming it is there and that most students are using it. We need to be open about it.

Darren O'Rourke (Meath East, Sinn Fein)
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Will Ms Kalda expand on her point about language? We have some considerations in Ireland with regard to minority languages. Will she expand on her point about particular considerations for the Estonian language? I presume the vast majority of information is available in other languages, and largely the English language. Will she give us a sense of what they have to contend with in dealing with the Estonian language?

Ms Laura Kalda:

This is one of the biggest concerns for all of the less researched languages. The default language on the student app is Estonian. Unless you expressly say you are studying a foreign language, it will reply to you in Estonian.

This is the rule that is made. There are several reasons for that. Estonian schools are moving towards only Estonian language-based education. We have had school systems in two languages for ages. Currently, it is replacing Estonian and we are improving the language. There are basically two parts. We are creating benchmarks to evaluate the quality of language. We are running them such that we can point out the mistakes. On the other hand, we are creating these datasets, both materials in Estonian but also prompt-based datasets. This is the question. This is like a perfect answer in Estonian. There are ways to work this through technically and we are working with the providers on enhancing the language. Language has funny effects. When we launched our student app in January, one of the first feedback items was that the student apps in the Estonian language were so much better than any other version. At that point we had not done anything to the language yet; it was just the new model. Every new model has been better in the language naturally as well; the improvement is there anyhow. We are also working on the side to make it faster.

We see that the minority language teachers in Estonia who now have to adapt to teaching in the Estonian language are using it a lot to have their materials put into Estonian and to improve their own Estonian language. They are really grateful for that.

Darren O'Rourke (Meath East, Sinn Fein)
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There is also potential for the application of that type of thing in Ireland. There is lots of discussion. I sit on the education committee, as do Senator Scahill and others. That is something we are interested in.

James Geoghegan (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael)
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I apologise for being late. I was at another committee meeting. I thank Ms Kalda for coming to Ireland and giving us the presentation on the work she is doing. I thank the ambassador for supporting her in coming here. I do not know whether the Chair mentioned at the outset that he and I were in Estonia for the AI summit last year. Both of us learned a lot about what Estonia is doing in the education system. It certainly blew my mind listening to what they are doing versus what we, as constituency TDs, deal with daily.

When we meet teachers in the school, nine times out of ten the teacher just wants to understand how to use AI to support students in the school. They may be using it in a way that is not appropriate because there is no system around it. Similarly, the students just want clarity on how best they can use AI in their studies. I have found that, in Ireland universities, if not schools, are moving quite quickly in adapting today. Schools in Ireland are at the fear phase where it is being used but not being properly used. We have a reasonably good digital infrastructure in some schools but not in others. Children and teachers are much more digitalised than they were ten or 15 years ago. The transition to using AI should not be very difficult but what they want is direction, certainty, appropriateness and knowing that this will be good for the children they want to teach and to do better for.

Every country is different and to try to apply one model to another country is almost impossible. Are there any lessons from the journey Ms Kalda has been on in bringing teachers with her which could be useful for us to understand? If we are trying to do something similar in this country, are there things that went wrong that she thinks we can learn from?

Ms Laura Kalda:

Yes. We have a voluntary system for this programme. The schools were very quick to join but the professional learning communities within their schools varied a lot. The key issue was with the school principals, the leadership. We did some work with the school principals in the beginning but we should have done more. This is something we are increasing for the next year. For next year's batch we are working with the school principals who are the key people to make this change within their schools. Of course, this is always the case. We need to put more effort into working with them, understanding their worries and what could be of use for them and their schools. Schools are different and teachers are different.

What we have done well is picking the professional learning communities within the school. We cannot really instruct schools to do it a particular way; they have to decide on their own with their own colleagues. That is working very well and teachers really appreciate that they can come together and discuss who has done what and how. They can have the time and space to discuss a topic that may be troubling them. They are also providing opportunities. They have done some very cool stuff as well. Some teachers have done super fantastic developments with AI. This is something that is working well. It empowers the teachers themselves, which is good.

Finding time has been the most critical part because the schedules are packed and the teachers are working really hard. This is one topic that the leadership can influence. As we talk to them now about the next school year, we encourage them to prepare time in their schedules. If the time slot is there, we can put this information there as well.

Another topic that our teachers have come back to is we had separate approaches. We had these rethinking-your-teaching practice sessions once a month and had these AI tools sessions once a month. However, they really want these topics to go together. They want to discuss the teaching part but also discuss how to integrate with the AI tools. By combining these two parts together in one session they can discuss the whole process together in one go.

James Geoghegan (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael)
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The fears of the parents are very often the same as the fears of teachers that by using AI, the children will not be as well educated as by using non-AI methods. There is a fear that we are creating children whose IQs will go down or that they will not be supported in their education in the way they currently are. How can we verify that those fears are not correct? How can we address those fears and concerns?

Ms Laura Kalda:

We actually see that students are more worried about this than parents are. Parents are more worried about data and things like this. Students are worried about losing their critical thinking and are also concerned for the environment, which also does not concern the parents but does concern the students.

James Geoghegan (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael)
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We would hope it would concern the parents too, but that is a different issue.

Ms Laura Kalda:

The answer here is that we do not propose replacing the current learning methods. This is just an additional tool that can be used and tried.

We have tried to work out, again with the educational psychologists, different tasks where we could see or they could see this could be beneficial. For example, you do this teen expression on your own, then you have the AI tool do it as well and compare the results. This is something where you have to engage in critical thinking to see what was different there. We have these assumptions that, based on the best knowledge we have, these learning methods should work but we are not replacing anything with AI tools at the moment; this is just an additional thing. That is the main thing and the biggest difference with some other countries that have gone more all-in with these tools. Scientifically, we will have the first results by July or August. We are measuring this quite early and with different dimensions and different results, so officially we will have the answers during the summer but we have tried to minimise the risks for the students because we are not pushing it through. The amounts they are using are not that high. They are using it one to two hours a week, which we believe is not damaging.

Sinéad Gibney (Dublin Rathdown, Social Democrats)
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I thank the witnesses so much for taking the trip over and being here. A warm welcome to the ambassador as well. Well done to Estonia for tackling this head-on. As was said, it is important we are honest about the reality that people are using these tools and then try to build our responses as a society in all the different domains.

I appreciate the witnesses' expertise is in education but I am very interested in their commentary about the broader ethical concerns surrounding AI and the governance of it, which is something I am particularly interested in. How does that play into the witnesses' programme management, how they communicate the details of their programme and how they support parents who I am sure share some of those ethical concerns? It is interesting to hear those concerns are focused on areas like data, as I have similar issues with that. I also have questions about open source. I appreciate the nature of AI and LLMs is they build on the data we give them so it is very hard to replace those, but I have real issues with the control of our data being in the hands of so few large tech companies and what that means for us and for the future of these technologies. I would really appreciate the witnesses' thoughts on that and especially on ChatGPT given it is engaged in legal proceedings, for example, with the family of Adam Raine, a young man who for similar reasons engaged with AI. He asked for chatbot support in September 2024 and sadly died six months later by suicide at the prompt of ChatGPT. We know this now from the logs. That court case is ongoing. I would like Ms Kalda's response to that, please.

Ms Laura Kalda:

I thank the Deputy. This is a very important topic. It has so many layers so I will have to think where to start from. Data-wise, there is a question about whether a state should even do something about the situation. For us, one argument is that if we control and pay for this and all the data in the systems are not used for training this is something we can provide with these kinds of collaborations. We pay for the licences because too many Estonian students are also using DeepSeek, Grok and even more worrisome applications. We try to take the situation as it is and ask what we can do based on the current situation. This solution is a bit better in terms of data. As for risk behaviours and worries about this, it is also something we can provide in this collaboration as we have set guardrails. Whenever some student says something that is troubling, the prompt immediately redirects them to seek help from a person and gives them the numbers. This is something you cannot have from the off-the-shelf tools. They have these restrictions as they are US-based, so we have the Estonian numbers and details running there.

Sinéad Gibney (Dublin Rathdown, Social Democrats)
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Excellent.

Ms Laura Kalda:

We have had cases where students are feeling tired already of it saying to them to seek help. We are very worried about it so we are maybe a bit too paranoid about this.

Sinéad Gibney (Dublin Rathdown, Social Democrats)
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I do not think you can be.

Ms Laura Kalda:

Yes, but I mean students are saying they are tired.

Sinéad Gibney (Dublin Rathdown, Social Democrats)
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Have Ms Kalda and her colleagues tried to feed back any of their learnings or suggested guardrails to OpenAI, for example, for ChatGPT?

Ms Laura Kalda:

Yes. We are working closely with OpenAI and Google - both teams. This is part of the collaboration. We are also sending them back whatever we notice and what our concerns are. Within Estonia we are also working with the police and border guards so they can have their own Internet approach. We take input from them as well and see what we can integrate and see the concerns they see so we can prevent all sorts of troublesome behaviour that there might be. There might be sexual misconduct or topics they raise that we have not seen from our data, but that we are trying to prevent as well.

Sinéad Gibney (Dublin Rathdown, Social Democrats)
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In the case of Adam Raine, the company's defence is the sycophancy dial was turned up too high, but I have heard analysis since that just as algorithms want to keep our eyes on the screen, chatbots, and AI generally, want to connect with us on a very emotional level so we build a relationship with that agent. Consequently, it goes against the model of AI as it is being developed in society to place those guardrails. I find it fascinating to think Ms Kalda and her colleagues are creating a prototype, essentially, of the same product with those guardrails. I really welcome that and would love to see those learnings shared as much as possible, especially in public discourse about this because there is a lack of understanding of how that connection is made and what the repercussions can be. Does Ms Kalda struggle with that as well, that is, the business model of these off-the-shelf products, as she described them?

Ms Laura Kalda:

Yes. There is also this cultural issue that the way LLMs talk to you is very different from how Estonians behave in general. We are very much like Finnish people in that we are very direct and there is not very much positivity in communication in our culture naturally. This is a concern we are also dealing with.

Sinéad Gibney (Dublin Rathdown, Social Democrats)
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That is interesting, so potentially Estonians are somewhat culturally inoculated from it.

Ms Laura Kalda:

Yes.

Sinéad Gibney (Dublin Rathdown, Social Democrats)
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That is great. We all need to be more Estonian.

Ms Laura Kalda:

Yes, be more direct. This is a funny topic we are also dealing with because if you interact too much, then it changes the way young people might interact. In general, the way we are developing the student tool we are keeping it in our own hands. With the research part, everything will be published soon. We are hoping to publish the general logic behind this, or as many materials as we can. We are also trying to keep it model-agnostic so the principles are adaptable to different systems and all the materials we create we have in our own hands.

Sinéad Gibney (Dublin Rathdown, Social Democrats)
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I thank Ms Kalda so much. That has been really helpful.

Laura Harmon (Labour)
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I thank both witnesses for being here. It is a really important discussion. I tuned in online earlier for the opening statement. We really need to be having more of these discussions in Ireland so it is brilliant we can engage with the witnesses in this way.

Schools here really need to learn from best practice around the world, including Estonia, regarding what we could adopt here. One of the key things is students' ability to interpret information in a critical way and what to do with that. This is really going to aid that in how it is used.

How does it work for pupils with disabilities? Is it enhancing their learning experience? Could this be adapted for other settings such as colleges and universities and for older people in lifelong learning? Is there scope for the model to be broadened into other areas?

Ms Laura Kalda:

I thank the Senator for raising the topic of disability. This is something we are also very aware of. We check the accessibility part of this based on the WCAG metrics we have in the EU. The issue is that we do not have our own interface so, basically, we are working with the systems we have from large service providers, so there are some issues. For example, it is very hard to resolve the colour of a button or whether the contrast is high enough. The general approachability of the technical system is sufficient by EU standards but there are some issues. They are addressing these issues but it is somewhere in the backlog of these large companies.

We have students but we also have separate schools that have joined that have more disabled students. We do not have any specific results from that side because this has been quite recent but they are very keen to be involved and we are working with their teachers. My hope is that this will be a very useful tool for students who might struggle in the traditional classrooms because the system offers limitless help and this has so many benefits that perhaps the normal classroom just cannot provide. We do not really know that yet but we are hoping for this.

Laura Harmon (Labour)
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My other question concerned how it could be adapted to other settings.

Ms Laura Kalda:

This is quite intense where one is restricting. As I mentioned, some students find it really annoying. It is a case of, "How would you think this through?", or, "How would you approach this question?" We know that large service providers like OpenAI and Google have their own study modes but they are five times briefer than we are so we are taking the learning parts of the app very seriously. This needs to be compared with the off-the-shelf study modes because we accept that adult populations have more kind of self-awareness or more self-guidance capabilities than 15-year-olds so some other option might be more suitable for them.

What we see from developments that are developing so fast is that basically, no time, we will see this more agentic approach and this will most likely change the way these systems work. They will probably become much more adaptable to a person's needs. This will probably change our list and our approach a lot.

Laura Harmon (Labour)
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Ms Kalda mentioned political leadership and the president. How important was that in driving this forward? I am thinking of the Irish context if we were to adopt something like this. Was political leadership central to it or would it have happened without it?

Ms Laura Kalda:

It would not have happened so fast. Basically, someone had to take personal responsibility for the topic and push this through. The discussions were happening everywhere in Estonia, but when a concrete person stood behind it, things started to happen so there has to be some sort of responsibility in someone's hand if we want to things to move fast.

Jen Cummins (Dublin South Central, Social Democrats)
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What the witnesses have been saying over the past while is so fascinating. I am a member of the Oireachtas Committee on Education and Youth. I am not a member of this committee but I was interested to see what was happening here today because the Committee on Education and Youth has been talking for quite a long time about leaving certificate reforms. That is the end-of-school examination process. There is real fear about the use of AI and not being able to certify it and say that students have not generated their whole project through AI, and there is a real lack of trust. What I am hearing today is that there is a significant amount of trust in the Estonian education system. As Senator Scahill said, the Committee on Education and Youth went to Finland. There is trust among educators, students and the department in Finland about what is going on in schools, so it is quite inspiring to hear that echoed from the witnesses' country. I thank the ambassador for being here.

The examination process in Estonia is different from what it is here. There are three examinations at the end. Estonia is using this platform it has developed through the private-public model, which is excellent because it means things move on because it has the know-how. Is there any positive impact through the use of AI?

I see that the two out of three teachers have adapted homework. I am not a big fan of homework because I think children and young people spend a long time in school and need to do other things in the afternoon and evenings. How did that actually look, because if we are adapting homework, I would love for it to be adapted so that we have less of it and use time more efficiently?

I see that AI Leap is planning to scale into primary school. I am particularly interested in how that would work because young people are already using AI. We can pretend they are not using it but what we need to do is harness the ability to use it as a learning tool. What AI Leap has built is something that seems very safe from what the witnesses are describing. I would love to actually see what it looks like and so I wonder how that will look. I am very interested in the universities and scientists and how they are carrying out the impact studies. Like Deputy Gibney, I am also interested in the ethics of that and how those reports are going.

Ms Laura Kalda:

The answer to both questions is the same. The AI Leap student track aims to enhance students' learning skills. The question is whether the exams evaluate the learning skills or something else. We are also measuring the change in their learning skills. We are happy if they improve, even if the exam results do not change. We are only in tenth and 11th grade.

In our case, we have let 12th graders be because they have exams. Next year we will have 12th graders as well. We are not very concerned about exams. We are concerned about the ability to create, think critically, be self-motivated and have life and learning skills. We are not focused on exam results.

Jen Cummins (Dublin South Central, Social Democrats)
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We are obsessed with exams in Ireland. They are covered in the newspapers every year. The leaving certificate results put added pressure on students because everyone is talking about them. It is quite refreshing to hear Ms Kalda. The learning is a process as opposed to the outcome.

Ms Laura Kalda:

This is of course a topic in Estonia. There are rankings and whatnot. We in the foundation are aligned with the minister for education that these are the skills that could be improved in the school system and we try to measure only this track.

With regard to primary schools, we are only moving forward towards teachers next year. Teachers are using these tools for their own administrative work and all sorts of things they have to do as well as in creating lesson plans. For example, many adapt study materials or differentiate materials for different levels for languages. The question is whether or how they will incorporate AI in the classrooms. It is a decision of the teacher and they need to be able to figure out how much they want to include AI.

Jen Cummins (Dublin South Central, Social Democrats)
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The other question was about adapting homework.

Ms Laura Kalda:

Yes. Our education system is very homework heavy, which is unfortunate. An 11th grader is at school from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and then has training and another two hours of homework, which is a crazy amount of time to expect a young person to dedicate to schoolwork. The question is whether using AI to complete one piece of work is actually a concern. We are trying to help teachers think through what needs to be done at home and what could be skipped or have some kind of process. Students have said they cannot do it because they are already in the classroom.

We see change happening with homework. It is becoming more integrated with AI tools. Teachers ask students to do one part with AI and use some critical thinking, which is a reasonable AI literate thing to do, and then present the topic. We see from our teachers that they know their students well. We do not need a separate tool for teachers to check whether students understand a topic because they know them and have seen them in the classroom. They know their level. If someone suddenly comes up with very profound concepts, the teacher would be able to check whether the student has come up with that themselves. We will have the results on homework by the end of May. We need to determine whether they are working and what they have actually done.

Jen Cummins (Dublin South Central, Social Democrats)
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I thank Ms Kalda.

Malcolm Byrne (Wicklow-Wexford, Fianna Fail)
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Thank you for the presentation. I will look at this from a very practical point of view. If I am in a history class in the Estonian education system as a senior cycle student and a teacher talks about Estonian history, how would the teacher and students use the programme in a classroom setting?

Ms Laura Kalda:

One of the nice examples we have seen is where a teacher tells students to ask AI to pretend they are this or that historic figure and have a discussion with AI as if it is someone from 100 years ago. They do it quite nicely in terms of language, and it works surprisingly well. They can discuss the topic. Teachers use AI for structuring work. They might ask a student to do homework, write an essay or do some practical work, and ask AI to help the student with how to plan and how to approach the work. It is used as a critical partner and fourth team member. Students work in a group and one team member is an AI.

Malcolm Byrne (Wicklow-Wexford, Fianna Fail)
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I like the idea of asking a figure from history to talk about an era. Students studying European history could ask Napoleon to describe his experiences as Emperor of France. What guardrails are there around what a student has access to? Obviously, there is an approved curriculum. As we know, history can be open to interpretation. How do the guardrails work?

Ms Laura Kalda:

This is a tricky one, especially in Estonia.

Malcolm Byrne (Wicklow-Wexford, Fianna Fail)
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It is difficult in an Irish context. That is why I asked about history. What does the student have access to in an LLM? It is a closed loop LLM.

Ms Laura Kalda:

No, it is not a closed loop LLM.

Malcolm Byrne (Wicklow-Wexford, Fianna Fail)
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Okay.

Ms Laura Kalda:

It is open, but we have integrated some materials for its reference. It is a general LLM and the answers are similar to what one would get from others. We influence the content and steer it towards the narrative that we have in Estonia. Of course, it makes mistakes. Too often in history classes it stops discussion on topics and does not go into details. These are the guardrails created by large companies, especially because those using our accounts are all under the age of 18. The models have more guardrails on the large company side on topics they can discuss. War is one of these topics. Very often the models stop discussing a topic, which is an issue in a history class.

What is very positive is that it forces students to think their answers through critically. There have been some funny answers. There have been some answers in Latvian or surprising replies. Students discuss that. AI has been good because it has increased students' critical thinking in respect of the content they get. Again, in some regions the narrative about history is very different from what the rest of the country might feel. We have not seen many such issues, but we are a bit worried about some narratives, especially because teachers can have their own materials. There are some issues, but so far they have not been serious.

Malcolm Byrne (Wicklow-Wexford, Fianna Fail)
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Schools and teachers are quite autonomous in Estonia in comparison to here where the curriculum is quite centralised.

Part of this is maybe a question for Mr. Riives about how this is sold. It is obviously a decision for the school and the teacher. There is a 99% uptake. How does AI Leap convince the teachers who, in some cases, can be a lot more conservative than the students to take it on board? How is it sold to schools? What are the reasons or the concerns of the schools that are not taking it?

Mr. Armas Riives:

Ms Kilda already mentioned that about 40% of students are using it weekly. She also mentioned the problem with certain kinds of school principals. We had to get around 20,000 students. We have gained access to almost 18,000 students and almost 10,000 of them are using it. We actually do not know why there is a gap. We know that there is a huge communication problem inside the schools. The principals are very often not giving the information to the students. We just started enrolment posts in January. It is ongoing and is getting better all the time. There are also communication questions all the time regarding how we can go to the schools and explain it better.

Ms Laura Kalda:

It was launched by the President of Estonia and we have one of the top scientists in Estonia working on this topic. He said that this is the best knowledge that we currently have about how we learn. The key people in Estonia are behind this and they are saying that they believe that this is reasonable. People, including teachers or schools in general, trust them.

Mr. Armas Riives:

At AI Leap, we always tell the students and teachers that we want them to use it wisely. However, nobody knows what the wisest way is to use AI. We have some good examples, of course.

A few weeks ago, we also started a communication campaign with different kinds of people in our society like lawyers, teachers and musicians. They are just talking about how they use AI in their work. We want to emphasise that we can use AI but we also have to use our brains, so it really matters what we put inside in AI. We have a collaboration with one organisation, Back to School. Teachers and their classes are watching these 20-minute lectures with people in our society who are inspiring to the students. They are telling them that it is not wrong to use it but just use it wisely.

We also see a stigma in society where if a person uses Chat GPT, they are called stupid. We want to change that a bit.

Dee Ryan (Fianna Fail)
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I thank the witness so much for coming to join the committee today. I apologise that I could not be here in person for all of the session. I was tuned in on the Oireachtas app.

It has been a fascinating discussion. It is so interesting to hear about what the witnesses are doing. My mind is kind of exploding with the possibilities. What is the future going to be like for us with AI? Are we going down a route where different sectors will develop their own trusted, perhaps closed, LLMs that will allow them to verify sources of trustworthy information that can be at their fingertips and they can ask deeper questions and get interesting answers.

I have a number of observations on the discussion, but I want to come back to what Ms Kalda said as I walked in. Did I hear correctly that it is not a closed LLM? AI Leap is satisfied that the guardrails are sufficient and that by working closely with its partners, it is managing any of the dangers that exist for anyone else using the products.

The witnesses also referred to regional disparities. Will they elaborate a little bit more on that for me? What are the regional differences that the witnesses are concerned may emerge? That is interesting for us in Ireland. When we think about an all-island society, we have our different regional interpretations of our shared history.

Ms Laura Kalda:

This is a tough topic. A quarter of the population is Russian speaking and there are some regions in Estonia where 99% of people are members of the Russian-speaking minority, who are not necessarily always in our information reach due to the language issues. There can be different narratives about the history, which is similar perhaps to Ireland. Some historical narratives might not follow our national curricula to the extent we would like to them to. We have seen it very briefly but not too extensively so far. However, it is something that we worry about a lot because we do not want the LLM to support this.

It is open at the moment, and this might even be a good thing in the case where teachers be might the issue and not the students, if you get what I mean.

What is the solution? The solution is that we are supporting the LLM with official materials by the state and this is the basis that we partly want it to have. We also want to keep the baseline open and for the LLM to generally keep working as it is because the language is better at the moment. General knowledge, chemistry or maths are also better with large-scale data than what we can provide.

Dee Ryan (Fianna Fail)
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You can benefit from the latest international research and publications. It is fascinating. A lot of the questions I have were asked by my colleagues, so I really do not have any further questions. Do the witnesses have anything else they want to add?

Mr. Armas Riives:

This is like a commercial minute or something, but we are organising a two-day study visit at the end of May. If the members or any of their colleagues are interested, they should feel free to register and reach out to us. We can have a further discussion inside an Estonian school. There will also be some ministerial representatives there.

Ms Laura Kalda:

We will also visit some teachers in school.

Dee Ryan (Fianna Fail)
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I thank the witnesses very much.

Naoise Ó Cearúil (Kildare North, Fianna Fail)
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The initiative is a three-year pilot programme. Is the intention that it will be put on a permanent footing or is it a case of seeing how the pilot works first?

Ms Laura Kalda:

It is both. We will have to see what works within the pilot programme. Basically, the biggest intervention here is working with the teachers. We guess that if we can reach all the teachers and their AI literacy skills increase, then we will be done. There is then the question of whether there should be someone for the licensing and organisational part, but that is not the main part of the whole programme, and any other entity could do this.

There is then the second question relating to the students and the use of AI as a study tool.

We will have to see what happens with all the changes that have happened in the LLM area in two months and how smart they will be. Our understanding is that we will have to see what happens with this. One prediction is that the large companies will basically figure out a way as education is such a big part of their usage anyhow. One hope is also that they will maybe adapt and build something that is exactly what we would see as a fit for our system as well. We do not necessarily want to do it ourselves, or we would create our own closed model as well, if the systems improve that much.

There are many options but teacher-wise, our assumption is that we just cover the teachers who are currently teaching. We integrate the system to the teachers' curricula and then we are done with this part.

Dee Ryan (Fianna Fail)
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It is interesting to hear that AI Leap has considered or is open to the possibility of a closed LLM. Will Ms Kalda expand on that a little bit further? In terms of the technology at this point, that sounds like an absolutely mammoth project to take on. Is AI Leap having discussions with its partners about that?

Ms Laura Kalda:

There are some entities within Estonia that would like to see this track being taken. This is not something that the current foundation is working on actively but the question is if, for example, Estonia started to build its own LLM for some purpose whether we would integrate it to this LLM. We might do that. If it worked very well, there is no restriction to doing that. The question is whether it would be as good as the large models because if we are talking about students, then they will use what is good for them and it is very hard to compete.

Malcolm Byrne (Wicklow-Wexford, Fianna Fail)
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I thank Ms Kalda very much. This has been a very useful and informative session. As Ms Kalda and Mr. Riives have outlined, it is very clear that students are using artificial intelligence at present anyway. What is important is that within our education system we give them the tools to use it responsibly and that we upskill teachers, so they are able to effectively use it as a tool to ensure that students can better learn.

I want to thank the ambassador, H.E. Ms Kairi Künka for coming. I also thank Ms Kalda and Mr. Riives for coming along to the committee today. The meeting is now adjourned until 28 April.