Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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77. To ask the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment to provide a detailed breakdown of all funding allocated for the year ahead or spent in the past fiscal year by his Department on artificial intelligence systems or artificial intelligence research; what programmes or Department operations are conducted using artificial intelligence tools; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [3705/25]

Peter Burke (Longford-Westmeath, Fine Gael)
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My Department has provided funding to the OECD to participate in a study called: "Generative AI: a solution to the SME skills challenge". €35,000 was provided in 2024 and €25,000 will be provided in 2025.

No other funding was spent in the 2024 fiscal year on artificial intelligence systems or research. Funding allocations for the year ahead have not been finalised. Funding will be allocated on a case by case basis as projects arise.

No programmes or Department operations are currently conducted using artificial tools. One of my Department’s Offices, the Companies Registration Office (CRO), uses machine learning to scan digitised annual returns to check whether they are signed in the appropriate places. This technology has proven to be very effective in delivering processing efficiencies for the CRO. The CRO received over 240,000 Annual Returns in 2022, all of which were processed using this signature recognition facility.

My Department and the CRO also collaborated on an artificial intelligence project to scan CRO annual returns and derive semantic meaning from the data. Work on data analysis from this project is ongoing.