Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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267. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills 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 programs or Department operations, if any, are conducted using artificial intelligence tools; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [3709/25]

James Lawless (Kildare North, Fianna Fail)
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My Department does not provide any funding on artificial intelligence (AI) systems or research and does not conduct any programs or operations using AI tools.

As part of a Memorandum of Understanding, my Department is provided with shared services by the Department of Education’s IT Unit, who provide all support, infrastructure and direction on technology usage directly to my officials. The Department of Education has provided my officials with the following response with respect to the upcoming fiscal year in response to the Deputy's question :

In the fiscal year ahead, there is €500,000 allocated for artificial intelligence systems and artificial intelligence research. The breakdown of this is as follows:

(i) the implementation and operational use of optical character recognition (OCR) and processing of suitable invoices for payment into a bespoke system used by the Education Shared Business Services (ESBS) for €250,000.

(ii) Several proof of concepts and limited pilots of AI systems, that may include Generative AI and Document Understanding, have been allocated a budget of €250,000.

A limited trial is underway by my Communications Department to assess the opportunity for productivity gains of AI services which includes the transcription of public audio recordings to text, grammar and spelling assistance, translation of public information, and editing text in plain English to make it more understandable. All text is reviewed and verified by a human.

My Department has no AI systems in place that processes citizens information.

My Department recognises the potential offered by AI and is aware of the Interim Guidelines for Use of AI published. My Department will continue to assess the suitability of AI on a solution by solution basis.