There has been a “very significant” number of redundancies and “churn” due to artificial intelligence, the Enterprise Minister has said ahead of the Government’s AI summit.
High-level executives from major multinational tech firms will attend the AI Summit at the RDS on Wednesday. The Government is billing the event, which is part of Ireland’s Presidency of the Council of the European Union, as “one of the most significant gatherings of AI leaders and policymakers held in Europe this year”.
Summit line-up
Sessions will include contributions from Microsoft president Brad Smith, Google DeepMind chief scientist Sir Demis Hassabis, OpenAI chief financial officer Sarah Friar, and Stripe vice chair Eileen O’Mara. Organisations like Amazon, Anthropic, AMD, Intel, and Nvidia will also be represented.
Asked if he will be looking for commitments from tech giants based in Ireland to maintain staffing levels, Enterprise Minister Peter Burke said: “We’re working very closely with so many companies and training employees right now – the Government has offered record levels of training.
“You’ll see that we have a number of announcements working with skills observatories, working through the IDA in which we have trained about 33,000 people in our 40,000 target to 2030. That shows you how much ahead of schedule we are.”
Vulnerable sectors
Mr Burke said a Cabinet subcommittee on AI would examine “particularly vulnerable sectors” that need specific training.
Speaking to reporters before Tuesday morning’s Cabinet meeting, he said: “We know the jobs that are vulnerable now, it’s very clear the jobs that are in ICT, consultancy, some in financial services, and you really need to ensure that the state is pre-empting that, getting in front of the challenge, and providing that transformational training for so many employees.”
Mr Burke added: “So I’m very focused on that, and I have seen over the last number of months there is a very significant portion of redundancies and churn in relation to AI right across the economy.
“But we need to see it as a position of transition for the Irish economy. We don’t want to see it as a time of decline, and that’s why we have to ensure that we’re using our strengths to really resolve and take the opportunity from artificial intelligence, and also ensure that we have strong, robust regulation.”
No 'doom and gloom'
The summit coincides with the national public service strike on Wednesday.
Asked about concern over jobs arising out AI adoption, Higher Education Minister James Lawless claimed there was “an increasing focus within some aspects of the media on doom and gloom and an apocalyptic future”.
He told reporters before Cabinet: “I don’t buy into that, It’s not a vision that I share.”
Mr Lawless added: “We’ve always had technology coming at us – from the invention of the wheel.
“What we continue to do is we prepare for it, and we invest in skills, we invest in training, and we make sure that our population is ready to utilise it, to work with it. And where there are possibilities of job displacement, what we do is we get ahead of that by ensuring that our workforce has the latest skills.”
Mr Lawless encouraged workers to stay on the “coalface” of AI. “It’s not so much that AI might take your job, but somebody better skilled in AI might take it.
“So the answer to that is become skilled in AI yourself. If you’re in an industry that is changing rapidly, remain on the coalface of that by continuing to adopt a new model and take on the supports the Government are providing to support people through that.”
