We look at how Irish businesses Lahinch Surf Shop, McNally Farm, BKultured and OpenHive used AI to achieve greater productivity.
Through a joint partnership between Google and Bank of Ireland, Irish small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are being offered fully funded scholarships for the Google AI Professional Certificate at no cost.
The programme is built around a single, proven commercial truth: whether you sell surfboards, grow organic vegetables, or brew kombucha, the path to a high-velocity operation is exactly the same.
The emerging reality of the digital economy is that the most profound, margin-altering efficiency gains are happening far away from the tech sector. It is the traditional, lean, and stubbornly analogue industries that are experiencing the most dramatic transformations.
👉 Future-proof your business in seven steps. Secure your scholarship to complete the certification at no cost. Apply now and get started!
The core framework is designed to demystify advanced technology for non-technical workforces. Historically, adopting a new software system meant hiring expensive external consultants or forcing staff to learn dense programming languages. The modern approach turns that model on its head by utilising standard, conversational English.
Through a curriculum focused heavily on intuitive natural language tools, the training introduces teams to “Vibe Coding,” for example. This concept allows any employee – regardless of their academic or technical background – to describe an administrative bottleneck to an advanced model and command it to build a custom, internal workflow or application from scratch.
The universal utility of this curriculum is best understood through the diverse small businesses that have already deployed its frameworks to future-proof their operations:
-
Overcoming Seasonal Logistics: Lahinch Surf Shop
Operating on the edge of the Atlantic in County Clare, Lahinch Surf Shop faces the extreme operational volatility typical of a seasonal tourism business.
While summer brings a massive influx of foot traffic and surging e-commerce orders, winter requires navigating sharp drops in demand and managing complex international supply chains for heavy hardware and technical gear.
The Lahinch Surf Shop in County Clare is as much a community centre and weather forecaster for the local surfers as it is a business. Not only does its owner Eileesh Buckley run the shop and sponsor young Irish surfers for international competitions, but she’s been compiling a daily surf report every day for 25 years.
Using Gemini, she been able to generate ads based on the company’s stock and the weather.
In this way different weather generates different ads tailored to different audiences and featuring a wide variety of products.
-
Modernising Field Operations: OpenHive Bee Conservation
Operating out of Dublin, Wicklow, and Galway, OpenHive tracks hive health, honey production, and colony treatments across multiple regional apiaries. The physical reality of their environmental mission was highly demanding – gathering critical data while wearing bulky protective suits surrounded by thousands of bees, resulting in a mountain of damp, handwritten notes that took hours to manually type into spreadsheets every week.
By using Google AI, the team completely eliminated this data logjam. Today, they simply snap a photograph of their handwritten field notes, and advanced models automatically read, sort, and digitise the records instantly. This has freed up critical hours, allowing the founders to shift away from tedious administrative tasks and spend their time directly in the field protecting the native Irish honeybee.
“You can’t do beekeeping remotely. Using Gemini has freed up over half a day a week — time that can be spent with our hives rather than spreadsheets,” explained Kyle Petrie, Co-Founder of OpenHive Bee Conservation.
“It also allows us to run community workshops and teach school children about conservation – passing the knowledge to the next generation.”
-
Strategic Data Clarity: McNally Family Farm
Based in North Dublin, this organic agricultural business experienced rapid diversification, expanding from supermarket supply into running a bustling farm shop, a cafe, and growing over 50 varieties of vegetables. While sales soared, the McNally Family Farm team was overwhelmed by messy, disorganised spreadsheets, leaving the manager with no clear view of backend profitability.
A member of the team started to feed raw sales figures directly into Gemini. The system immediately transformed the chaotic numbers into clear, readable patterns showing exact seasonal demand trends. This predictive analytical clarity removed the guesswork from crop planning, allowing a traditional family farm to plan its next commercial expansion with absolute, data-driven confidence.
“Suddenly we had clear, readable reports – what was selling, what wasn’t, what people bought at different times of year. For the first time, we truly understood our business. Since then, Gemini has become central to how we operate and grow – from launching guided farm tours to planning our next expansion. In farming, standing still isn’t an option, and with Gemini, we don’t have to,” explained Niamh McNally, from McNally Family Farm.
-
Automated Branding & Media: BKultured
A fast-moving natural beverage brand based in Cork, BKultured faced a classic small-business hurdle: communicating complex nutritional and gut-health science to consumers on a startup budget.
Using Gemini, the team was able to take dense, academic food science papers and make them more digestible for consumer-friendly marketing assets. Furthermore, they used NotebookLM to convert notes into a podcast, allowing the founder to stay updated on the move, saving a full standard day of office work every single week
“We used Gemini to digest intricate scientific and nutritional papers about gut health and instantly distil them into creative, engaging social media content that resonates with our audience,” said Niamh Hegarty, founder of BKultured.
“Gemini helps me create credible marketing materials to communicate with my customers. There’s new studies being published constantly and Gemini allows me to keep at the forefront of these, giving BKultured a real edge over our rivals.’
“Since launching, BKultured has tripled in size and our products can be found in shops and cafes across Cork. With Gemini keeping me up to date on the latest scientific developments and ensuring I get all my tasks done, I am looking forward to achieving my next ambition – having BKultured stocked across Ireland.”
👉 Future-proof your business in seven steps. Secure your scholarship to complete the certification at no cost. Apply now and get started!
-
Bank of Ireland is welcoming new customers every day – funding investments, working capital and expansions across multiple sectors. To learn more, click here
-
For support in challenging times, click here
-
Listen to the ThinkBusiness Podcast for business insights and inspiration. All episodes are here. You can also listen to the Podcast on:
-
Spotify
-
SoundCloud
-
Apple
