Podcast Ep 335: Microsoft and Trinity College research shows 92% of Irish organisations are using or plan to use AI – but a widening chasm between large firms and SMEs could undermine Ireland’s competitive position. We talk to Microsoft’s Kieran McCorry about how real this threat is.
On the face of it, with the massive presence of so many tech giants on our shores and artificial intelligence (AI) weaving its way into the knitting of how business gets done, Ireland has established itself as one of the most AI-active economies in the world.
But a new report from Microsoft Ireland and Trinity College Dublin paints a more complicated picture behind the headline numbers that indicates a widening gulf between large companies racing ahead with sophisticated AI deployments and smaller businesses still grappling with the basics.
“This is a time for leaders to lead. It’s a time to take a step back and say the future of my business depends on the proper adoption of AI. Otherwise, we’re going to get left behind”
The third annual AI Economy Report found that 92% of organisations are using or plan to use AI – a figure that Microsoft’s National Technology Officer Kieran McCorry describes as reflecting a fundamental shift in how businesses relate to this technology.
“The narrative has changed quite considerably from ‘what is AI’ towards ‘how do I operationalise it in my business’. Irish businesses are deploying AI with a particular purpose I mind. They understand the advantages it can bring and they have a focused deployment to drive and enhance productivity.”
That shift in mindset, while welcome, has not translated evenly across the economy. The report identified a stark productivity gap: large organisations are saving around 5,000 hours per month through AI use, compared with roughly 1,000 hours per month for smaller firms. That gap is not merely about scale – it reflects difference in readiness, resources and strategic ambition.
Mind the gap
-
Listen to the ThinkBusiness Podcast for business insights and inspiration. Latest episodes are here. You can also listen to the Podcast on:
-
Spotify
-
SoundCloud
-
Apple
According to the report, only 10% of companies surveyed could be classed as having “advanced deployments” – meaning AI is genuinely reshaping how work gets done, rather than simply providing an extra layer on top of existing processes.
“By advanced deployments, we mean really starting to get into how AI is fundamentally changing the workflows in a company,” McCorry explained. “It’s an additive tool at the moment for employees – making them more efficient, more effective, more productive – but only about 10% of the companies that participated in the research could be described as having advanced deployments.”
For many Irish SMEs, the challenge is not a lack of interest but a lack of capacity to think beyond the immediate. A managing director focused on meeting payroll and winning the next contract has little time to redesign business processes around AI agents, even if the long-term case for doing so is obvious.
The governance gap compounds the problem. The research found that around 44% of organisations have no formal AI policy in place – and those without one are dramatically less likely to realise productivity gains. Companies with formal AI policies in place are ten times more likely to extract measurable value from the technology.
“It’s an indicator that you’re an organisation that is taking the tech seriously and putting the right controls and enablers in place to get the value out of it,” McCorry said.
“If I do it, it might be painful for me now, but it’s going to drive more value in the future.”
Laying the tracks for the future
McCorry reached for a historical comparison to make sense of where Irish business stands today. At a recent industry event he heard AI described as an infrastructure component – comparable to the great railway buildout in the United States. The metaphor resonated.
“You must put that initial investment in core infrastructure before you start to see the benefits down the line,” he said. “Simply stringing hundreds of thousands of miles of railway track across a country doesn’t bring you a return on investment until you start to leverage it – but it takes time to put that infrastructure in place first.”
The parallel extends to the capital flows surrounding AI. The sheer volume of investment pouring into the sector has drawn comparisons to the dot-com era, though McCorry notes that the current wave has more operating substance behind it.
He cited a recent Gartner analysis suggesting that companies shedding staff to cut costs in the short term are not capturing the longer-term returns that come from using AI to genuinely transform what their remaining workforce can do.
Inside Microsoft: What good looks like
At Microsoft itself, AI is woven into the daily rhythm of work in ways that offer a preview of where the broader market may be heading. Copilot sits inside Teams, Outlook, Excel and PowerPoint. Employees routinely use it to prepare for meetings, sift through archives of email and shared documents for relevant context, and brief themselves on unfamiliar topics in a fraction of the time research would have taken previously.
“I would rarely go into a meeting without having prepared it in some way using Copilot,” McCorry said. “I’d be able to go into Copilot and say, ‘Look through all of the content in my Teams, in my SharePoint, in my Outlook that relates to this upcoming meeting and give me some key talking points. What are the issues that have been floating around for a while that haven’t been addressed?’“
Beyond that baseline, Microsoft’s internal deployment extends to what McCorry describes as first-party agents. A researcher, for example, can be instructed to gather information from multiple sources, apply judgment about what is relevant and return a distilled output ready for use – compressing research that might once have taken half a day into under an hour.
The company has also built dedicated agents for HR queries, legal questions and deal support. Rather than tracking down a colleague or waiting for someone to be available, employees can access a knowledgeable agent around the clock.
“The need to go and interrupt someone, or know where to go to, or the reliance on a person being available, is kind of abstracted away,” McCorry said.
Amplifier, not a replacement
On the question that lingers over every conversation about AI – what it means for jobs – McCorry was emphatic that the technology’s primary function is amplification, not displacement.
“AI makes a coder a better coder. AI makes a graphic designer a better graphic designer. AI makes a writer a better writer,” he said. He is not dismissive of the risks.
The Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) recently projected that around 7% of the Irish working population – roughly 200,000 people – could experience some form of displacement linked to AI. But displacement, as McCorry and others point out, does not necessarily mean redundancy. In many cases it means a job that looks quite different.
Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, has noted that around 30% of code at the company is now written by AI agents. The human software engineers remain. Their role has evolved: less line-by-line coding, more oversight, quality control and direction.
“To develop software, you still need people who understand what software development is about,” McCorry said. “We’re miles away from any notion of humans not being required to be part of this process. I don’t contemplate that happening anytime soon.”
The people who tend to gain most from AI tools, he suggested, are those who already have strong underlying skills. The technology acts as a lever, not a substitute.
“The people that had some intrinsic skills to begin with actually really get those skills amplified,” McCorry said. “If you’re the person who knows how to create a great PowerPoint presentation, you probably know, with the benefit of the PowerPoint agent, how to get even more out of that.”
Ireland’s position: Strong, but not guaranteed
On a global stage, Ireland is performing well. The Microsoft Work Trend Index AI Diffusion Report, published in recent weeks, placed Ireland fourth globally for AI adoption measured across the working-age population, with around 48.5% of people in that group using AI. The only European country ahead of Ireland is Norway, and on current trajectories Ireland is projected to overtake it in the next reporting period.
The Government has moved to cement that position through the National Digital and AI Strategy, published earlier this year, which places skills and AI adoption at the centre of national economic policy. The AIReady.ie platform, launched recently by the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, provides learning resources aimed at the whole population. An AI advisory council is operating. An AI office is due to be established by August.
McCorry sits on the Enterprise Digital Advisory Forum within the Department of Enterprise and describes AI as firmly at the top of the government’s priority list. The domestic implementation of the EU AI Act is working its way through the legislative process.
“There is a very real recognition that AI is central to the nation’s future and the nation’s success,” he said. “The steps are there – but you don’t just flick a switch and this thing happens. It takes time to embed these things, especially into the curriculum, and to change how people teach and how people learn.”
He is encouraged by the direction of travel in higher education. His daughter, currently sitting law exams at university, is assessed through take-home papers that allow full use of any available technology, including AI. The premium is on critical thinking and the ability to use tools well, not on the capacity to memorise and reproduce information under exam conditions.
“She remembers more about it because it’s not about remembering a case or a particular quote,” McCorry said. “It’s thinking. How can I use this critically, to explore an area more comprehensively?”
The SME imperative
Asked what he would say to an Irish SME owner today – someone simultaneously keeping the lights on and trying to build a workforce fit for the future – McCorry offered a single word: courage.
“I described it in one word as courage,” he said. “This is a time for leadership. This is a time for leaders to lead. It’s not a time to look away and think, ‘We’ll come to it in good time.’ It’s a time to take a step back and say the future of my business depends on the proper adoption of AI. Otherwise, we’re going to get left behind.”
He referenced the fate of Kodak – a company that understood the technology displacing it but failed to act decisively enough on that understanding. The risk for SMEs that delay is not just slower productivity growth. It is the prospect of being outpaced by competitors who have already crossed the threshold from AI as an experiment to AI as infrastructure.
Leadership tone matters. Research in the legal sector, McCorry noted, has shown that silence from partners and senior figures about AI creates hesitation throughout a firm.
“Stand up, be counted, use the technology, make a difference in terms of how you work – because that gets reflected by others,” he said. “Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. When employees see leaders embracing a difficult technology, perhaps making mistakes, it opens up the time and the space and the permission for everyone else in the company to learn.”
The final safeguard, he and others agree, is human oversight: not blind trust in what AI produces, but a disciplined habit of checking outputs before they go out. The technology, for all its capability, still hallucinates. The standard should be what McCorry called a “human in the loop” – review everything before it leaves your hands.
“Trust but verify,” he said.
-
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. Latest episodes are here. You can also listen to the Podcast on:
-
Spotify
-
SoundCloud
-
Apple
