The whole of Ireland got an eight-minute glimpse into Brightbeam's mission this morning. Brian Hanly, our CEO, was asked to explain what we do on Newstalk's Breakfast Business with Joe Lynam. After exploring our core services the two got into economics, regulation and data sovereignty. As well as the future of Irish jobs. Listen out for Brian's particularly useful F1 analogy. And how he slips the idea of 'creative destruction' in. A big thanks to Joe for the invite. You

The agent, or ‘agentic’, era already has two key protocols: MCP: Model Context Protocol - connects agents to tools; and A2A: Agent-to-agent protocol - connects agents to each other. Both are good - and both are being adopted to excellent effect. But both leave out one critical party a regulated business can't treat as optional: the human. Which is why we're open-sourcing a protocol we have developed for that missing layer: CHAP, the Collaborative Human-Agent Protocol. Fosteri

Who owns the risk when the knowledge walks out the door? Our very own Kieran Ivers put that to a packed room at last week’s InsTech.ie Transformation Summit. Because in an industry where the average decision-maker is edging towards 60, decades of judgement are about to leave the business with them. There’s no doubt that the industry is making huge progress - both as a sector of national importance, and with its adoption of digital intelligence. But most AI deployments tod

Welcome to all the AI news that matters this week – across tech, biopharma, medtech, advanced manufacturing and insurance. We discover what the machine started building, what the market paid to own it, and why you - most definitely - remain in charge. tl;dr: AI made history. But humans still rule. If we're vaingloriously helping to write history's first draft, may we respectfully suggest this week might have been something of a moment? A few days before President Donald Trump

Cork, you set a high bar. At the Brightbeam Talent Tour’s first stop, engineers armed only with a laptop were given a series of real world challenges - and a vanishingly tiny number of hours to solve them. The AI feats we witnessed were excellent – but the conversations were even better: honest on both on a technical and human level. Over twenty engineers took part, with one having travelled five hours to get to Cork’s Republic of Work. We’d like to repeat our thanks to every

In April, this series opened with auditor Grant Thornton agreeing to cut its fees. Its client, KPMG, argued that AI had made its audit cheaper. And that this saving belonged to the client. The bill fell from $416,000 to $357,000. Eight weeks and one earnings season later, the question the story raised hasn't gone away. When AI makes knowledge work cheaper, who keeps the value? Parts 1 and 2 described four ways AI abundance moves value around. Competitive absorption: productiv

The first serious generative AI use case in a regulated manufacturing site shouldn't sit on critical GMP. But it should sit right next to it. And make sure you’re using that non-GMP use case as a place to practise the habits that matter later, when AI moves to quality-critical work. Data access. Ownership. Version control. Model behaviour. Human review. Escalation. Evidence capture. And whether people still use the system once the project lead leaves the room. Get this right

Much has been written about AI ‘solving maths’. Even ‘solving physics’. But might it help solve viruses first? A Cambridge-led team has taken a new universal vaccine technology, developed with AI, into human testing for the first time. Current vaccine cycles start with strains already circulating. Jonathan Heeney, who led the work, says it’s like ‘a dog chasing its tail'. His team tried the reverse. They took genetic data from across the sarbecovirus family – SARS, Covid and

Welcome to all the AI news that matters this week – across tech, biopharma, medtech, advanced manufacturing and insurance. Where the work started, where its moving to and who wants the gains it’s yet to create. tl;dr: Compute? It's coming home. Ker-laaaaang! You could almost hear the penny drop this week. Right as finance teams took cover under a blizzard of invoices. The question du jour: If using cloud AI is becoming expensive and unsustainable, (which it is) why don't we m

We’re seeing digital intelligence move out of pilot conversations and into operating models across insurance organisations. That brings deeper questions. How does it sit inside legacy systems? Who governs it? Where does it change underwriting, claims and service? And what has to change in the organisation before the technology can do useful work at scale? Helpfully, that’s the focus of this year’s InsTech.ie Transformation Summit in Dublin on Thursday 11 June. Now in its thir

The rules shaping how AI can be used in regulated European industries are being written now – in data spaces, sector standards and the frameworks forming around the AI Act. For organisations in biopharma, medtech, manufacturing and insurance, that work will help define the conditions they work within. A key forum for that work is the BDVA - Big Data Value Association – an industry-led partnership of 250+ members that helps shape Europe's data and AI agenda, policy work, resea

Based in or near Cork? We’re looking for engineers who want to work on digital intelligence with Brightbeam. On Tuesday 9 June, we’re running a hiring day at Republic of Work. You’ll spend the day on a practical, self-contained digital intelligence project, close to the kind of work Brightbeam does with customers. You’ll have desk space, WiFi, lunch, tea, coffee and an Anthropic API key. Bring your laptop, charger and preferred development environment. We’re hiring across thr

Mammals dream because reality is slow. A rat that ran a maze yesterday may, that night, run the same maze again in its sleep – faster, in fragments, sometimes backwards. Neuroscientists first recorded hippocampal replay in rats in the 1990s. Later work showed just how strange it can get. The body is still. The learning isn't. Experience is something we live through, then replay, compress and recombine. Which is what some of the most capable AI systems do. AlphaGo Zero learned

Welcome to all the AI news that matters this week – across tech, biopharma, medtech, advanced manufacturing and insurance. Where the money rushed in, what it's building and who's being watched. tl;dr: What's in short supply? It's not the money. Anthropic raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation, making it the world's most valuable AI startup. But it's not the only AI-thing capital has been a-courting. China's troubled consumer funds turned tail to become tech stock-pick

Brightbeam remains bullish on Ireland's job prospects in the age of AI. But our tax base? That might be another question. There are two ways our corporation tax pipeline could be reduced by AI. The first one was outlined in the Irish Times this week. Digital Infrastructure Ireland, a lobby group for data centres, argues that if multinationals can't build them here, enterprise IP will migrate to other jurisdictions. And tax take will follow. The mechanic underneath: tax follow

We were asked again to comment on the AI-jobs debate, this time after yesterday's IMF warning that 40% of Irish jobs could be affected. Here's what we said: Impacting jobs is very different from destroying them. We're seeing a lot of work change - people doing different things than before, as they are augmented by AI. But working with large multinational clients in Ireland across biopharma, medtech, advanced manufacturing and insurance, we've yet to see the evidence of displa

Welcome to all the AI news that matters this week – across tech, biopharma, medtech, advanced manufacturing and insurance. What got said out loud, what got bought quietly and what got cut to pay for it. tl;dr: We thought the big guy was all-in. But then we discovered what he'd bought. On Thursday, we noted that Google AI supremo Demis Hassabis was all-in on world models. He framed Gemini Omni as the centrepiece of Google's year, as a digital intelligence that simulates physic

Many commentators are calling Google’s newly revealed AI path confusing. And underwhelming. But for those leaning in, it is anything but. The muted reaction is, perhaps, understandable. The models launched at Google I/O were catch-up not leap-ahead. The apps weren't ready. And Gemini Pro was punted to June. Then AI legend Andrej Karpathy joined Anthropic the same day - drawing 25m+ views on X - and pulled considerable focus. It's also not usually great news when procurement i

Could smaller nations (still) use AI to unlock a new wave of economic growth? Which, given the growing disquiet about AI, feels like a tone deaf question to ask. But bear with. Until recently, we have expected everyone to have relatively cheap access to the very best models OpenAI, Anthropic and Google can offer. It's estimated that when you hand over your €20 for access, you receive up to €400 in usage. But as models have become larger, increasingly capable and more expensiv

Can the greatest engineers in Cork be found in a day? We think so. Tuesday 9th June is the first stop on the Brightbeam Talent Tour. An engineering recruitment day at Republic of Work – real digital intelligence chats, honest conversations – and hiring decisions made on the day. We're looking across three tracks: Engineers, Forward Deployed Engineers, Digital Intelligence Engineers – at Mid, Senior and Principal level. During the day you’ll work on a practical, self-contained

Baffled by its brilliance. Stunned by its stupidity. AI is intelligent, until it’s not. It can save you a week and then waste an afternoon. That’s why it needs harnesses, evals and constant supervision to do what you want reliably over time. It performs intelligence, but it does not reliably learn from experience. So for your Monday musing, we’re asking: What even is intelligence anyway? There are hundreds of possible definitions. But to name a few key ones: Prediction? Compr

Welcome to all the AI news that matters this week – across tech, biopharma, medtech, advanced manufacturing and insurance. The wins, the fails and the somewhere in-betweens. tl;dr: The public boos, the money cheers It's not been the best of weeks for Irish AI sentiment. Research revealed half of workers are expected to use AI without enough training. And the Irish Times argued women could be the losers in the workplace transition. This was in addition to the 720 Covalen worke

Is insurance finding its rhythm with AI? Last week, Marsh put ‘Project Leapfrog’ in front of selected clients - a tool for testing coverage and exposure scenarios. The world’s largest broker is using AI to compress actuarial and exposure analysis into an app clients can interrogate, live. And this isn’t the only signal that insurance’s rate of adoption has started to pick up the pace. Aviva has built 80+ AI models across claims, the result of a multi-year integration effort.

What should we make of Ireland's three AI-and-jobs stories this week? We've learned that 720 workers at Covalen have voted to strike - most of whom annotate and moderate content for Meta, which now wants its own AI to do the same work. LinkedIn also notified the government of further redundancies, although the company says the rationale is broader than AI. And Fórsa, Ireland's largest public-sector union, opened its conference today asking for an 'AI Time Dividend'. Which wou