IRELAND’S AI SHIFT IS BIGGER THAN THE HEADLINES

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 would mean protections against displacement, paid AI upskilling time and a shorter working week as a benefit share.

Those proposed solutions are not tilting at windmills. The displacement is real. The recent ESRI report was clear on that.

But are the headlines the whole of the picture? Every consequential technology has, so far, run the 'creative destruction' gauntlet. Electricity, the assembly line, computing, the internet. They all destroyed jobs. And then entirely new categories emerged. Although it took longer for that to become obvious.

Stanford's 2026 AI Index found a 50-point gap between expert and public optimism on AI's jobs impact - 73% of experts expect a positive effect over 20 years. Only 23% of the public agree.

Our experience of implementing AI, which is now considerable but far from omniscient, is that AI does not usually displace knowledge worker jobs. But it does change them.

It turns out that, in a capitalist economy where we're all competing to give clients and customers as much value as possible for the lowest price, work seems infinite. And that AI opens up the possibility of doing far more at much higher levels of quality. Which also takes up at least as much time as the old way of doing things.

Repetitive tasks are swapped for defining what the AI should do. And then deciding how to make it as good as it need to be. In many instances, our subject matter expertise matters more than it used to.

But, as we have seen at Covalen, this is not true in all instances. There will be destruction as we move through the transition. But we are already seeing creation.

Brightbeam is part of that wave of creation. And we are a collegiate part of a burgeoning sector. A sector which is less likely to make headlines in the short-term. But which, over the longer haul, will create many jobs. And help further the competitive advantages that Ireland already enjoys.

All of which will be no comfort at all to those who lose their jobs in the meantime. So collectively, as a society, we must do all we can to lessen the impact and help every individual through.