THE INTERNATIONAL AI SUMMIT 2026
Ireland, we are told, wants to be Europe's leading applied AI economy.
Here at Brightbeam, we rather like the emphasis on applied.
Around 1,500 people - all expected at the RDS in Dublin for today's International AI Summit - discussing future prospects from the AI economy. A year ago, we hypothesised that the optimal division of labour would be:
- The US creates AI;
- China reduces its cost;
- The EU regulates it; and
- Ireland implements it.
So it's good to see implementation getting this kind of national attention.
But implementation still moves at very different speeds. Some organisations go from proof of concept to production in months. Others stay in ‘prototype purgatory’ for years.
In our experience, the model is rarely the sticking point. More often, it's whether an organisation understands how its own decisions get made - whose judgement matters, and who answers for the result when AI is involved.
Get that clear, and you can give AI a useful job to do. And what you learn from one deployment can make the next one easier.
So here's somewhere to start tomorrow morning: pick one decision your team makes every week, and ask the people who make it to walk you through it.
The International AI Summit is livestreamed today on the Irish Presidency site:
‘From strategy to scale: Ireland’s AI advantage’, our piece from last October:
