The Government is bracing for possible turbulence in the Republic’s tech sector as artificial intelligence (AI) threatens to cause “significant upheaval” to large parts of the Irish workforce in the coming years.
In a forthright warning about the disruption the AI boom may bring, Taoiseach Micheál Martin said the State needs to be “mindful” that advances in the technology could have far-reaching implications.
It comes as Meta, owners of Facebook and Instagram, confirmed plans to cut 10 per cent of its global workforce, which equates to roughly 8,000 employees, to trim costs as it invests massively in AI.
It is unclear how many of Meta’s 1,800 workers in the Dublin offices will be affected.
Work is expected to pick up pace across several Government departments to assess the likelihood of AI significantly shaking up the labour market within the next few years.
“I think we should be mindful of the fact that there could be significant upheaval in the jobs market over the next decade. And it could be earlier, rather than the latter half of that decade,” said Martin.
Speaking on Friday, he added that officials had already been tasked with getting a better sense of how advances in AI might affect jobs.
Tech executives in leading AI companies have often made bold predictions that the popular tools will continue to evolve rapidly, to the point where they will replace the need for substantial numbers of entry-level employees in white-collar industries.
AI assistants, such as Anthropic’s Claude, Microsoft Copilot and similar tools, have increasingly been incorporated into office workplaces.
It is understood officials in the Department of Enterprise will, in the coming months, begin monitoring to review the uptake of the technology across businesses and how it is being deployed.
The Department of Further and Higher Education has separately been tasked with helping people upskill in an attempt to AI-proof parts of the labour force.
Martin said US industry figures involved in the AI race seemed to be putting a focus on using the tech to cut jobs.
“Depending on who you talk to, some people are very clear that the impacts will be very significant, others less so … We do need to get a handle on that as best we can,” said Martin.
The Republic was also well placed to gain jobs from more AI-driven investment in the State, he said. The Taoiseach was speaking in Cyprus where he was attending an EU summit.
“Three years ago, when ChatGPT was launched, we couldn’t have imagined how powerful the tools we have today would be. So who knows where we will be in another three years’ time,” said Barry Scannell, a partner who specialises in AI in law firm William Fry.
There was “no doubt” that more powerful AI tools would disrupt the workforce in the next number of years, he said.
“The question is what kind of disruption it will be … There will be job losses, but if we get it right, that will be mitigated if we upskill,” said the lawyer.
Scannell said a huge amount of coding work was now being done by AI under the supervision of humans, but that software companies had increased their output as a result, rather than laying off large numbers of staff.
A Department of Finance research paper, published in February, warned that the Republic’s economy was particularly exposed to AI upending the world of work, given the large concentration of tech sector employees in the State.