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Minister of State Robert Troy TD on harnessing the potential
Ireland is well positioned to harness the potential of artificial intelligence (AI). Minister of State with responsibility for Trade Promotion, Digital and Company Regulation at the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Robert Troy TD, writes.
When we talk about AI, there is a tendency to speak in terms of the future or in potential and opportunity. We talk about what AI can help us to achieve and what it will do for us, but the fact is that many Irish businesses are already using and benefitting from AI, whether it is to improve productivity, to interact with their customers or to gain a better understanding of market opportunities.
AI is changing the way we work and live, opening up new ways to address problems in almost every field of human activity. It is when we recognise it as a tool for the present that its true potential can be realised: to help us as we drive toward a society and economy that is greener, more productive, and more innovative. To get there, though, we need to create the right conditions for the use of AI here and now.
In July 2021, the Government launched the National AI Strategy, AI: Here for Good, to provide high-level direction to the design, development, deployment, and governance of AI in Ireland. The strategy reflects our ambition to harness AI as a positive and transformative force for Ireland.
We want to support more businesses to benefit from AI and to help those businesses already using AI to achieve more sustainable growth through trustworthy systems. We will do this by building on Ireland’s existing capabilities, our thriving community of indigenous SMEs, and the presence of world-leading software and ICT industries.
In an effort to boost the uptake of digital technology, including AI, we have established a Digital Transition Fund. This €85 million multiannual fund will run until 2026 as part of Ireland’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan. This funding will help businesses as they work to become more productive, to develop new business models, and expand into new markets.
As an enterprise ecosystem, Ireland is already well positioned to harness the potential offered by AI. Many of the largest technology companies have an established presence here, we have an agile and highly skilled workforce, a record of scientific excellence, and a strong drive for innovation.
To further help our SMEs as they look to the opportunities offered by AI and other digital technologies, the Government has committed to establishing several European Digital
Innovation Hubs (EDIH), which will offer upskilling, innovation and advisory services to enterprises and public authorities in areas aligned to AI, as well as offering technical expertise, research facilities, and experimentation.
At the core of each EDIH will be a research and technology organisation, or a higher education institution lab. These hubs will serve as the first stop for businesses looking to implement AI and other digital technologies. They will also serve as SME incubators, offering access to infrastructure, technologies, and test beds.
While all the EDIHs will engage with SMEs and help them as they adopt AI, one will be specifically designated the National AI Digital Innovation Hub. This hub will serve as the national first stop for AI, acting as a point of contact for businesses as they engage with AI adoption and the broader AI innovation ecosystem.
We are also working to assemble an Enterprise Digital Advisory Forum (EDAF), which I will chair. This forum will comprise representatives of enterprise –both large and small – AI experts, academics, and state bodies. It will work with government to drive enterprise adoption of AI and other digital technologies.
As with all new technologies, there is a degree of risk involved in the implementation of AI, and it is important we be cognisant of those risks. While it is true AI has unique potential to help us further our ambitions as a society, we must temper those ambitions with an awareness of the potential ethical implications of the deployment of AI.
The Government’s vision is for Ireland to become a leading country in the use of AI to benefit our citizens through a people-centred and ethical approach to AI adoption and use. The National AI Strategy will serve as a roadmap as we work towards that goal, adopting AI to the benefit of business and society in an inclusive and responsible manner. Ultimately, if AI is to be truly inclusive and have a positive impact on all of us, we need to be clear on its role in society and ensure trust in AI is the ultimate marker of its success. To facilitate this, the National AI Strategy is underpinned by three core principles: the adoption of a human-centric approach to AI; staying open and adaptable to new innovations; and ensuring good governance to build trust and confidence so that innovation can flourish.
By making human rights and ethical principles a key focus of the National AI Strategy, Ireland is making a commitment to ensuring AI-based systems and solutions developed and used here are trustworthy, fair, and inclusive. Founded on these core principles, it is our ambition that we can put Ireland at the very forefront of a people-centred, ethical, and responsible rollout of AI.
The Government will also appoint an AI Ambassador to promote awareness among the public and businesses of the potential AI has to offer, serving as a champion of AI as a positive force for the economy and for society as a whole, emphasising an ethical approach. To inform the work of the AI Ambassador, we will soon begin discussions on young people’s attitudes to, concerns
about, and visions for an AI-powered future using Comhairle na nÓg, the national structure for consultation with young people.
AI can help us to address long-standing challenges in areas like public health, education, housing, and urban development, to name just a few. While government has a role to play in facilitating and enabling the use of AI for the public good, this is a journey that will involve all of us, as a society.
Ireland can become a leading international hub for the ethical and responsible use of AI, and we all stand to benefit from that.
Minister of State Robert Troy TD
Public sector takes to the cloud
Rapid adoption of cloud services during the pandemic has changed the roadmap for public sector organisations, according to Jonathan Maguire, Accenture’s Health and Public Services Cloud First Lead, with all signs pointing to more agile services and better citizen engagement.
The accelerated adoption of digital and cloud technologies during the pandemic, has demonstrated how fast paced change is possible. People’s willingness to embrace new ways of doing things saw levels of digital transformation occur in weeks that had previously taken years.
Back in October 2019, the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer had already called for a switch to cloudfirst thinking, declaring that “the decision to be made now is what, how and when to move to cloud”. As it turned out, agencies had to make those decisions much sooner than expected when the first lockdown happened at the end of March 2020.
Over the next 18 months, public service agencies demonstrated a capacity to pivot in the face of an unprecedented crisis and the response was overwhelmingly positive. Citizens took to the cloud and the number of MyGovID accounts soared. The challenge now is to build on what has been achieved. There is a golden opportunity for public sector leaders to maintain the momentum and continue to transform, powered by the needs of their own organisations and the citizens they serve.
Rethink cloud journeys
The business case for cloud has always been built on the promise of resilience, agility, scale, speed and responsiveness. Covid-19 has made it hard to argue with the benefits, but more importantly, it has changed the conversation about the fundamentals of what the cloud can do for government.
Many public sector leaders still prioritise so-called sovereign clouds, where the starting point was always about securing data and regulatory responsibility, but reasons to migrate to public clouds are now too compelling to ignore. During lockdown they became enablers for citizens, partners, and employees to interact remotely. Cloud is now seen as a way to transform and modernise operating models, rather than a static repository for sharing information and data.
After a year of increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks, the cloud is also recognised as a safer place to host IT infrastructure and services. Organisations know they could never match the huge investments cloudproviders are making to keep their platforms secure, especially around building solutions natively on public clouds.
With security becoming part of the public cloud business case, governments can start to think about other cloud benefits and look more at nurturing innovation. We know from Accenture’s Cloud Continuum research that public service executives understand the opportunity. 57 per cent believe that accelerating cloud is business critical; 83 per cent agree or strongly agree that cloud is essential to fuel innovation and new business models. The next step is to identify service areas that will reap the biggest rewards.
Personalise at scale
One priority will be about serving citizens through their channels of choice at a time of their choosing. There have been huge technological developments in this area, such as virtual interactions and automated customer service, with more to come. Fuelled by AI and machine learning, these operations require the huge computer power and scale that cloud provides; ensuring that more citizens can be served more quickly without compromising their experience.
This is partly about personalisation, providing tailored services across previously siloed departments, where citizen information is shared by joinedup agencies, ‘raising all boats’ in the transition from physical to digital engagement. At the core is data, or the insights that can be derived from it. The challenge is extracting meaningful insights from an array of data sources in legacy applications, as well as new volume-intensive sources, such as body-worn cameras.
For example, the pandemic proved what’s possible with track and trace and the Covid Tracker app, where real-time data is shared across public and private sector organisations for societal good. New services were created in days rather than months by using the cloud to ingest, process and analyse data from multiple sources, and the time to actionable insights was dramatically shortened.
Scale is the other component. One of the long-standing cloud benefits has been the way services can be ‘flexed’ up and down to meet changing demand. This was highlighted during the pandemic when, for example, the Department of Social Protection utilised cloud-enabled systems to cope with the huge surge in benefit payments. It plays to another cloud strength that strikes a chord with public sector bodies facing significant budgetary restrictions: services can be configured to make sure they only pay for what they need and use.
Migrate and innovate
Responsive cloud components provide a blueprint for modernising public services. Not least is a flexible and accessible technology architecture that increases the potential for cross-agency and external partner informationsharing. Taking the decision to decouple from legacy and migrate to the cloud will break down silos and deliver true digital transformation, but there is a right and wrong way to do it.
Simply doing a ‘lift and shift’ of existing applications never makes the most of the cloud opportunity. At worst, you simply relocate less-than-perfect legacy solutions and end up paying more than before because of cloud consumption costs. A much smarter migration is the one that takes the opportunity to modernise applications, leveraging different platforms to rethink and optimise value and quality of service.
Cloud is now seen as key enabler for more green and sustainable public services. According to Accenture’s The Green Behind the Cloud report, migrating on-premise applications to a hyper-scale cloud platform can reduce carbon emissions bymore than 84 per cent and cut energy usage by 65 per cent.
There is no doubt that cloud-based platforms can support governments to provide better services, cost-effectively, quickly and more sustainably, facilitating new types of citizen interaction. People from all walks of life have shown an appetite for change during the pandemic that the public sector must do its best to satisfy. Quite simply, it’s too big an opportunity to miss.
Five steps for successful cloud journeys
1. Leadership teams define an outcomes-based vision that everyone in the agency understands.
2. Prioritise citizen and workforce experiences by reimagining how your agency operates.
3. Define a cloud journey and new IT structure that enables execution of the agency vision.
4. Establish standard practices to support ongoing adoption of new technologies and operating models.
5. Build a decoupled IT architecture reducing the constraints of legacy, enabling hybrid IT modernisation and cloud adoption.
E: j.m.maguire@accenture.com W: www.accenture.com
