Most of what is written about AI in Ireland is about the multinationals that build it here. This briefing is about the rest: the Irish enterprises the Central Statistics Office counts, the grid they share with the data centres, the rules they now have to follow, and the handful of Irish companies that have said in public what they are doing. It is written in the last week of August 2026, the week after the CSO published its reading of the numbers.
One in five, and the split that matters
- 20.2%
- Irish enterprises with ten or more employees that used AI in 2025, up from 8.1% in 2023 and about 15% in 2024 [1]
- ≈58%
- Share of large Irish enterprises using AI in 2025, against about 28% of medium-sized and 17% of small ones [1]
- 20.0%
- The EU average in Eurostat's census for the same year; Denmark 42.0%, Finland 37.8% [2]
The CSO's feature article of 20 August draws together its enterprise and household surveys. Enterprise AI use has more than doubled in two years and now sits exactly on the EU average, a long way behind the Nordic leaders.[1][2] The interesting number is not the average but the split by size. Around 58% of large enterprises used AI in 2025, against roughly 28% of medium-sized firms and about 17% of small ones, and the divide is by size rather than by sector: the large firms are where the budgets, the data teams and the vendor attention are.[1] Read alongside the executive surveys of the winter, in which a quarter of Irish firms had a chief AI officer but only 17% of chief executives had seen AI revenue, the picture is of governance ahead of delivery at the top and nothing much at the bottom.[3][4]
The workforce numbers run the other way. Ibec found workplace AI use had doubled in a year to 40% of employees, with 81% saying they could do more with training and 27% having had none.[5] Stanford's payroll study, updated on 12 August with data to June, finds no economy-wide displacement in the United States and a widening gap for the young: employment of 22 to 25 year olds in the most AI-exposed occupations is about 19% below trend, up from 15% a year earlier, driven by reduced hiring rather than layoffs.[6] Ireland has no equivalent study yet; the mechanism, fewer entry-level hires rather than redundancies, is the one to watch for.
The grid
Data centres consumed 7,663 gigawatt-hours of electricity in Ireland in 2025, 23% of metered consumption and 10% more than in 2024, according to the CSO's July release; the share was 5% a decade ago.[7] EirGrid's forecasts have it rising to 31% by 2034 as demand grows from 9.4 to 14.6 terawatt-hours.[8] The regulator's answer, published on 12 December 2025 after a year of consultation, is that a new data centre must meet at least 80% of its annual demand from additional renewable generation built in Ireland, provide matching local generation or storage, and reach compliance along a six-year path, with the system operators required to publish their connection processes by the end of March 2026.[9] It is a policy for growing the sector with its own power, and stricter than anything the American campuses face. For a business renting a fraction of that capacity the constraint shows up as geography: EU-hosted increasingly means Paris, Frankfurt or the Nordics as well as Dublin, and our own infrastructure is arranged on that assumption.
The Act, from 2 August
Two things changed on 2 August 2026. The Commission's enforcement powers over providers of general-purpose models took effect, so it can now demand information, require access to a model and order one withdrawn.[10] And the Act's transparency duties applied: a business must tell people when they are dealing with a machine and label AI-generated or manipulated content.[11] The AI-literacy duty has applied since February 2025 to every deployer regardless of size. The high-risk obligations for hiring, credit and similar decisions were due the same day; the Commission's November proposal to move them to December 2027 had not been adopted at the time of writing, which leaves that timetable unsettled and the original dates the safe assumption.[12] Ireland's fifteen competent authorities were designated in July and September 2025, with the Department of Enterprise as the contact point, and the Oireachtas committee's interim report in December called for a National AI Office to lead an all-of-government approach.[13][14] What all of this means for a small firm is set out in the rules briefing and in our SME readiness note.
Who is doing what
| Organisation | What | Reported |
|---|---|---|
| Ryanair | Five-year deal with Google Cloud and Gemini Enterprise | Announced 12 August 2026; rollout to 35,000 staff |
| Bank of Ireland | €1.6bn technology spend over three years | Announced 3 April 2026; about a fifth of a €250m cost-saving target attributed to AI |
| AIB | Microsoft 365 Copilot | Rolled out to most of about 10,000 staff from July 2025 |
| Kerry Group | Digital centre of excellence in Naas | €7.5m Enterprise Ireland grant; €100m annual benefit targeted by 2028 |
| OpenAI and Anthropic | Dublin offices | Both reported seeking about 25,000 square feet more in December 2025; Dublin is Anthropic's EMEA headquarters |
| Irish start-ups | Venture funding in 2025 | €992m across 319 companies, flat on 2024; 99 Enterprise Ireland-backed start-ups built AI into their product |
The named deployments are large companies buying from large vendors, which is what the CSO's size split predicts. The supports for everyone else exist and are under-used: Skillnet-subsidised training, the Local Enterprise Office's digital vouchers, Enterprise Ireland's grants, and the R&D tax credit where a build creates something genuinely new. The AI Advisory Council's report to government in February 2025 and the national strategy refresh before it both said adoption by small firms was the gap; eighteen months on, the census says the same.[21]
