\u201cThere will be quite considerable amount of jobs lost to AI in the next three to four years,\u201d Fianna F\u00e1il TD Naoise \u00d3 Cear\u00fail has warned, as he unveiled proposals aimed at reducing AI-related redundancies in Ireland.<\/p>\n
In an interview with Gript this week, the Kildare North TD, who is Fianna F\u00e1il\u2019s spokesman on artificial intelligence and sits on the Oireachtas Committee on Artificial Intelligence, said the State needed to move quickly to \u201cprotect as many jobs as possible\u201d as automation accelerates across several sectors.<\/p>\n
\u00d3 Cear\u00fail himself comes from a tech background prior to politics, hold jobs at various tech firms, including Gong and Zendesk.<\/p>\n
\u00d3 Cear\u00fail said his proposal centres on a pilot retraining programme designed to intervene before workers lose their jobs.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo basically it\u2019s a pilot program,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf a company is looking to make ten people redundant \u2013 just for example \u2013 what would happen in this instance would be they\u2019d notify government, and there would be a training fund put in place to see if there could be new jobs for them created within that business.\u201d<\/p>\n
Earlier this week, \u00d3 Cear\u00fail published a formal proposal calling for the establishment of a National AI Workforce Transition Programme.<\/p>\n
According to the proposal, the programme would begin as a three-year pilot involving 1,000 workers and would initially focus on financial services operations, customer contact centres and shared services roles.<\/p>\n
The proposal states that between 25% and 40% of tasks across key sectors could become exposed to automation in the coming years, potentially affecting between 30,000 and 48,000 workers.<\/p>\n
He outlined how the proposal could work in practice in sectors already facing growing automation pressures.<\/p>\n
Describing a hypothetical call centre scenario, \u00d3 Cear\u00fail said companies increasingly moving towards automated systems could retrain some workers into new internal roles rather than eliminating entire teams.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, what the proposal is in this instance would be\u2026two or three of them could be retrained to manage that system or to do other roles within the business so that we\u2019re not losing ten jobs, it might be five jobs in that particular company,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnother example would be, let\u2019s say a law firm has ten legal secretaries, and they\u2019re moving to a new system where they only need two or three legal secretaries. It\u2019s about retraining some of them into roles that they could fulfill within the business, again, rather than losing the jobs and then going onto social welfare.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00d3 Cear\u00fail said his analysis had identified financial services and customer service roles as among the sectors most vulnerable to AI disruption.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe pilot scheme that I proposed focuses on financial services and customer services because internationally, that has proven to be the most at risk,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, that\u2019s why it\u2019s focusing particularly on those two key areas.\u201d<\/p>\n
He pointed to banking operations and mortgage processing as examples of jobs that could increasingly be automated while still requiring some degree of human oversight.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou might have ten people who would review a mortgage application,\u201d \u00d3 Cear\u00fail said.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow, the more that becomes automated, you will still have human oversight, right?\u2026 But it would be actually retraining them into roles specifically within, say, Bank of Ireland, for example.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Fianna F\u00e1il TD said he had examined international approaches while developing the proposal, including programmes in Singapore, the United Kingdom and the United States.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s nothing really been done like this before,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s been a similar kind of a thin in Singapore. But this would be the first of its kind in Ireland.\u201d<\/p>\n
He also referenced existing government efforts around AI upskilling, including initiatives linked to Higher Education Minister James Lawless.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are efforts to retrain and reskill people in general with AI,\u201d \u00d3 Cear\u00fail said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd James Lawless is doing a good bit of work around that. But what this is actually looking at is, \u2018Okay, we are seeing people losing jobs, right? How can we get ahead of it?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
The deputy said the proposal was intended to avoid situations where large-scale redundancies occur before intervention measures are introduced.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, instead of this reactive thing of, \u2018Okay, a hundred jobs are gone. What are we going to do now?\u2019, it\u2019s about getting ahead of that,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, you know, in the future, if a business is actually looking at, \u2018Okay, we don\u2019t need this amount of staff anymore, we streamlined, as we can automate a lot of it,\u2019 it\u2019s about saying actually, \u2018Okay, how can we protect as many jobs as possible?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Asked whether he believed fears surrounding AI-driven unemployment were overblown, \u00d3 Cear\u00fail said the long-term impact remained uncertain but acknowledged significant vulnerabilities in administrative and technical professions.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe jobs that are most vulnerable are, I would say, the more administrative roles,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, if you think of kind of secretarial roles, real administrative roles that you can set up a process where a lot of that can be automated. That\u2019s where there\u2019s particular vulnerability.\u201d<\/p>\n
He also identified software development and customer contact centres as sectors facing substantial disruption pressures.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is particular vulnerabilities around, we\u2019d say, software developers, call centers, all that kind of thing,\u201d \u00d3 Cear\u00fail said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut, you know, it is particularly the social media and the tech companies that are looking to get most efficiency gains.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Kildare North TD argued that certain professions involving manual labour and practical skills were less likely to face immediate replacement.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of jobs can\u2019t be replaced, and won\u2019t be replaced, particularly manual labor, particularly any of the any of the critical core skills,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut what\u2019s important is, AI can\u2019t do the objective thinking.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a statement released earlier this week, \u00d3 Cear\u00fail said recent comments from Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg had heightened concerns surrounding the future size of workforces in AI-driven companies.<\/p>\n
\u201cRecent comments from Mark Zuckerberg on the future size of teams in an AI-driven world are a clear cause for concern,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThere will be quite considerable amount of jobs lost to AI in the next three to four years,\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":462077,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,14258,4990,113,176,61,60,80],"class_list":["post-462076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ben-scallan","tag-economics","tag-economy","tag-finance","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=462076"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462076\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/462077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=462076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=462076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=462076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}