Two documents published this year cover AI and Irish business:
- The Government’s national strategy for digital and AI, Digital Ireland, published in February.
- Enterprise Ireland’s Make AI Work, its practical guide for companies that want to start using AI, with the supports behind it.
1. The Government’s national strategy
In February, the Government published Digital Ireland: Connecting our People, Securing our Future. It’s a plan for the whole of government, led from the Department of the Taoiseach, with most of its targets set for 2030.
Much of it is about infrastructure and public services: gigabit broadband to every premises, for example, and key public services fully online by 2030. Several measures in it are aimed at businesses:
- It gives Enterprise Ireland the job of drawing up an AI adoption roadmap for its client companies, sector by sector, and appointing AI Sector Champions.
- A separate AI adoption strategy, with targets for how many businesses use AI, is due during 2026.
- An AI “regulatory sandbox” will help start-ups and smaller firms work out what the EU AI Act means for them.
- A new observatory will track how far Irish businesses have got with AI.
- There’ll be campaigns to build digital skills in smaller businesses.
2. Enterprise Ireland’s Make AI Work
Enterprise Ireland’s Make AI Work hub describes itself as “No hype just practical help”.
It sets out three stages:
- Start. Exploring what’s possible and where AI might help. Enterprise Ireland’s example is FoodCloud, which started with the problem and only then asked whether AI was the right tool.
- Plan. Turning the most promising ideas into a plan, a pilot or a proof of concept.
- Scale. Building what works into how the business runs day to day.
The AI Discovery support, at the Start stage, has its own path: discover, prototype, then put into operation. It looks at whether a company’s skills, data and systems are ready, and says that sometimes the answer isn’t AI.
The supports behind it
For each stage, Enterprise Ireland lists the supports that can help.
The Make AI Work page also lists Enterprise Ireland’s three Lean supports: LeanStart, LeanPlus and the Operational Excellence offer. Each support’s own page sets out who is eligible, what it funds and how much.
Enterprise Ireland’s clients are established, export-ready technology, manufacturing or internationally traded services companies.
Sources
- Digital Ireland: Connecting our People, Securing our Future, Government of Ireland
- Make AI Work, Enterprise Ireland
- AI Discovery brochure (2025), Enterprise Ireland
- Become a client, Enterprise Ireland
- Individual support pages, linked in the table above