AI and HR: Creating Future-Ready Workplaces with Mark Kelly

In this episode of The Red Cube Podcast, Cathal Divilly sits down with Mark Kelly, a global speaker on AI, Founder of AI Ireland, and host of the AI Awards. The conversation delves into actionable ways organisations can leverage AI to transform recruitment, onboarding, and performance management, offering practical use cases and success stories. Mark also discusses the critical importance of simplifying AI concepts to overcome fear and foster adoption in workplaces, emphasising the role of AI in enabling HR professionals to work smarter, not harder. This episode provides invaluable insights for leaders, HR teams, and anyone passionate about using technology to create meaningful impact. 

Listen below! 👇

Subscribe and Listen on:

Visit the AI Ireland website: https://aiireland.ie/ 

Click here to check out the AI Ireland podcast

> In this podcast

Mark Kelly

Founder

AI Ireland

Cathal Divilly

CEO 
Great Place to Work Ireland

> About Mark

Mark Kelly stands at the forefront of artificial intelligence innovation as a globally recognised thought leader and founder of AI Ireland. His work has significantly shaped how organiations understand and implement AI technology, reaching thousands of professionals through keynote speeches across five continents and hosting Ireland's prestigious AI Awards. Mark excels at translating complex AI concepts into actionable business strategies as a sought-after media commentator and author of the "AI Unleashed" series. His unique approach, combining technical expertise with practical business insights, has influenced AI strategies at major enterprises and guided numerous successful transformations across multiple sectors.

About Great Place to Work®

Great Place to Work® is the global authority on workplace culture. We help organisations quantify their culture and produce better business results by creating a high-trust work experience for all employees. We recognise Great Place to Work-Certified™ companies and the Best Workplaces™ in more than 60 countries. To join the thousands of companies that have committed to building high-trust company cultures that help them attract, contact us today, and click below to find out more about how to get Certified.

>Transcript

Cathal Divilly: Welcome Red Cube listeners. You're very welcome to the latest episode of our podcast, I'm delighted to welcome a global speaker on AI, founder of AI Ireland and the awards there Mark Kelly, Mark, you're very welcome. How are you? 

Mark Kelly: Cathal, doing really, really well, we had the AI awards, which we're really excited about, so it was our biggest and best yet but I've got a little bit of a head cold and a cough but I'm a soldier, I’ll keep going so don't feel sorry for me. 

Cathal Divilly: You are a soldier, Mark. We appreciate it. And what year now is it for the awards? 

Mark Kelly: It's our 6th year, so we've been going since 2018 and it's consistently got bigger and more popular and you know, we’ve been quite lucky, it’s been in the media since the start. But this year we were across all media, even international and I think I was saying to you we had about 150 on the waiting list, we had to close the doors and turn people away from very established companies, so it's not something that we do every day, but it kind of just shows the appetite and excitement for what the whole world of AI is at the moment. 

Cathal Divilly: That’s great, Mark. And you're very much hitting a hot topic at the moment, of course, right. For our listeners, you might give just a brief background on yourself, Mark and I suppose how you came to establish AI Ireland. 

Mark Kelly: Yep, so I'm 17 years in the world of technology staffing. About 11 years ago, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do and I was having a conversation, “will I leave, will I not?” my previous employer. And the agreement was if you're going to leave, you better leave for something that's going to make more money and pay the mortgage rather than just leave and just try to figure it out on the fly. 

So over a six-month period of time, I interviewed 84 people on the island of Ireland who are in the world of AI and cyber. I just said, you know, is this a market, do you think this is something that we can turn into a recruitment market in the future. And 2018 there was still hype, but it was nothing to the extent it was, but out of those interviews I felt confident that we could turn this into a good staffing market. We co-founded a company called Alldus, offices in Dublin, Glasgow, New York and Austin. 

And what I noticed in Ireland was there was a lot of silos, so out of the 84 people I was interviewing, literally across the hall from each other, people were working on similar projects and they weren’t sharing any advice or insights. And they were walking by each other, and I was thinking, this is crazy. So I created a not-for-profit entity. I took fifty of the interviews, made them available as podcasts -  really simple idea. What's the business problem? How have you used AI to solve it? What's the impact? And that's grown to now over 200 episodes and we kind of did blog posts answering frequently asked questions and that turned into kind of quarterly events. We had our first award ceremony which showcases best of AI across small companies, large companies, people of the year. Since then we've had over 650 applications for the AI awards, which I’ve read every one myself but I haven’t judged at all, so I'm impartial on that. And then we've got, you know, several hundred blog posts. We've got an EU AI Act Hub. So we try to make the content as accessible as possible and just get rid of the acronyms and the you know, kind of arrogant terms that can be kind of a lot. And that gives me personally a lot of energy. There's some overlap on the recruitment side because from the people that we would be helping on the training or development or giving them some insights or book for a speaking gig, they might come back and say, listen, we want some hiring in this field, could you help us out? But that that was never actually the core goal of it. The core goal was actually just to educate and get some kind proper sense out there because there's a lot of BS, as you can imagine. 

Cathal Divilly: Those acronyms can sometimes feed into perhaps a little bit of fear. Do you find that Mark, like the language we use. 

Mark Kelly: Absolutely. I was at an event in Trinity on risk a couple of weeks back and you know, we had some top professors speaking about it and they're so articulate and they're wonderful at what they do. But for your average punter who's sitting thinking how am I going to use this for my business? How do I get involved in it? Out of the 700 interviews I've done in the world of AI, very few even agree on what AI is or what AI isn't right, so it's a big, huge mosh pit. 

Every 72 hours – and I know that sounds like an exaggeration but it really is – there's a new significant update now in AI, so for a lot of people, it's like they’ve got a hose into their face of information and they don't even know where to start. So what we try to do is try to simplify things. And get people on the road to using the technology that’s applied to themselves and break it down into storytelling. And if you do that, people start to feel a little bit more confident about it and then move out of that kind of fear. 

Cathal Divilly: So almost adopt an element of it right? And the audience largely Mark is people and culture, HR, right so give us an idea as to maybe an area where you could start from a HR point of view and adopt it. And then I guess is it you build a bit of confidence then? 

Mark Kelly: So the work that I've been doing with HR professionals like for training or kind of workshops – massively under pressure, they’re stressed out of their head, they’ve got people issues every different angle, mental health seems to be a real challenge in the workplace. And they're just under resourced. So what I say to people is, I don't think that's fundamentally achievable to continue on this path. So I kind of say there's three areas to go, there's recruiting, onboarding and performance management. They’re three areas where you're not reinventing the wheel. There's use cases in there, right. So from a bigger area, AI is very successful in customer service, HR onboarding, offboarding and sales and marketing right? So thousands of case studies are doing that well. So I would always say to people don't try to do something different if there's case studies of success, just copy those case studies.  

So on the recruitment side, you could have kind of screening that's going to be a little bit slicker, ironically enough, it actually reduces bias. We already see the hiring time significantly drops from that. Onboarding, you're having more personalised workflows and chat bots involved in the process. So Cathal if you start a job and I start a job on Monday and I am doing onboarding which is documentation, my laptop’s broken, I don't get my passwords till Wednesday versus the other person is in the Teams call ready to go with their team, high fives they’re feeling energised. The statistics show I'm going to churn in the next six months. So what we try to do is help them get personalised workflows that make it really consistent and transparent, make it easy for hiring managers to know where to start in terms of putting in a rec, hiring a role, and then having these chat bots that you can train on your own business data across every different domain that are really engaging, that you can respond to. 

Cathal Divilly: Let's get into that Mark, so thinking about that onboarding piece, right. So you know how important that is, right? Your onboarding experience. Give us a specific then. 

Mark Kelly: Yeah. So let me give you an example, right? So let's say somebody is joining ABC Limited, right? They might have to read 100-page documentation, they might have a HR person go through certain things with them. You can take that 100-page documentation, you can upload to a large language model, let's say open AI ChatGPT bot, that you call HR Onboarder. And you can talk to that, you can engage it and of that specific data set, you can just ask questions, and working off those questions and answers you get, they are specific to your company. So people Monday to Friday outside of regular hours can get access to this information in real time.  

You can go a step further. You can have a digital human which looks exactly like us. There's a lag of about a second and a half, right. So there's a there's that kind of uncanny value still. So it's not perfect. You can ask questions to and fro and it will respond back, and we've seen in the city of Amarillo they've got so many different nationalities that don't speak English, they put it all online for their government services, where you've got this digital human doing that. So suddenly, if you're doing that across every division of a company, you're in a really, really good place to start to save time and energy. And what we found is people actually much prefer asking about pension, sick pay to an avatar that isn't going to be a bit peed off that they're asking these kinds of silly questions. And this is then freeing up other people. So that's one which I really, really like.  

The second one I really like is let's say the contract review. So let's say you get in a legal contract. You’ve got procurement involved, you’ve got accounts involved. It could take two to three weeks to get it turned around, red lined. You review the 2000 contracts you've had before, you look and say, actually this contract is similar to the contract we had before – insert this amenable text everybody's going to agree with this because you've done it before, and that's done. There's a company in Sandyford who's gone from two weeks to 22 minutes reviewing contracts.  

So if you're kind of clever with the use case, you don't try to do too much with it, there's low hanging fruit that people can actually start to tackle, and I love the onboarding piece because Cathal, you’ll remember when you started your first day at school. I was crying the first day of school. I always remember that experience. Now, the next couple of days got a little bit better, but I was crying. You want to have a really, really nice experience for your employees because we all remember that first day, right? So this onboarding kind of removes the friction, adds a more personal element in terms of it's more specific to you because you can really add in specific details to you, but also allows you to get more human with the more important conversations that we find in the world of HR that you can't do because you're trying to do everything else. 

Cathal Divilly: You're so busy doing the other pieces. You said something there Mark that really interested me, right? So we presume that when somebody is like, I don't know about to be hired or is hired that they're only thinking about their new job from 9:00 to 5:00 and we're only available from 9:00 to 5:00 to answer their questions. But actually the technology is there for them whenever it's on their mind, right to work through the questions they have. 

Mark Kelly: I think yeah. If you think about it right, either you’re dropping your kids to school in the morning. Maybe you're dropping the kids to rugby or soccer at a certain time and maybe you're waiting in the changing room, maybe having a quick look at a message. Or maybe you're heading over to the doctors, you might just listen to that and chat to it. So one of the really interesting ways I’ve seen this done now is with the Google Notebook LLM, where you take the document, you upload it and you've got two avatars who are really engaging talking about a really dry document, but they’re making it really easy for you to learn about it. And this is again multimodal difference of how you can actually start to engage. You know if you're maybe in the kind of newer brand of people coming through, graduating, you're going to be more digitally native because chances are you get an Uber most places, you watch Netflix, maybe you make a purchase on Zalando or Amazon, so you're not really wanting to push the paper type environment, you want to have that kind of digital experience and AI is really slick for that because also what AI is about is personalisation and this is where you can then start to use this for your business. 

Now, one of the things that I speak about, particularly in the hospitality industry, sounds particularly challenging to get people who've got an awful lot of opportunities, payment is higher in other fields. But in this way, if you could show that you're enabling technology, you're going to advance their career by showing them how to use it, because that will then get them further career prospects either in your company, or somewhere else – people will join you. So it's actually a really lovely enabler to get the best and brightest and that's why I’ve seen some companies actually leverage that. 

Cathal Divilly: Interesting. So by actually embracing the technology, we're telling the talent market, we're ready for you. We're telling the younger generation we're ready for you. We're not asking you to show up in a different way to what you're used to in terms of your personal and your social life. 

Mark Kelly: Yeah, because think about it. We're now getting better tech at home as a consumer than we are working in an enterprise. ChatGPT had a million users in five days, 100 million in less than two months, like 90% of their sales are consumer, right? So people are trying out this tech all the time. So they're pretty savvy. So you've now got this shadow chatGPT culture in your organisation where they're using it, and majority, a vast majority of companies still don’t have an AI policy, they don't have an AI literacy programme and this is law by February.  

So we really have to kind of remind people that if you don't have an AI strategy or an AI policy, your employees are creating one and now you have defunct because of their one. So there's a lot in there, but my advice is take control of it, set the narrative and suddenly you'll start to become the employer of choice. 

Cathal Divilly: Yeah. And the third topic, the third area there Mark on performance management, right. A hot topic, what are you seeing out there in terms of performance management? 

Mark Kelly: So I think for me, right, so you're trying to use this as a way for continuous tracking, right? So you've got your objective and then you’ve got predictive analytics around it and managing that. I think you have to be very, very honest about the assessment tools that you're actually using, because an awful lot of them when there's human bias in there, they’re not really that objective, right, but if you start to use technology as an enabler to allow people to go on that journey, it's a lot more transparent and you can actually start to put flags in the sand the whole way through in terms of this is what we said we're going to achieve, this is what I've done, here's all the metrics that I can show this is how we've done it.  

You know, here's a soccer example, so not necessarily as relevant to a lot of people, but I'll still say it. So when Kevin DeBruyne was looking for his new contract with Man City a few years back, he got rid of his agent, and he hired in some data scientists, and he could show specifically on the football field through all the key data metrics, why he deserved a new contract and a substantially increased one. And they went through all the data and they managed through all the data. And when you're making data-driven decisions as an employee and an employer, an awful lot more trust becomes clear because you can show that kind of clean line of sight.  

So what I'm saying to organisations is, is that if you've got a true meritocracy and you want to be transparent and you want to kind of keep the best and motivate the best, you need to be allowing people to have insights into the data to allow them to be a lot better. And I’ll just stick with another football example! But let's say you're coaching on the field and you're saying to a player, come on, you're not running as much as you used to do, you're lagging behind. And the players are like what do you know about it? When you actually show them all the data of what they're running, how they're comparing to their colleagues, how they're compared to the competition. We see straight away people feel OK, that's a better conversation. Now if you can flip that into a workplace environment, you get a lot more confidence about it and that's what I'm seeing day to day. 

Cathal Divilly: I like the idea of being able to show employees, right, managers, leaders, the data in terms of their performance. Is there a specific tool that's being used at the moment Mark? 

Mark Kelly: So ServiceNow seems to be a tool that a lot of people swear by, and there's a lot of positive energy around that tool in terms of having kind of key dashboards very, very suitabe metrics ... They were acquiring AI companies, probably about 8 to 9 years ago, and with all those acquisitions, they were primed for the world of AI that we're in now. So they’re doing it very, very effective, particularly on the onboarding side of it. They're very good. They're also very, very good from objective assessments, so trying to look at skills qualifications, very effective at diverse merit-based hiring. So spotting those leaders or future leaders from insights, from different reviews and things like that, very, very effective. 

Workhuman is another one I'm very, very impressed by, had them on the podcast a while back when they were talking and seeing where they could see these high performers that you might not see, they're kind of diamonds in the rough but actually bringing them to the table and seeing you know what, we don't need to hire externally, we just need to put these on the fast tracks and looking at those key metrics that are there because you find a lot of peers recognising their performance as very, very good and then taking a fast track for that. So I think that's particularly good.  

And then from a kind of strategic insights perspective, even the usage of like chatGPT is very, very effective where you can just say “act as if you're a strategic HR manager working in the automotive industry, we’re this company size, we’re having these five issues, here's our employee feedback, talk us through it”. Now obviously that information would be anonymised, but that's a wonderful way to get a $15 billion HR strategic advisor to start supporting you, right? Is it going to be absolutely perfect? No. But is it going to give you wonderful insights? Yeah. So again, this is where I'm starting to see more and more companies adopt that and embrace that to do a lot higher value work. 

Cathal Divilly: When we talk about AI with many HR people Mark, like there’s an awareness right? We know we have to do something. Often the piece is like where do I start, right and you mapped it out there in terms of, you know, build a bit of confidence, pick perhaps one area of the employee life cycle. As a HR person like, how do I convince, let's say, a skeptical CEO around this? Have you had any interactions with HR people, just supporting them? 

Mark Kelly: Yeah, yeah, I have. So the first thing you need to do is tell them from a regulatory perspective, we need to have an AI policy and we need to do AI literacy training. So whatever happens, we have to do it and you might say, but I don't have any AI currently! Well, we know 48 to 66% of your employees are using ChatGPT or the equivalent, right? So you need a literacy programme. And before you get a literacy programme, you need AI policy, kind of like GDPR, this kind of thing, you need to sign it and you need to have a GDPR policy which you obviously have at the moment, but you need to have an AI policy.  

Then you have your AI literacy training which explains to you about what AI is, what it isn't, how employees can't be infringed upon, how employers can't be infringed upon. If you're buying a product or service with AI in it, you need to let everybody know. You cannot be, you know, using technology that can harm people knowingly or unknowingly. Also if you are using the software and you purchase this and then you're putting it on to your employees or your customers, you’re then part of the problem and opened up for a fine. So from that standpoint, the CEO needs to recognise that. But that's just your starting point.  

From a practical perspective, one of the ways that I've seen it most effectively done is a Lunch & Learn, on a Tuesday from 12 to 1. So let's say you've got a project management team in a company, let's say there's six people in the team. On a Tuesday at 12:00 you divvy out 6 products, maybe it could be Monday, could be ASANA, whatever it might be. You come back in two weeks and everyone's got 15 minutes to talk about the pros and cons of each product. And after that lunch and learn, bit of confidence is going to grow. You're going to do it again and again and again for different products. You start doing that per department, people will start to feel that bit of confidence in it. Now if you create a little bit of a, let's say 3 or 4 people who are kind of like a governance committee or kind of an ethical committee they're talking about - if you can use it, when best to use it, what we need to abide by, certain guardrails - you're now having more of an adult conversation about it. People know about the rights, about how they should actually use it correctly. They feel more literate because they know the pros and cons. And having that kind of rule to the road breeds confidence.  

But nothing breeds more confidence than pulling up the sleeves, start to use it, and then suddenly there's a bit of FOMO because Mark’s hitting the golf course at 4:00 on a Friday and he's not checking his emails during the weekend and while Cathal’s over watching the match, he's more relaxed about it rather than checking the e-mail as well – because they're using that technology as an enabler. And that's where FOMO starts to come – people go actually, I want a bit of that action. So some people I know are doing 3 1/2 days a week in the world of sales and marketing versus their five days a week. Now, that may not continue because the bar will raise and expectations will raise. But for now, they're doing it. So it's just trying to start small and build it up. I could give you thousands of use cases about going big and buying and the investment, but if you're trying to get yourself up and running, that's what I would do. 

Cathal Divilly: Giving us a good, clear road map there, Mark. Mark, what's your view of, just the golf analogy there triggered this, what's your view of the relationship between AI and wellbeing? 

Mark Kelly: So there's some really good products out there that are helping to pinpoint when mental health starts to be an issue. So for example, we find is if you're using a lot of “I” rather than “we”. And you can see from the text analysis when people are starting to crack down. If you start to analyse that and anonymise it, you can start to see well actually this person needs a bit of help or support, let's try to organise that where you have a chat bot actually engaging with them and chatting with them.  

We're on all the time. There's no switch, you know, the access to technology as an enabler means we can work from home, but we're always contactable, right? So there's pros and cons of that. So I think that you need to have some kind of guardrails and boundaries. Myself, people would be surprised, but I turn my phone off at the weekend and I've got a small burner phone that's got like, imagine your Nokia, that has no technology on it. And that's what I use Saturday and Sunday and that's my preference. People think that's crazy, but I like to be in the zone of just having kind of, you know, dumb tech for that weekend and then I'm back on the horse.  

So I'm not saying you have to be as extreme as me, but I do think you need to be conscious that your life is being dictated by an algorithm, and that algorithm is showing you all the different types of content that you wanted to see. So I'm sure you're getting either Liverpool content or Man City content for that weekend and chances are you're going to be looking at it all the time or it's gonna be popping up on your feed, and because it's personal to you, you will watch that. If I start sending you Chelsea football, you’d be like get me off these notifications straight away. And that's a basic example, but we have to be cognisant that this algorithm is really playing a major part in our life and to start to control that, you need to start to take ownership of that as well.  

So from a HR perspective, you need to put in those guard rails to say listen, this is what we expect you to do when you're working in these hours, not to be outside of these hours, our policy is this, this is what we expect you to do. And again, just coming back to that literacy piece. It's a wonderful tool, AI, but in the wrong hands it can be very challenging. We've got, you know, fake ads, fake messages, we've got avatars that are going rogue. So there's so many different challenges that come from it, from a cyber security perspective, people just need to be vigilant for that too. 

Cathal Divilly: Yeah, I love the “I” and the “we” sort of piece around language as a sort of a trigger or an indicator. One of the areas that certainly organisations spend a lot of time on is actually just the idea of communicating, right. So communicating messages and emails and all of that. Let’s say from a CEO point of view into a large organisation, what's your view in terms of using AI as a support around communication, emails. 

Mark Kelly: So bumper sticker is you can't say AI ate my homework, right? So I think we need to be really, really clear about that, that the buck still falls with the person. But I'm seeing some really innovative ways how it can be used. So idea generation, so coming up with ideas about how to reimagine how you communicate. If you saw a couple of days ago, Klarna, the CEO of the payments company, he used a digital avatar for his investor roadshow. Again, perfect, you wouldn’t even know it was, he was able to answer all the questions, ask any questions because it was trained on all his own personal data. Now, that's obviously an extreme example, but you can start to communicate across 27 different languages by using these avatars to get messaging across. So it's really helpful for training and development.  

So let me give you an example, so you know BP, one of the things with BP is they're so focused on safety because you know, if you're anywhere near an oil rig, you can imagine how dangerous it can be. So simple things like driving into the BP car park, you have to reverse in, that eliminates accidents coming out, when you're walking up the steps or down the steps, you have to hold onto the guardrail. Simple things like this save lives and also save a lot of money. Now, every year, they’re doing videos that show people going to the car park and you know like that, but now they can create those videos in any language you want, in less than maybe 2 minutes within your branding, so huge cost save, but then also it's more engaging to the audience so you can dial up or dial down the rhetoric and again that's a wonderful way to start to communicate.  

But also you can personalise the messages, right? So the warehouse team doesn't necessarily need to hear about the sales team. So then the messaging that you can have, you can dial up or dial down. So reporting can be dialled up in terms of complexity or dialled down in terms of simplicity and different stakeholders are going to get that. So again you can start to control that narrative as well. So what we're seeing an awful lot of government agencies doing such as Tagus, they're summarising complex documents, putting up a summary and then they're saying this is generated by Generative AI, we’ve fact checked all the information and it’s correct. So there's wonderful ways to start to do it. But the worry is, is that you overthink it and you don't do it. But my kind of thinking is, we're under so much pressure, everyone has to do an awful lot more with less these days, so you need some type of enabler to help you, and I think AI is very effective at it. 

Cathal Divilly: The policy, the literacy, get on the bus, try something, build a bit of confidence. 

Mark Kelly: Build a bit of confidence, you’ve got the Lunch & Learn. From a simplicity perspective, go onto the AI Ireland website, 400 plus blogs regarding the EU AI Act hub. There's several books under the AI Unleashed, which basically are our top 100 questions asked in each field, answered A-Z glossary and then some detailed use cases. So they're kind of like your idiots guide to get going and after you read them, you're kind of thinking, actually, that makes a lot of common sense, that's really straightforward. And once you get into that kind of field, you're kind of like, geez, I'm actually a bit behind here, I want to get into it. And that's where confidence starts to come.  

But the other thing I say Cathal is there's never been a better time to get into this field because so many mistakes, so much money has been spent on it up to this point, about 600 billion has been invested in the last couple of years. A hundred thousand products and services, if not more, available for people to use. They're dying for users. It's kind of like buying €10 notes for €3.50, right? It's such a good time to get involved to try these products. So start those Lunch & Learns, start going on the journey. And I think confidence will start to come on that. 

Cathal Divilly: Yeah. And will we start to see Mark, or maybe you're seeing it already, like the Head of AI as a role within organisations? 

Mark Kelly: Yeah, we’ve been seeing that the last couple of years. It's a very, very important role to get right, particularly with the regulation. If you've got products or services, AI is going to be weeded into them, if it's not, the CEO probably won’t have a job much longer, right? So I think it's going to become more important. You're going to have to have a regulatory component to getting that right, literacy for the team. But you also have to remember your business – it's got so much data and because you've got so much data, you can have that proprietary data and offer a service on the back of that. Because of proprietary and people will pay for that. So how do you then take that into an AI product or service and that's particularly exciting for a lot of businesses. 

Cathal Divilly: What's your thoughts around adoption, Mark, like, what's your vision there? How do you see it being adopted over the next two to three years? 

Mark Kelly: So from an AI first perspective - when I say AI first, this is where companies are using AI across every single department, you're talking about 12% adoption. We're probably talking 60 to 65% of companies, people in them are using AI for certain use cases - sales and marketing, Canva, using it for video generation, image generation, so loads of silos of those different products, right? So they just need to be kind of brought together under an AI policy. We've also got Microsoft Copilot, which has got wonderful applications of it – they take some of the best of OpenAI and put it packaged up into a trusted product. So people are going to start to use this. This is going to start to really roll out across in like about 12-18 months. So it's going to start to become the norm.  

The big thing that's happening is the world of agents, agentic AI. So let's say I've lost my phone. And rather than going up to the Blanchardstown Centre and picking a new phone, I can ask my agent to go and check on my contract whether it’s up for renewal, come back to him with the best options. And this will be able to call up, explain that they're their agent trying to get the best deal, come back to me and then make a purchase on my behalf while the phone comes into my hand the next day. So those different types of things are going to become the norm I'd say by this time next year. And that is incredibly exciting. This is an incredible moment once that happens, because the organisation structure that we currently have with your job descriptions and things like that – that's not fit for purpose anymore for the majority of fields, outside of being a plasterer or electrician or plumber, which AI isn't going to go near anytime soon. You're going to be able to reimagine those job descriptions with people using AI, and vice versa, so then you got a copilot.  

But if you think about a manager, sometimes managers are managing people and it may not be for them, so an awful lot of people will go down the principle route or the technical route or they’ll stay away from the management piece. Now you're gonna be a manager of agents, doing different roles. So maybe you don't like working with humans as a manager, but you might get a lot of energy working with agents and that brings together a new role. And your colleague would be an agent and suddenly you're kind of a hybrid, that’s the team.  

And that's where it's going and when we do our workshops, we kind of talk through it, we kind of get companies prepared for it. So it's an incredibly exciting space. It's not an understatement to say if you take a week off, you feel like you're way behind. But businesses don't need to be as up to date as me. They just need to stick to the use cases that are applicable to them. Think about the opportunity to leverage their proprietary data, and get an AI literacy programme in place, and then feel more confident about, you know, just getting on the journey.  

Cathal Divilly: Mark, you've been really clear there, I think for us in terms of the steps, right, because that's often the challenge is kind of how do I start, what are the steps I need to follow. Give us your details again, Mark, just for everyone.  

Mark Kelly: Yeah. So I'm Mark Kelly. I'm the founder of AI Ireland. So AiIreland.ie, easiest thing to just do a stick in AI and Ireland and we'll come up with number one. Loads of content there for people to listen to for free, if you want to get a workshop or speak about what's happening in the market or executive brief we’re there available. Easiest thing is to organise an AI literacy training or policy training and we do that on site. And that will set you up for success. 

So some companies will ask me to come in and do an AI literacy training for the whole team and then you feel like you’ve ticked the box from a regulatory perspective, but most importantly, you've got the conversation started to say, well, actually, how do we reimagine our company and if people feel like they're on the journey to help with that, they won't be leaving anytime soon because they’ll feel like they can have impact. And I don't know about you, but the vast majority of people I know want to be able to feel like they're making a difference with the work they do and if they feel like you're starting to use tech as an enabler to do better work, most people want to go on that journey. 

Cathal Divilly: We want impact, right? We want to make a difference. We want connection. And actually these tools are taking away some of the tasks that's stopping us from getting to those things. Right. That's it. 

Mark Kelly: That’s it. Ultimately, that’s it. 

Cathal Divilly: OK, and that can only be a positive. Mark, congratulations on the Awards last night, six years in, I know it's a big undertaking, all right, we appreciate you joining us today sharing your insights. Ask your agent to fix you a nice cup of tea now! 

Mark Kelly: I will, I will. I just need to get one that's reliable, but maybe this time next year we'll be there. 

Cathal Divilly: This time next year, Mark, thanks for joining us. 

Mark Kelly: Thank you very much Cathal!