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AI and the Irish Jobs Market: What Employers Need to Know

By Paul O'Dwyer, Founder, Irish AI Consultancy · Published 6 September 2026 · 8 minute read

If you are an Irish employer trying to work out what AI actually means for your hiring plans, here is what the current data says, and what it means in practice.

Is AI reducing hiring in Ireland?

Not broadly, based on the most recent evidence. A 2026 EY Ireland survey of 150 senior technology leaders found that the large majority expect AI to have no effect on recruitment levels at their organisation, with only a small minority expecting it to reduce hiring outright. At the same time, investment in AI has risen sharply: the share of those surveyed who said they were investing in AI nearly doubled year on year.

PwC's 2026 AI Jobs Barometer, which analysed over a billion job advertisements across six continents including Ireland, found that AI-related hiring in this country almost doubled between 2024 and 2025. Roles that involve AI skills are also attracting higher advertised salaries, particularly in technology and financial services.

So what is actually changing?

The skills employers want, more than the number of people they hire. PwC's research describes a two-track labour market: in "professionalised" roles, AI takes on routine tasks and places more weight on human judgement and expertise, and these roles are growing faster than "democratised" roles, where AI simply makes the existing job easier for a non-specialist to do. The practical takeaway for an employer is that AI tends to raise the bar on judgement and decision-making within a role, rather than removing the role.

This shows up clearly in Ireland-specific survey data too. Hays Ireland's 2026 Recruiting Trends report, based on research with over 600 employers and professionals, found that 96% of employers had dealt with skills shortages over the past year, and 47% said they lacked the in-house skills to make the best use of AI. Yet the same survey found a strong majority of employers, 76%, would hire someone without all the required skills on the understanding that they would be upskilled, and 79% rated willingness to learn as more important than existing skillset.

What is the biggest barrier to AI adoption?

Skills, not access to tools. The EY Ireland survey found that a shortage of skilled employees was the single most significant barrier technology leaders faced in delivering their technology plans, ranked above budget, and the proportion citing this had grown compared to the previous year's survey. Nearly one in five respondents said they were concerned their organisation could not adopt AI quickly enough as a direct result.

This matches what we see directly with clients: the constraint is almost never "we don't have access to a good enough AI tool." It is "nobody here has the time or specific know-how to turn that tool into a working part of how we operate." That is a different problem, and it needs a different fix.

Should you hire an AI specialist, or upskill your team?

For the great majority of Irish SMEs, upskilling the team you already have is the more realistic and often the better starting point, for a few reasons. Your existing staff already understand your business, your customers and your actual bottlenecks, which a new hire would spend months learning. The Hays data above shows Irish employers already lean this way in practice, prioritising willingness to learn over a ready-made skillset. And a dedicated AI hire is a genuine ongoing cost that only pays for itself once there is a steady pipeline of AI work to justify it, which most SMEs do not yet have.

A specialist hire, or a consultancy engagement, tends to make more sense once you have identified a specific, high-value workflow to fix, rather than a general ambition to "do something with AI." At that point the right approach is usually one focused project: map the workflow, build the AI-assisted version, and train your own team to run it, so the skill stays in the business rather than walking out the door if a specialist hire ever leaves.

What should employers do this quarter?

Three practical steps, in order. First, ask your team directly where AI tools are already being used informally, since most organisations underestimate this, and it tells you where appetite and early skill already exist. Second, pick one workflow, not five, and use it as a training ground: redesigning and rolling out one AI-assisted process teaches a team more than any generic course. Third, treat AI literacy as a baseline expectation across the business, not a specialist skill reserved for one department, since the Hays data shows the businesses that will win this decade are the ones that raised the floor, not just the ceiling.