AI-generated illustration.
Affordable, practical education could determine whether artificial intelligence broadens opportunity or simply gives another advantage to those who already have it.
By PJ Timmins
For the owner of a business employing 20 or 30 people, the artificial intelligence revolution arrives in the middle of an already busy working day. A customer needs an answer. Someone has called in sick. A quotation is overdue. Somewhere between those demands, the owner is expected to work out how a technology that appears to change every week might reshape the business.
The advice is plentiful. Adopt now. Move faster. Transform everything. What is less readily available is a sensible answer to a straightforward question: where should I start, and how do I bring my people with me?
There is a danger of mistaking that uncertainty for a lack of ambition. Someone responsible for wages, customer relationships and the reputation of a business has good reasons to ask questions before changing how it operates. Caution can be a sign of responsibility. It becomes a problem when the owner has no practical way to move beyond it.
The gap is already visible. CSO figures for 2025 show that approximately 58 per cent of large enterprises used AI, compared with 17 per cent of small enterprises employing between 10 and 49 people in the sectors surveyed. These figures do not cover the smallest businesses, but they show a substantial difference in adoption by size.
A larger organisation can assign people to investigate, experiment and train colleagues. In a smaller company, that responsibility may fall to the person who is already managing sales, recruitment and the bank relationship. The price of a software subscription is only one part of the cost. Time, confidence and the ability to judge the result matter just as much.
Yet smaller businesses have reasons to be hopeful. They are close to their customers. Decisions can be made quickly. The person who understands a recurring problem may sit a few feet from the person who can authorise a better way of solving it.
A useful first application might be helping to prepare a customer proposal, turning an experienced employee’s notes into a training guide, or testing the assumptions behind a marketing plan. None requires the owner to reinvent the company before discovering whether the technology is useful.
It does require judgement.
A polished answer can conceal a poor assumption. A convincing document can contain an invented fact. Work completed in seconds may still need someone experienced enough to recognise what is missing. The skill lies partly in asking a better question, partly in providing the right context, and partly in knowing when to challenge the answer.
As software moves from producing suggestions to taking actions, that judgement becomes more consequential. Drafting a customer email and sending it are different responsibilities. Suggesting a purchase and committing the business to it are different again. Owners need to understand where review and approval belong.
This is why AI education must reach beyond the owner.
If one enthusiastic colleague experiments while everyone else remains uncertain, the business has acquired an isolated capability. It has not developed a shared way of working. Teams need opportunities to learn together, compare results and agree what good practice looks like.
Employees also deserve an honest conversation about the purpose of the exercise. Concerns about jobs, changing expectations and the value of hard-earned experience cannot be dismissed with a cheerful promise that technology will make everything easier. People are more likely to contribute when they help shape how it is used.
A sensible starting point is modest: choose one recurring task, establish how long it currently takes, test an alternative and examine the quality of the result. Include the time spent checking and correcting. Share what worked and what did not. Then decide whether to continue.
There is considerable value in doing some of that learning alongside other business owners. A demonstration shows what a tool can do under favourable conditions. Another owner can explain what happened when it met an impatient customer, incomplete information or a team with competing priorities.
That combination of new capability and practical experience is particularly relevant to Ireland’s locally owned businesses. We should be ambitious about making it accessible.
The Business Owners Guild, powered by TAB, will shortly introduce a mix of free and low-cost learning opportunities to help business owners and their teams build their understanding of AI. Our intention is to make the first steps affordable and useful, with an emphasis on practical application, informed judgement and learning alongside others. Details of the programme and access arrangements will be announced shortly.
We are developing this because access to a powerful tool does not automatically give someone the confidence or knowledge to use it well. Owners need room to ask elementary questions without embarrassment, test ideas without excessive expense and develop their teams as they learn themselves.
There is a wider economic interest here. If the benefits of AI are to extend through local employers, family businesses and professional firms, education must be within their reach and compatible with the realities of their working lives.
Business owners do not need another reason to feel behind. They need a credible place to begin.
Ireland has much to gain from making sure they have one.