AI Growth Zones and Data sovereignty: Whose cloud is it anyway?

To kickstart, I think we should chat around AI first.

Obviously, it's very much a buzzword at the minute.

So it'd be great to start with you, Ben, just in case anybody doesn't know what AI is, just to hear what it is.

And then also how you both using it personally and what value it brings to yourself, but also the market as well.

So definitely not an AI expert, but I can give it a go.

So AI at the minute is what we're seeing is basically very, very smart computing.

And we're seeing it in kind of ways in a consumer way where we are interacting it with like, you see like ChatGPT, you've got Claude and things like that, which are kind of like agentic AI where you'll ask them a question, they'll help you with the answer.

There's lots of other kind of smart businesses doing things with AI to help with their software and kind of their processes and things like that as well.

But I don't know too much about that, but I know it goes on.

And in terms of how I'm using it, I think the best use case for how I'm using it is I've got two small boys.

I've got a six-year-old boy, Reese, who's autistic and a three-year-old.

And I use it to go, Claude or ChatGPT, i've got i've got the kids need to go on a day out give me some like send friendly activities or something like that for the day that i haven't done before because i've gone to a million zoos i've gone to a million farms uh try and find me something like send friendly where i can bring the boys with my wife and uh and uh yeah something that we haven't done before and it's amazing for that it's really good for that that's how i use it the most

brilliant one

I mean maybe to add to that I mean personally I use it it just drives a huge amount of efficiency you know you can we went to an event last week in Dublin fantastic event CCT and I was able to take my notes and just consolidate that into a short report in seconds what historically could have taken me hours to write that up and I was able to share that with the leadership team and Lots of people are scared of AI because they think it's going to take jobs.

I don't think that's the case at all.

It's more around driving efficiency.

And we're using it more and more to improve product life cycles or bring products to market quicker, sorry.

Look for errors in code quicker and all those sort of things.

I think it's a real industrial revolution, I would think, rather than this sort of evolution of technology.

So it's an amazing, amazing time to be in this industry.

I

would say the productivity benefits are insane.

Just doing more administrative tasks like creating a PowerPoint and drafting an email is just brilliantly.

I

was going to say, for me, I use probably Copilot daily at work.