Irish business leaders wary of AI's impact, survey finds

Expleo has reported that 54% of business leaders in Ireland are worried about how artificial intelligence is transforming their organisations, making Irish executives the most cautious in the survey across Ireland, the UK, Germany and France.

The July reading from Expleo's AI Pulse sentiment tracker suggests that the weaker confidence seen a month earlier has continued. Opinium surveyed 800 business leaders, including 200 in Ireland.

Irish respondents were also evenly split on whether AI poses a threat to their own jobs. Half said they were worried about AI's impact on their role, compared with 39% across the other European markets covered by the study.

The data also shows lower trust in workplace uses of AI among Irish leaders than among their peers elsewhere in Europe. While 60% in Ireland said they would trust AI to autonomously summarise emails, documents and meeting notes, the wider European average was 71%.

The gap widened on more sensitive tasks. Just 27% of Irish business leaders said they would trust AI to make hiring or other HR-related decisions, against a European average of 42%.

Ethics concerns

The survey also found that Irish business leaders were the least likely among the countries polled to trust their organisation to use AI ethically. Some 62% expressed trust on that measure, compared with 73% across the wider European group.

Irish respondents were the most pessimistic across every sentiment measured in the tracker, including excitement about AI, trust in ethical use and whether the technology would mainly benefit their business.

Even so, the findings were not uniformly negative. Three in five respondents in Ireland said they remained excited about the opportunities AI could bring to their business, although that still trailed the 67% average elsewhere in Europe.

A similar pattern appeared in views on commercial benefit. In Ireland, 54% said they saw AI primarily as a benefit to their business, compared with 63% in the wider European sample.

Adoption tension

The results highlight a tension for Irish companies as AI use expands across routine office tasks and decision-making processes. Businesses may be adopting AI tools quickly, but senior leaders appear less comfortable handing over even basic work without human involvement.

Expleo linked that caution to broader concerns about oversight and governance as companies move from experimental uses of AI towards more autonomous systems. The company's monthly index measures sentiment on a scale from 0, meaning very worried, to 100, meaning very confident.

Phil Codd, Managing Director - Ireland at Expleo, set the findings against a backdrop of broader AI adoption and regulatory change.

"Irish organisations may have one of the highest AI adoption rates in the world, but business leaders are wary of its impact. Recent news about rogue AI agents have shown the importance of human oversight and so, to a certain extent, all business leaders should be cautious. But at what point does healthy vigilance become inertia? If business leaders are worrying about AI summarising a document, are they ready for agentic AI?" he said.

His remarks point to the gap between interest in AI and confidence in delegating tasks to it. The survey suggests that concern is not limited to high-risk use cases, but extends to everyday administrative functions such as scheduling, note-taking and document summaries.

That matters because many AI deployments in offices begin with exactly those uses. If managers are reluctant to trust such systems with low-level tasks, broader deployment into operational or personnel workflows may face internal resistance despite pressure to adopt the technology.

Codd also said governance frameworks would shape whether organisations can move beyond that hesitation.

"Embedding strong governance, risk and compliance frameworks will be key to ensuring the successful and safe adoption of AI. With new transparency rules now in effect under the EU AI Act, organisations will be subject to stricter regulations on the use of AI. Business leaders must use their organisation's compliance with the Act, and accompanying guardrails, to explore AI further before being permanently left behind," he said.