Irish report says AI will drive public-sector innovation in 2026

The Irish Times piece is less about a single breakthrough and more about a tipping point in institutional adoption. After a year of “cautious pilots”, the author expects Irish public bodies—especially in healthcare—to lean into AI for triage, workflow optimisation and citizen services in 2026, mirroring what’s already happened in private recruitment and IT. That qualitative shift from experiments to embedded systems is how AI quietly becomes infrastructure rather than novelty. ([irishtimes.com](https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2026/01/02/artificial-intelligence-to-be-at-the-heart-of-innovation-in-coming-year/?utm_source=openai))

For the AGI race, widespread deployment in smaller countries is strategically important. It broadens the base of real‑world tasks that models are exposed to, increases the diversity of languages and institutional contexts they must handle, and creates demand for more robust governance and assurance tooling. It also shows how non‑US jurisdictions are starting to think of AI as a horizontal capability—like broadband or cloud—rather than a niche innovation program. That mindset tends to unlock sustained budgets for both infrastructure and talent, which in turn feed back into global ecosystems that are building more powerful and general models.