Trinity College Dublin and Microsoft Ireland have published the AI Economy Ireland 2026 report, revealing a significant gap in AI maturity between small and medium-sized enterprises and large organisations across Ireland, as reported by Edtech Innovation Hub.

The third in an annual series, the report draws on survey fieldwork conducted by 3GEM across 250 organisations between December 2025 and January 2026. While AI adoption has reached 92% across Irish organisations, just 10% of leaders describe their deployment as advanced or frontier-level.

Large organisations are more than twice as likely as SMEs to deliver weekly time savings of two hours or more per employee, at 54% versus 25%, and SMEs are more than twice as likely to have no formal AI training in place, at 15% versus 6%.

Organisations with a formal AI policy are ten times more likely to report major productivity gains, at 30% versus 3%, yet fewer than half of all organisations surveyed have such a policy in place.

Professor Ashish Kumar Jha of the ADAPT Centre at Trinity College Dublin said governance and structured adoption are the decisive factors. "The competitive advantage will come from how quickly organisations move from early deployment to scaled, governed, and value-driven AI adoption," he said. "SMEs that do invest in AI capability report higher rates of significant productivity gains than large firms."

Catherine Doyle, General Manager of Microsoft Ireland, said closing the capability gap among SMEs remains the central challenge. "That means closing confidence gaps wherever they exist and supporting SMEs to scale from early adoption to full integration," she said.

The report also flags a persistent gender confidence gap, with 70% of women hesitating to use AI at work compared to 52% of men.

Access the full findings of the AI Economy Ireland 2026 report in the complete article.