In the rapidly evolving world of technology, staying ahead of the curve is crucial. Kieran McCorry, National Technology Officer at Microsoft Ireland, plays a pivotal role in this space. He represents Microsoft across the island of Ireland, engaging a wide range of audiences—from public and private sector customers to strategic partners—on the company’s technology vision, with a particular focus on artificial intelligence. In addition to championing innovation, he also works closely with national stakeholders on shaping technology-related public policy, ensuring that Ireland remains at the forefront of digital transformation.

 

Kieran McCorry, National Technology Officer at Microsoft Ireland, on how AI agents are reshaping productivity, empowering SMEs, and driving national economic growth

AI and machine learning have already moved into a new phase, becoming integral to our everyday working lives, and will play an even greater role in the future. By 2050, AI will permeate every facet of our lives, amplifying human ingenuity, and driving efficiency and innovation across industries. According to Kieran: “Automated tools like Microsoft Copilot are set to revolutionise both work and home life, helping people stay productive and connected.”

 

AI Agents

Copilot has now been available for over two years, and this year marks a new phase in the evolution of AI: the era of AI agents—autonomous systems that perform tasks for users. In this new paradigm, every user has their own Copilot, and every business process can be supported—or even driven—by an intelligent agent.

Copilot is exceptional at enhancing individual productivity and creativity. It works with you, helping you write, think, and create more effectively. But when it comes to transforming entire business processes, streamlining workflows and scaling decision-making, AI agents are the key. An agent takes the power of generative AI a step further, because instead of just assisting you, agents can work alongside you or even on your behalf. Agents can do a range of things, from responding to questions to more complicated or multistep assignments. What sets them apart from a personal assistant is that they can be tailored to have a particular expertise.

For example, you could create an agent to know everything about your company’s product catalogue so it can draft detailed responses to customer questions or automatically compile product details for an upcoming presentation.

The pace of this transformation is staggering – and it’s only accelerating. According to Gartner, by 2028, at least 15% of day-to-day work decisions will be made autonomously through agentic AI, up from virtually 0% in 2024. That’s a dramatic shift in just three years, showcasing how quickly organisations must adapt to stay competitive.

 

Benefits for SMEs

Kieran highlights how professionals who rely on learned skills—such as engineers, architects, and creatives—can benefit from adopting this technology in their working lives.

“Rather than spending time searching, we see that knowledge workers who use Copilot are 29% faster at knowledge work tasks”, Kieran explains. “Instead of wading through piles of search results, they're delegating that task of finding information to Copilot. It keeps people in the creative flow.”

The Microsoft National Technology Officer highlights the benefits of Copilot and AI for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which, according to research conducted by Forrester, reported a 6% increase in revenue last year attributed to AI use.

Moreover, Microsoft Ireland and Trinity College Dublin’s recent research projected that AI is expected to increase Ireland’s GDP by at least €250bn by 2035. At a national level, the economic potential of AI for Ireland will only be fully realised if AI is adopted broadly across the economy, including our SME sector which makes up 99.8% of our enterprise sector. Providing targeted support to SMEs to help them overcome skills gaps, expertise limitations, and cost barriers is key to ensuring equal access to AI-driven opportunities.

To help close the skills gap, Microsoft Ireland is on a mission to “Skill Up Ireland” by providing every person in Ireland with the opportunity to skill up for an AI future. To help learners kickstart their AI learning, Microsoft has developed the ‘AI Skills Navigator’—a free platform which offers personalised guidance to help people learn and apply AI skills within their own career and sector. The company’s ‘Skills for Jobs’ initiative also seeks to help graduates and mid-career professionals to advance their digital and AI skills and secure Professional Certificates in the areas of Generative AI and Cyber Security.

AI will touch all areas of our society. It will accelerate economic growth, generate innovation and fundamentally change the way we live and work.

“We're seeing that companies are reducing the time spent in meetings and others are making that time much more valuable,” Kieran explains. “It's a much more interactive process than people might have considered. It's not about command and control, it's much more akin to a conversation. The introduction of agents has also revolutionised the way we handle business processes, providing valuable time savings and enhancing overall efficiency.

“You can use agents for project management, for automated status updates and task assignments, in software development for code reviews and bug tracking, and also in marketing for creating campaigns and newsletters.

AI can unlock a wide range of benefits for SMEs, especially those with limited staffing resources. For example, in March we launched two first-of-their-kind reasoning agents for work: Researcher and Analyst. These agents analyse vast amounts of information with secure, compliant access to your work data, your emails, meetings, files, chats, and the web to deliver highly-skilled expertise on demand.

“People are not used to having an assistant,” acknowledges Kieran. “They're used to working as an individual contributor. This is a mindset shift that is needed.”

 

AI Usage

75% of knowledge workers in the last Microsoft Work Trend Index report that they are using AI. But in many cases, they're using their own AI tools because many organisations have not yet introduced formal AI training or defined how AI should be used.

According to the AI Economy in Ireland 2025 report by Trinity Business School and Microsoft Ireland, AI adoption in Ireland has surged from 49% in 2024 to 91% in 2025. Yet despite this rapid growth, the report warns that SMEs and the public sector risk falling behind due to barriers in expertise, investment, and structured deployment.

To overcome these obstacles, Kieran advises that companies sit down and define their pain points before looking into AI-based solutions. “Plenty of people don't like change,” he says. “We need support, so an enablement programme, communication, and training is critical.”

Final advice from Kieran? Pick a process and apply it. Set clear expectations for how AI technology can benefit your company, and ensure you work within these expectations.

Microsoft’s aim, now and in the future, is to increase productivity and innovation among its customers on a trusted platform. Security is non-negotiable, and the EU AI Act, which will regulate AI in the EU by 2026, is crucially important.

“We have moved beyond experimentation to implementation,” Kieran says. “We are in the middle of the AI process transformation. It is not in the future, it is here now.”

“We are in the middle of the AI process transformation. It is not in the future, it is here now.”

– Kieran McCorry, National Technology Officer, Microsoft Ireland