AI’s real impact felt as executive confidence wanes
An interesting week in technology: after two years of speculation, we finally saw something like evidence – and Irish evidence, at that – of the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the job market.
The news is mixed: while overall job openings across Ireland increased by 10% in the second quarter of 2025, there were “notable reductions” in graduate hiring in accountancy and finance, and, so says recruitment outfit Morgan McKinley, the culprit is AI.
According to the Morgan McKinley Irish Employment Monitor, and as reported by TechCentral.ie, life sciences and engineering roles remain stable.
The main impact is on graduate entry positions, though Morgan McKinley Ireland’s global director Trayc Keevans, said this could be a case of storing up problems for the future.
“A notable trend driven by automation is the reduction in graduate-level hiring, raising concerns about potential shortages of experienced mid-level professionals, which could impact future business operations and growth,” Keevans said.
Are these the first signs that we really are in the early days of a worse nation, then? Perhaps. However, while the jobpocalypse continues to loom large, the bigger story may be that businesses have lost faith in their ability to harness AI effectively.
A cooler climate
Another report conducted by consultants Akkodis for recruitment giant Adecco Group, entitled What CTOs Think: Using Digital Transformation to Scale Skills and Unlock Enterprise Potential, found that executives are cooling on AI.
The survey of 2,000 senior executives in some fifteen countries reports that “confidence in corporate AI strategy among C-suite leaders has dropped 11 percentage points in the past year – down to 58% in 2025 from 69% in 2024”.
Researchers said that part of the issue was ignorance of AI among those self-same execs.
“Only 55% of CTOs believe their executive teams have sufficient AI fluency to fully grasp both the risks and the opportunities,” the report said.
Of course, the issue revealed by this survey isn’t AI per se so much as the inability of businesses to usefully implement it.
For instance, the percentage of CEOs who are ‘very confident’ in their ‘AI implementation strategy’ plummeted from 82% in 2024 to 49% in 2025, while CTOs saw a similar drop from 82% in 2024 to 62% this year.
Is this a surprise? McDonald’s has hit the tech headlines after a vulnerability in the chip shop’s hiring chatbot (yes, we live in hell) exposed the personal information of up to 64 million job applicants.
It would be a bit unfair to finger AI, though, as the actual problem is that someone left a test account on the system, complete with the highly safe password ‘123456’. That’s an issue of human stupidity.
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