Up significantly from last year’s research, companies are struggling to find the tech employees needed to drive their businesses forward.

EY Ireland has published the results of its fifth annual Tech Leaders Outlook Survey, which explores how Ireland’s technology leaders are navigating challenges and opportunities in the sector. What was discovered is that the AI skills gap and the shortage of appropriately skilled personnel are significant barriers  to success at present. 

During the months of March and April, EY Ireland collected data from 150 senior technology leaders across Ireland, including individuals with strategic decision-making accountability and technology or data responsibilities, as well as those in innovation or transformation leadership roles. Sectors included government, infrastructure, consumer, health, industrial, energy, telecommunications and technology.

The research found that the skills shortage in Ireland has deepened significantly since last year, with the number of technology leaders citing a shortage of skilled employees as the most significant barrier to executing their agenda, up from 24pc last year to 36pc in 2026.

In 2025, 6pc of leaders who contributed to the research stated internal capacity was a concern when aiming to drive change, compared to today, where that same concern is held by 16pc of participants. This is occurring in a landscape where almost 20pc of respondents are prioritising succession planning and leadership development.  

AI impact

EY Ireland’s report also indicated a lack of certainty among contributors regarding the impact of artificial intelligence in the workplace. 6pc of participants said that they believe AI adoption will reduce recruitment, while only 3pc said it will drive an increase; 84pc are of the opinion that there will be no impact on recruitment levels at all. 

This is despite 82pc of respondents saying that they are currently investing in AI, a figure that is up from 44pc since last year. Almost 40pc have an AI strategy and a further 45pc are exploring AI’s possibilities, while many organisations are investing  in AI tools, solutions and decision-making.

Though just one in five said that they have yet to see meaningful value emerge from the use of AI, one in five also said that an inability to adopt AI fast enough is a key concern, up from 12pc in 2025.

Commenting on the report, Ronan Walsh, the head of technology consulting at EY Ireland, said: “While there has been much recent discussion on job displacement in tech, our research finds that the single most significant barrier to Irish technology leaders executing their agendas right now is the shortage of skilled employees to implement new technologies or progress complex transformation programmes.

“This points to a more nuanced reality that while AI adoption is accelerating, most organisations are struggling to find the talent they need to make AI work in practice. AI specialists are in short supply and training cannot keep pace.

“In many cases, technology leaders are being asked to work miracles, balancing rising expectations with limited capacity and being more creative than ever in how they allocate resources, while maintaining a clear focus on value and return on investment.”

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

PARTNER CONTENT: Leveraging multi-modal LLMs and agent technology to automate signaling analysis and shift core network O&M from experience to knowledge-driven

ZTE has joined forces with China Mobile Jiangsu under the guidance of China Mobile’s Network Division to pioneer the implementation of core network complaint agent capabilities, marking a significant step forward in accelerating intelligent network operations and maintenance (O&M) transformation.

Both parties innovatively introduce the multi-modal signaling model and agent technology to reconstruct the complaint handling process, implement automatic signaling analysis, and efficiently locate customer complaints. This solution sets a new benchmark for digital and intelligent O&M in the industry.

At present, the complexity of service signaling interaction in mobile communication networks increases dramatically. Manual analysis of original signaling to locate problems has a high technical threshold, which relies on expert experience. In 2024, the Network Division of China Mobile Communications Group proposed a planning framework for intelligent agent-based complaint handling, leveraging agent and large model architectures to intelligently process complaint work orders. China Mobile Jiangsu and ZTE innovatively launched the complaint agent solution, and implemented it in 2025, breaking through the bottleneck of the industry through three core technologies.

Modal Signaling Large Model: Learn massive raw signaling rules to train a core network multi-modal signaling large model, achieving end-to-end automatic signaling parsing and anomaly detection. The system inherits signaling expert knowledge to significantly enhance signaling interpretation efficiency.

In customer complaint scenarios, the complaint agent automatically orchestrates the analysis workflow by integrating the signaling analysis large model and core network configuration data. It enables precise localization of issues in complex scenarios such as international roaming.

Knowledge-based Complaint Handling: Intelligently recommend complaint handling suggestions based on complaint localization results to assist operations personnel in making rapid decisions. It can drive the transformation of complaint handling from “experience-driven” to “knowledge-driven” and close the loop on complaint resolution tickets.

In the future, China Mobile Jiangsu and ZTE will continue to focus on digital and intelligent transformation, driven by value-oriented scenarios, to extend coverage to all scenarios and processes of core network operations and maintenance.

It will continuously produce core network operations and maintenance agents and large models tailored to diverse maintenance scenarios, forming an agent cluster to enhance analytical capabilities in complex scenarios and empower industrial digital transformation.

Through in-depth integration of AI and communications technologies, ZTE has created a new O&M mode to improve user experience and satisfaction.

Contributed by ZTE.

from the whiny-ass-debate-me-bros dept

MAGA got itself a martyr when Charlie Kirk was killed. The “violent left,” etc. as they say. One of it’s own practiced what he preached and his life was ended prematurely by someone practicing what Kirk preached.

I mean, this is a direct quote of Charlie Kirk:

Kirk argued that the benefits of having guns in many American hands outweighed the costs. Gun deaths were inevitable in such a heavily armed society, he admitted, but the prevalence of firearms allowed citizens to “defend yourself against a tyrannical government”.

“I think it’s worth it,” he said. “I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the second amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It’s rational.”

The most charitable reading of this quote suggests that Kirk has embraced Thomas Jefferson — “”The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants” — but decided the “patriots” and/or “tyrants” must be, occasionally, innocent people, including elementary school students.

The least charitable reading is this: Charlie Kirk doesn’t care how many of your kids are killed so long as he (and his fellow debate me bro grifters) still have access to firearms. And as for the “second amendment protects the other God-given rights), get the fuck out of here. The last time any of these God, Guns, and Gadsden flag motherfuckers ever went after the government, they did it to fully embrace tyranny while attempting to destroy democracy.

So, when someone says something pointed to say about Charlie Kirk’s live-by-the-gun, die-by-the-gun philosophy, they’re in the right (as in “correct,” rather than being part of the “right”).

Late last year, someone not sufficiently supportive of Kirk’s martyrdom got arrested. Somewhat surprisingly, this person was a former law enforcement officer, which didn’t put him beyond the reach of a current law enforcement official who was a big fan of Charlie Kirk. Perry County (Tennessee) sheriff Nick Weems took it upon himself to take offense on behalf of everyone in his jurisdiction and arrested former cop Larry Bushart for simply quoting Donald Trump in response to Charlie Kirk’s shooting:

One of his posts was a photo of President Donald Trump, along with the quote “We have to get over it,” drawing from his response to a school shooting in Perry, Iowa, in 2024. 

Weems pretended that this post caused mass hysteria in Perry County, Tennessee. First, he claimed he was justified in arresting Larry Bushart because Bushart refused to take the post down. “What kind of person just says he don’t care?” asked the sheriff, who apparently thinks the First Amendment only applies to people who care what law enforcement officers say when they’re in the process of violating people’s rights.

Then he lied to everyone — something exposed by none other than Lexington PD officers. He later admitted investigators knew Bushart wasn’t referring to Perry County or its schools in his Facebook post, which meant the post couldn’t possibly hope to satisfy even the vague and expansive contours of a local law that’s supposed to curb school shootings by punishing online threats.

Sheriff Weems claimed “mass hysteria” was the result of Bushart’s post. A public records request to the Perry County School District for documents by FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which represented Bushart in this case) pertaining to this post was met with a “no related records” response, which strongly suggests no parent, student, teacher, or administrator thought Bushart’s post was some sort of threat against local schools or students.

The end result of Weems’ asinine attempt to punish someone for indirectly maligning Kirk’s cooling corpse? A sizable settlement that taxpayers might want to remember the next time Weems is up for election:

A Tennessee man who was jailed for 37 days over a Facebook post he shared after the killing of Charlie Kirk has agreed to a $835,000 settlement with the sheriff who detained him, his lawyers said on Wednesday.

[…]

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In the posts, he shared memes that accused Mr. Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA, of perpetrating hate and another that included past comments from President Trump about moving past a school shooting. The sheriff’s office in Perry County, Tenn., claimed that with those posts, he had threatened violence.

His bail was set at $2 million, and he remained in jail until the charge against him was dropped.

Check out that last sentence. Voters might also want to keep this in mind the next time local judges are up for election (or, if appointed, the people who appoint these judges are up for election).

Look, even if I didn’t think Charlie Kirk was a terrible person with reprehensible ideas/ideals, I’d still speak up for everyone’s right to treat his death with whatever level of respect they thought it deserved. “Too soon” is in the eye of the beholder, which definitely isn’t the objective approach needed to address cases involving personal expression.

Even if I thought Larry Bushart was extremely careless in his wording or was perhaps trying to tease out an inference that could conceivably be seen as “threatening,” there’s no excuse for what happened here.

“No one should be hauled off to jail in the dark of night over a harmless meme just because the authorities disagree with its message,” Adam Steinbaugh, a senior attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free speech legal advocacy group that represents Mr. Bushart, said in a statement. “We’re pleased that Larry has been compensated for this injustice, but local law enforcement never should have forced him to endure this ordeal in the first place.”

No law enforcement officer worth their paycheck would have engaged in this arrest. (And, indeed, it looks as though the first officers on the scene from the Lexington PD saw this as an unconstitutional attack on someone’s protected rights.) And no judge should have signed off on a $2 million bail request over a post only one person — that being Sheriff Weems — seemed to feel was illegal.

Bushart wins. Tennessee residents also win, but they’re stuck with the bill. Sheriff Weems loses, but unless he’s ousted from office, he’ll learn nothing from this experience, since this won’t be coming out of his own pocket. The First Amendment has been vindicated, but Sheriff Weems (and the people who support him) made it clear it will always be under attack so long as MAGA acolytes remain in positions of power.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, bogus arrest, censorship, charlie kirk, donald trump, free speech, gun violence, larry bushart, perry county, sheriff nick weems, tennessee

Good morning! Let’s play Connections, the NYT’s clever word game that challenges you to group answers in various categories. It can be tough, so read on if you need Connections hints.

What should you do once you’ve finished? Why, play some more word games of course. I’ve also got daily Strands hints and answers and Quordle hints and answers articles if you need help for those too, while Marc’s Wordle today page covers the original viral word game.

Quordle was one of the original Wordle alternatives and is still going strong now more than 1,400 games later. It offers a genuine challenge, though, so read on if you need some Quordle hints today – or scroll down further for the answers.

Enjoy playing word games? You can also check out my NYT Connections today and NYT Strands today pages for hints and answers for those puzzles, while Marc’s Wordle today column covers the original viral word game.

Strands is the NYT’s latest word game after the likes of Wordle, Spelling Bee and Connections – and it’s great fun. It can be difficult, though, so read on for my Strands hints.

Want more word-based fun? Then check out my NYT Connections today and Quordle today pages for hints and answers for those games, and Marc’s Wordle today page for the original viral word game.

Watch Argentina vs Honduras live streams to see how the defending champions shape up before the 2026 World Cup. Can they become only the third team in history to retain the title? Early signs suggest that Lionel Messi’s men are indeed capable of doing that.

After their March friendly against Spain was cancelled, Argentina went on to decimate Mauritania and Zambia and have now won five successive friendlies. They will look to extend that run against Honduras.

There comes a point with an ageing television where the picture is still perfectly watchable, but the smart platform it shipped with has become too slow, too limited, or simply too frustrating to use every day.

Plugging in a dedicated streamer is the most cost-effective way to solve that problem, and the Google TV Streamer 4K is currently down from $99.99 to $79.99, saving you $20 in a 20% discount.