DCC chief executive’s son involved in development of council’s AI strategy
The son of Dublin City Council (DCC) chief executive Richard Shakespeare is one of three people working for the authority’s artificial intelligence (AI) unit.
Mr Shakespeare’s son, Richie, has been working in the council’s GenAI Lab since January of this year.
The lab launched in February last year, in partnership with Trinity College Dublin and the ADAPT research centre, and aims to trial AI solutions for the organisation in a protected sandbox environment.
It is said to be Ireland’s first AI Lab dedicated to local government, and is currently developing an AI strategy for staff of the organisation, to be published in the third quarter of the year.
Speaking during an episode of the Transform Gov podcast in February, Richie said he brings “non-technical” skills to the lab, considering his philosophical background.
“In many arts degrees, there’s a lot of reading and a lot of writing. And given the fact that we do a lot of work with large language models, sort of having a good understanding and a good use of language can just be quite helpful,” he said.
His father Richard Shakespeare has publicly spoken positively of the technology and its potential for local authorities.
“Everybody is focused on the threats and Grok and all of this type of stuff, but there are opportunities [with AI], particularly for the rote type of processing [roles],” he told the Irish Independent earlier this year.
He said that some DCC employees doing repetitive tasks could be “repurposed” as the technology seeps into ever more layers of the organisation.
“For argument’s sake, and I have no hard and fast numbers on this, but if out of the sort of two-and-a-half thousand administrative staff across the organisation, are there one hundred, two hundred, just doing invoices and that type of stuff? ... how could they be more productively used?”
He said all 6,200 DCC staff would be trained on using AI technology, and that the council had introduced a few guidelines on the technology for employees to refer to in their daily work.
“Internally, I want to try to maximise the benefit for the citizen, not just the staff,” he said.
According to Richie’s LinkedIn profile, prior to being promoted to the AI Lab in January, he worked as a smart city intern at the council beginning in March 2025.
He also had a stint as a library assistant in DCC from July 2023 to July 2024, having graduated with a bachelors degree in philosophy from UCD.
Meanwhile, Richard Shakespeare moved from assistant chief executive role in DCC’s planning and property development department, where he worked for six years, to acting chief executive in September 2023.
The Foxrock man became the council’s chief executive in a non-acting capacity in December 2023, a role which he will hold until at least 2030.
A spokesperson for DCC said it “does not comment on individual staff members, or internal staffing matters”.