Dublin council chief says AI may lead to ‘repurposing’ of staff doing rote work
Some employees doing “rote” work in Dublin City Council (DCC) could be “repurposed” as the authority looks to increase its AI usage, according to chief executive Richard Shakespeare.
Speaking to the Irish Independent, Mr Shakespeare said: “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 emphasised that his interest in the technology was not about “knocking jobs off or downscaling”, but about “creating opportunities to do more with the staff that you have.”
“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?” he said.
"And how could they be more productively used? Train them to do something else.
"You know, we do have a very good learning and development unit here. I think about 1,000 people a year go through different courses,” he said, adding that the outcome of any AI task must still be mediated by a human.
“The one thing I want to say, I’m not interested in AI to reduce staff cost. I think it presents great opportunities to possibly repurpose some of those staff into other areas.”
Mr Shakespeare is more wary about introducing AI into DCC’s customer service-facing roles, saying that he doesn’t see much use for the technology in this space besides basic chatbot queries.
“A lot of the problems we deal with in customer services, you’re not going to get off a chatbot,” he said.
“We are not Eir or Sky or any of these utilities, we impact everybody’s lives every day, and you’ve got to recognise that and treat people with compassion. A chatbot doesn’t do compassion.”
He said all 6,200 DCC staff are being trained on using AI technology, and that the council had introduced guidelines 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.
AI’s impact on jobs is still hotly debated, with some experts predicting mass layoffs across many sectors, while others forecast an increase in jobs and productivity as a result.