← All work2025–Present
Future Academy · Founder
Practical AI education that creates real capability, not just awareness.
Launched at Microsoft Ireland in summer 2025. Delivered to 180+ Transition Year students by autumn. Now scaling nationally with Turnua and serving SMBs and enterprise teams.
Outcomes- Headline
180+
TY students taught
5
Winning teams pitched
1
National partner (Turnua)
3
Delivery tracks live
Context
Most organisations know AI matters; few know how to turn awareness into capability. Slide decks and e-learning create awareness, not ability. Ireland has set a target for 75% of businesses to use AI, cloud and big data by 2030, that requires a different approach.
Challenge
Build a working model of applied AI education, for teens, SMBs, and enterprise teams, that proves capability comes from doing, not watching.
Approach
- 01Launched at Microsoft Ireland: teams of teens used AI tools to build and pitch real ideas.
- 02Delivered Build Camps to 180+ TY students at St Gerard's School, by request.
- 03Partnered with Turnua to scale across Ireland, connecting Kildare businesses with TY teams.
- 04Stood up SMB AI Maturity diagnostics and applied workshops on the same hands-on model.
- 05Built three delivery tracks: education institutes, SMBs, and enterprise upskilling.
- 06Authored 'Leading, Setting teams up for success', a leadership playbook framing work across four types (Hand Off, Synchronised, Co-ordinated, Interdependent) and the five clarity questions every leader owes their team: what, why, when, who and how.
- 07Embedded the playbook into enterprise upskilling tracks, so AI literacy lands inside a model of how high-performing distributed teams actually operate.
In retrospect
"The teenagers I taught built things in a day that adults take quarters to scope. The lesson isn't that they're prodigies. It's that the gap between knowing and doing is mostly cultural."
Next case2026
Designed IMI's flagship 'Leading the Human-AI Workforce' executive programme. →
Irish Management Institute