Founded a Practical AI Academy that creates real capability.

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.

Case at a glance— 01

Problem type

Turn AI into operating capability

The mandate

Build a working model of applied AI education — for teens, SMBs and enterprise teams — that produces the Article 4 literacy and human-oversight readiness the EU AI Act now demands, and prove capability comes from doing, not watching.

Workstreams

Distinct parts of the intervention

Headline result

180+

Students taught

Measured outcomes— 02

180+

Students taught

Art. 4

EU AI Act literacy delivered

Delivery tracks live

National partners (Microsoft, Enterprise Ireland)

The situation— 03

Context

What was happening.

The EU AI Act entered force with a workforce-literacy obligation (Article 4) most enterprises had no answer to. Slide decks and e-learning create awareness, not competent human oversight. Ireland has set a target for 75% of businesses to use AI, cloud and big data by 2030 — that requires operators who can actually use, question and govern the systems in front of them.

Mandate

What had to change.

What changed

The moves that made the difference.

— 04

The intervention, broken into the moves that mattered.

Highlights

9 moves

Launched at Microsoft Ireland: teams of teens used AI tools to build and pitch real ideas.
Delivered Build Camps to 180+ TY students at St Gerard's School, by request.
Partnered with Enterprise Ireland and Turnua to scale across Ireland, connecting Kildare businesses with TY teams.
Stood up SMB AI Maturity diagnostics and applied workshops on the same hands-on model.
Built three delivery tracks: education institutes, SMBs, and enterprise upskilling.
Reframed the enterprise track around EU AI Act obligations — Article 4 workforce literacy, competent human oversight of high-risk systems, and the operational judgement staff need before an AI-enabled process ships.
Anchored the executive module in the IMI curriculum so senior leaders can read a risk classification, an Article 50 transparency notice and a GPAI touchpoint without needing legal counsel to translate.
Authored '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.
Embedded the playbook into enterprise upskilling tracks, so AI literacy lands inside a model of how high-performing distributed teams actually operate.

What I would carry forward

“Governance principle demonstrated: Article 4 literacy and human-oversight readiness produced through practice, not policy. 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, and the Act now makes closing that gap a compliance obligation, not a nice-to-have.”

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