The Irish Tech News Podcast

A lot of businesses are overpaying for outdated ways of working, and AI is reshaping their expectations around creative, strategy and operational costs. To find out more about this I spoke to Seamus Begley, founder of creative studio, The Studio of Possible.
Seamus talks about ahis background, what the Studio of Possible does, why many businesses overpay for outdated ways of working, how AI is reshaping expectations around creative, strategy and operational costs and more.
More about The Studio of Possible:
They are a Design Practice that works with forward thinking individuals, brands and businesses to increase their impact on the world around us

Many people in this country don't have access to reliable financial guidance — so they're increasingly asking a free chatbot instead. The problem? A general-purpose model trained on Reddit threads inherits Reddit's appetite for risk, and now that skew shows up in the conversations people are having about their money. 
In this new episode of One Vision Podcast, Alisha Chowdhury, Founder of Kiro Money, joins Theodora Lau to argue that the same technology, pointed with different intentions, can do the opposite: close the advice gap instead of widening it.
Alisha traces the origin of Kiro back to a socioeconomically diverse Bangladeshi community in New Orleans — the "aunties and uncles" who taught her immigrant parents how to navigate an unfamiliar financial system — and to the University of Pennsylvania, where she saw real wealth and learned how it's built for the first time. After years as an investor at Vanguard and in private equity, she left for an MBA in London and started building the earliest version of Kiro: a low-code, RAG-based coach fed only sources she trusted. "Not garbage in."
Today Kiro is an embedded financial intelligence layer that lets a bank or investing platform drop a context-aware AI coach directly into its own app, so users get guidance where their data and their relationship already live. 
A conversation about financial inclusion, the advice gap, and what it takes to build AI for money that people can actually trust. Because when it comes to money, trust has to be earned — and tested.

🎧 Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.

Keywords: AI, Fintech, GenerativeAI, AI Agents, Chatbots
📍”The vision of why I started this is to give back to people like my parents, is to give back to a younger version of myself, and making sure that access truly means access.”

Timestamps
00:00 Welcome and Introductions
01:22 Alisha’s Founder Roots
02:38 From New Orleans to Finance
04:48 Career Path and MBA Pivot
07:35 What Kiro Money Builds
10:19 AI Agents and Product Vision
12:27 Trust, Emotion, and Community
17:36 Safety Guardrails and Testing
22:12 Impact Metrics and Closing

More about our guests 
🌐Alisha Chowdhury on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alisha-chowdhury-163808122/

More about our host and One Vision Podcast 
🌐Theodora Lau on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theodoralau/ 
🌐Banking on (Artificial) Intelligence (book): https://www.bankingonaibook.com/ 
🌐Unconventional Ventures (company): https://www.unconventionalventures.com/ 
🌐Listen to all One Vision Podcast episodes by visiting: https://shows.acast.com/one-vision

As various nations prepare for future lunar landings, interest in space exploration has never been greater especially in Ireland. In Cork the UCC Rocketry and Space Exploration Society which was founded last year has been very busy, launching 5 rockets.
To find out more about what the UCC Rocketry and Space Exploration Society are doing and the Irish interest in space exploration I spoke to members of the UCC Rocketry and Space Exploration Society.
The members told me when they started the society, Ireland’s first flight computer, Mach-26 Rocketry competition, For All Mankind and more:
More about UCC Rocketry and Space Exploration Society:
Since being founded last year, they have launched 5 rockets. This includes Prometheus, their largest rocket yet which got  5th in the Mach-X Rocketry and Cansat Competition in their respective category. 
Their current projects include:
- Ireland’s first flight computer: Recently test-launched in Portlaw, Waterford.
- Liquid propellant motor, currently under construction for the Race 2 Space competition, where their design review ranked third in their category.
- Ireland’s first two-stage rocket, scheduled to fly this summer in the Mach-26 Rocketry Competition.

The National Final of the Student Enterprise Programme took place recently with 88 students competing for the title of Student Enterprise of the Year. The programme itself is Ireland’s largest student entrepreneurship initiative, with over 500,000 students having started businesses since 2003. To find out more I spoke to one of the finalists Seán FitzGerald, a fourth-year student who has created software Fleet Monitor, designed to predict the movements of ships attempting to avoid maritime sanctions across every ocean globally.
I spoke Sean about his background, the  Student Enterprise Programme, what Fleet Monitor does, and more.
More about Fleet Monitor:
A standout in this year’s programme, Fleet Monitor uses Automatic Identification System (AIS) data to track the position, heading, speed and size of vessels. The platform then cross checks this data in real time against official EU and Nato sanction lists to identify known or suspected shadow-fleet ships.

We're halfway through 2026, and the fintech landscape is moving faster than anyone can track. In this new episode of One Vision Podcast, Theo brings back three fan favorites — Jennifer White (J.D. Power), Tiffani Montez (Insider Intelligence / EMARKETER), and Julie Muhn (Finovate) — for a midyear roundtable that covers it all.
What did the recent Finovate Spring reveal about where AI is actually landing in financial services? Tiffani shares the latest from the AI Visibility Leadership Board — why banks are no longer competing for attention, they're competing for recommendations, and why the rules of discovery have completely changed. Jennifer brings the data that captures our attention: 53% of consumers used AI in the last 3 months to ask a personal finance question. While awareness of bank-provided PFM tools runs 70–90%, adoption sits at 17–22%. Soft churn is now the real primacy threat. And Julie calls out one of the hardest questions in fintech: what's real, and what's just marketing?
This episode covers AI as infrastructure, the trust paradox, agentic payments, GEO vs. SEO, and why the money leaving your primary bank might be the most important signal nobody's watching closely enough.

🎧 Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.

Keywords: AI, Fintech, GenerativeAI, AI Agents, AI Visibility, LLM

📍 “AI is no longer being just tacked on to existing platforms, like customer service chatbot. It's now being integrated into solutions.” ~ Julie Muhn

📍 “For decades banks spend billions of dollars competing for attention, and they're now competing for recommendations.” ~ Tiffani Montez

📍  ”You being the center of how the consumer manages where their money flows is a potential new definition for primacy.” ~ Jennifer White

📍 “ Would we all have a little agent that's running around trying to look for the best product for us and move money for us?” ~ Theodora Lau

Timestamps
02:35 AI Gets Practical
05:25 Consumers Using AI
07:04 AI Visibility Leaderboard
14:26 Trust Paradox 
19:53 Primacy and Soft Churn
25:38 What to Watch Next

More about our guests 
🌐Jennifer White on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-white-57257424/ 
🌐Julie Muhn on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julieschicktanz/ 
🌐Tiffany Montez on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tiffani-montez/ 

More about our host and One Vision Podcast 
🌐Theodora Lau on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theodoralau/ 
🌐Banking on (Artificial) Intelligence (book): https://www.bankingonaibook.com/ 
🌐Unconventional Ventures (company): https://www.unconventionalventures.com/ 
🌐Listen to all One Vision Podcast episodes by visiting: https://shows.acast.com/one-vision