Transform Gov - the digital government podcast

Ireland is about to spend €275 billion on infrastructure with a workforce that's already stretched. So what is the difference between AI as a nice-to-have productivity tool, and AI as the thing that actually closes the gap between what we need to deliver and the people we have to deliver it?

Stephen Bradley and João Silva from Accenture return to go deeper: not just what goes wrong on infrastructure projects, but exactly where AI changes the picture — and where to start if you're leading a major procurement tomorrow.

What you can take from this episode:

🔹 Sort your data foundation before you scale AI on top of it. It’s fundamental to figure out your work breakdown structures, cost breakdown structures, and what historical data is worth cleansing. If you get this wrong and "you'll spend the next 10 years doing data cleansing" instead of delivering.
🔹 Understand the three layers AI actually adds: AI has three layers in a project – Assistance (roughly 50% productivity gains on individual tasks), orchestration (real-time triangulation across a whole project), and assurance (AI-supported checks that direct human reviewers to where their judgement matters most).
🔹 Start small, prove it, then scale. Pick use cases where your data is already credible, demonstrate success, and expand from there.
🔹 Reframe the skills conversation. The problem is that there are too many jobs, and not enough people. AI is a capability multiplier for a workforce already in short supply, rather than a threat in and of itself.
🔹 Take humans out of harm's way wherever you physically can. Remote monitoring and AI-assisted inspection means real risk reduction. Every person you don't have to send onto a live rail line or a fast road is one less risk.

Missed Part 1? Catch Stephen and João's earlier conversation on why infrastructure projects overrun, and Ireland's skills gap.

🎧 Transform Gov is part of the Ireland eGovernment Awards, brought to you in partnership with Accenture.

📅 The Ireland eGovernment Awards and Leadership Summit take place 24 September at O'Reilly Hall, UCD. Find out more at digitalgovawards.com

#TransformGov #Infrastructure #PublicSector #AI #DigitalTransformation
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Ireland has committed €275 billion to infrastructure by 2035. Globally, 9 out of 10 major projects fail to deliver on plan, scope, or budget. What goes wrong, and can Ireland beat the odds using AI, digitisation and know-how?

In Part 1 of this special two-part podcast series, host Maeve Kneafsey speaks with Stephen Bradley, lead author of Accenture's research into Ireland's infrastructure delivery challenges, and João Silva, Accenture’s managing director of capital projects.

What you can take from this episode:

🔹 How do you map your project's interfaces: A UK rail electrification project's cost grew tenfold after a value-engineering decision wasn't properly assessed against its knock-on effects — a decision that should have taken a day instead played out over a decade.
🔹 How to face the skills gap honestly: Delivering Ireland's National Development Plan at current productivity would need roughly 100,000 additional construction practitioners — equivalent to two years of all net migration into the country.
🔹 Why you need to rethink procurement before you launch: Moving from a "passive buyer" to an "engaged system orchestrator" means defining your data standards before contractors are appointed, not after.
🔹 How to watch for over-engineering: It often reflects genuine caution around safety on novel assets — understanding why it happens is the first step to managing it.
🔹 Why you should communicate progress early and often: Projects that published clear timelines and used digital twins to show the public visible progress built trust that made delivery easier, not harder.

Part 2 goes deeper on exactly how AI and digital tools can change infrastructure delivery in practice.

🎧 Transform Gov is part of the Ireland eGovernment Awards, brought to you in partnership with Accenture.

📅 The Ireland eGovernment Awards and Leadership Summit take place 24 September at O'Reilly Hall, UCD. Find out more at digitalgovawards.com

#TransformGov #Infrastructure #PublicSector #AI #DigitalTransformation
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Could Irish Rail have saved the State €16.5 million, and got a working traffic management system, if its project had been managed differently?

Today, guest James Louttit — Founder and Lead Trainer at Impactful Project Management — argues that successful projects come down to some surprisingly simple disciplines: focus on value, prioritise needs, make risk visible, force governance to make decisions, and adapt rather than blindly following a plan-for-plans-sake.

So, could applying those principles earlier have changed the outcome at Irish Rail?

That’s one of the questions we’re asking today on Transform Gov.

James takes us inside:
🔹How to get a project funded: focus on how many citizens benefit, how much time is saved, and how much risk is taken out
🔹Why MoSCoW can collapse into chaos: when everything becomes a “must”, nothing is really prioritised, and force-ranking is a better way to make hard choices
🔹Stopping project risk becoming tomorrow’s headline: The risk-specific contingency method for putting a real cost on what could go wrong before it happens
🔹Pawpaws versus prickly pears: a brilliantly simple way to spot the work that delivers big value for little effort, and the work that eats time, money and energy for very little return
🔹When an AI sceptic changed his mind: how a civil servant, given a real task and Microsoft Copilot, turned resistance into enthusiasm in a matter of minutes

🎧 Transform Gov is part of the Ireland eGovernment Awards, brought to you in partnership with Accenture.

📅 The Ireland eGovernment Awards and Leadership Summit take place 24 September at O'Reilly Hall, UCD. Find out more at digitalgovawards.com

#TransformGov #ProjectManagement #PublicSector #Leadership #AI

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Public services need to deliver more, for a growing and increasingly complex population, but the people and technology resources available to do it are finite.

Could AI change that?

In Part 2 of her conversation with Transform Gov, Audrey O'Mahony of Accenture gets practical about where AI could have its biggest impact and how we reskill to meet the challenge.

She explains how public-sector CIOs are already looking at AI to compress transformation timelines, increase the capacity of technology teams and rethink software delivery, coding, data migration and testing.

We also hear how AI can change citizen services themselves — including a striking example where technology helped identify vulnerable people hidden within a huge backlog of correspondence, allowing public servants to prioritise those who needed help most.

Where to start: Audrey brings us through the five imperatives for moving from isolated AI tools to genuine end-to-end transformation.

This isn't AI as another productivity tool. It's a conversation about whether AI can give government something it badly needs: more capacity to transform and more capacity to serve.

Missed Part 1? Catch Audrey's earlier conversation on agentic AI, data foundations, and the mindset shift from cost-cutting to capacity.

🎧 Transform Gov is part of the Ireland eGovernment Awards, brought to you in partnership with Accenture.

📅 The Ireland eGovernment Awards and Leadership Summit take place 24 September at O'Reilly Hall, UCD. Find out more at digitalgovawards.com

#TransformGov #AI #PublicSector #FutureOfWork #Accenture

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For decades, Ireland has built its economic identity on being a knowledge economy: highly skilled, highly educated, and a magnet for global investment. Agentic AI is about to test whether that advantage still holds.

Most conversations about AI start with cost – how do we do more with less? Audrey O'Mahony, Accenture's Head of Talent Reinvention for UKIA, argues that's the wrong starting point entirely. Her question instead: what would you do with 10,000 extra employees? Thinking capacity instead of cost-cutting changes what preparing for AI actually looks like.

In Part 1 of this conversation, Audrey talks about what's at stake for Ireland if that knowledge-economy advantage slips, and why government and the public sector have a uniquely important role to play. As adopters of AI, but also as enablers of it across the wider economy.

🔹 The risk to Ireland's knowledge-economy advantage if AI readiness doesn't keep pace
🔹 The mindset shift — why "what would you do with 10,000 extra employees?" is a better question than "how do we cut costs?"
🔹 The public sector's dual role — adopting AI in its own services, and enabling AI readiness across the wider economy
🔹 The foundation — why agentic AI is only as good as the data sitting underneath it
🔹 The real driver of adoption — trust, not training modules

Part 2 coming soon.

🎧 Transform Gov is part of the Ireland eGovernment Awards, brought to you in partnership with Accenture.

📅 The Ireland eGovernment Awards and Leadership Summit take place 24 September at O'Reilly Hall, UCD. Find out more at digitalgovawards.com

#TransformGov #AI #FutureOfWork #Accenture #PublicSector

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.