💡The Irish AI 50, 2026: our number one

👋 Céad míle fáilte! This is it. Over four editions we have counted down The Irish AI 50, 2026, the Irish minds shaping the frontier of AI. Today, the top 10, and the reveal of number one.

ICYMI (one last time 👀) here is the countdown so far:

📌 Numbers 50 to 41: the countdown begins
📌 Numbers 40 to 31: the list comes home
📌 Numbers 30 to 21: halfway up
📌 Numbers 20 to 11: the heavy hitters

Last week took us from 20 to 11: the €425m Brightflag exit, the TIME100 researcher holding the industry to account, and the O'Brien brothers selling autonomous ocean robots to the US Navy.

Today's ten include the Tyrone woman who signs OpenAI's cheques, the textbook every machine learning engineer owns, and the biggest deal an Irish founded technology company has ever been part of. And at number one, a Belfast man.

A final reminder on method: ranks and tiers only, no marks out of ten. We weighed frontier proximity, seniority, track record, scale and the strength of the Irish story. And this list rewards building AI over buying it.

Numbers 10 to 1. 🥁

THE IRISH AI 50, 2026
Numbers 10 to 6

#10 | Fergal Reid 🇮🇪
Chief AI Officer, Fin. Dublin. AI Builder at home

His pedigree is a decade of machine learning before it was a boardroom word: a Trinity computer science degree, a UCD PhD in 2013, then years building Intercom's ML systems long before the company bet itself on them. He now leads the team behind Fin, the AI agent that resolves an average of 76% of customer support volume end to end, built in Dublin and sold worldwide.

The achievement: they bet the company on his team's work, and the result is the $3.6bn Salesforce deal. Arguably the most senior applied AI leader operating on Irish soil.

#9 | Mark Collier 🇮🇪
Research Engineer, Google DeepMind. Ireland. Frontier lab

His pedigree is the pure research track: computer science at Trinity, a machine learning MSc at Edinburgh, then DeepMind, where he has spent his career inside the model-building machinery most engineers only read about. His early published work includes implementing Neural Turing Machines, and he does it all from Ireland rather than Zurich or Mountain View.

The achievement: a credited contributor on the Gemini 2.5 technical report, the paper behind one of the most consequential models on the planet.

#8 | Barry O'Sullivan 🇮🇪
Professor and Founding Director of Insight, University College Cork. Cork. AI Researcher

His pedigree spans the whole modern history of Irish AI: constraint programming research at UCC, the founding directorship of Insight, Ireland's biggest data analytics research centre, and a past presidency of EurAI, the European AI association. His influence runs through policy too: he served as Vice Chair of the EU's High-Level Expert Group on AI, and he now sits on the Government's AI Advisory Council. When Europe wrote the rules that bind OpenAI and Google, an Irishman from UCC was in the room.

The achievement: in 2022 he became the first academic based at an Irish university elected a Fellow of the AAAI, the field's most exclusive honour roll.

#7 | Addy Osmani 🇺🇸
Member of Technical Staff, Anthropic. Bay Area. Big tech AI

His pedigree is more than fourteen years at Google, finishing as the director who ran Cloud AI developer experience, the tooling behind Gemini, Vertex AI and Google's agent platform, which is to say he shaped how millions of engineers actually build with AI. Before any of that he won the Young Scientist exhibition outright from St Finian's in Mullingar in 2003, and his books and newsletters made him one of the most followed voices in software, read by hundreds of thousands of engineers. He left Google in 2026, and this week announced his move to Anthropic, where he works on Claude Code.

The achievement: making Google's AI buildable. The models get the headlines; the tools he ran are why working developers could use them.

#6 | Conor Durkan 🇮🇪 🇺🇸
Research Scientist, Google DeepMind. New York. Frontier lab

The cleanest Irish research pedigree at a frontier lab: raised in Ireland, maths at UCC with a year at Berkeley, a PhD in machine learning at Edinburgh, then DeepMind, where he now works on large-scale generative models, most recently Gemini Omni. His Neural Spline Flows and the nflows library became staples of generative modelling, cited and used across the field. In between he co-founded the AI music startup Udio before returning to the lab.

The achievement: inventing methods the rest of generative modelling builds with. Few Irish researchers have work this widely used inside the field itself.

THE IRISH AI 50, 2026
The top five

#5 | Sarah Friar 🇺🇸
Chief Financial Officer, OpenAI. San Francisco. Frontier lab

Her pedigree is the executive track at the very top of American tech: CFO of Square through its IPO, CEO of Nextdoor, an OBE, a seat on Walmart's board, and now the C-suite of the most talked-about company in the world. From Sion Mills in Co. Tyrone to OpenAI, she is the most senior Irish person in the AI industry, full stop.

The achievement: structuring the finances of the AI era. When OpenAI raises tens of billions to fund the frontier, she is the one who makes the numbers work.

#4 | Kevin Murphy 🇺🇸
Research Scientist, Google DeepMind. California. Frontier lab

If you have learned machine learning in the last decade, you have probably learned it from him. Born in Ireland and raised in England, his pedigree runs through Berkeley, MIT and fifteen years at Google, where he manages a research team at DeepMind and has passed 138,000 citations. His 2026 work has turned to agentic forecasting.

The achievement: the MIT Press Probabilistic Machine Learning textbooks, the standard references of the field, the first of which won the DeGroot Prize. Whole cohorts of the people building AI today were trained on his books.

#3 | Eoghan McCabe, Des Traynor and Ciaran Lee 🇮🇪 🇺🇸
Founders of Fin, formerly Intercom. San Francisco and Dublin. AI Startup builder abroad

Their pedigree is fifteen years of product craft turned, late and decisively, into the most commercially successful applied AI story Ireland has produced. Four friends started Intercom in 2011 out of a small Dublin consultancy called Contrast; McCabe is a Dublin-born Trinity computer scientist, and Lee was CTO for a decade, stepped away, then came back as chief engineer to help rebuild the company around its own agent. Fin resolves an average of 76% of support volume end to end and charges $0.99 a resolution rather than per seat, a genuinely new way to sell software. In 2026 the company renamed itself after the agent.

The achievement: Salesforce agreed in June to buy Fin for roughly $3.6bn, the largest deal ever involving an Irish founded technology company. It has cleared Australian competition review, and Salesforce said in late August it expects to complete the purchase within weeks.

#2 | Andrew Fitzgibbon 🇮🇪 🇬🇧
Engineering Fellow, Graphcore. Cambridge. AI Researcher

Raised in Cork, schooled at Coláiste Chríost Rí, a UCC computer science and maths graduate, and one of the most decorated engineers Ireland has produced. His pedigree spans three generations of machine vision: he co-founded 2d3, whose boujou was the first software to work out a camera's movement from footage alone and won the company a Primetime Engineering Emmy; he was on the Microsoft team behind the Kinect, where he introduced synthetic training data at a scale nobody had tried; and he now builds AI compute at Graphcore. Two Marr Prize winning papers, the top paper award in computer vision, and the 2021 Longuet-Higgins Prize for work still standing a decade later.

The achievement: election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2024, science's oldest honour, for a career of making machines see. His personal website is still at fitzgibbon.ie.

#1 | David Singleton 🇮🇪 🇺🇸
Vice President of Engineering, Consumer Products, Meta Superintelligence Labs. San Francisco. Frontier lab

Our number one. A Belfast man whose pedigree runs through three eras of computing: eleven years at Google, latterly as the VP of engineering running Android Wear, then seven years at Stripe, latterly as chief technology officer, where he led the building of Stripe's first engineering hub outside the United States and put it in Dublin. He left in 2024 to start again. The company launched as /dev/agents and came out of stealth as Dreamer, an operating system for AI agents built so people with no technical background could make their own, co-founded with the crew who made early Android: Hugo Barra, Nicholas Jitkoff and Ficus Kirkpatrick. Index Ventures and CapitalG led a $56m seed at a reported $500m valuation, per TechCrunch, before the product was public.

The achievement: in March, Meta hired the entire Dreamer team into Superintelligence Labs and licensed the technology. The work is already shipping: this week Meta launched Muse, its personal AI agent, built to run across Meta's apps and wearables, and it was Singleton who introduced it to Wired. Seniority, frontier proximity and a proper Irish story, all in the one person.

That is The Irish AI 50, 2026

From a Tyrone woman running OpenAI's finances to a Belfast man at the top of Meta's superintelligence push, from the Gemini technical report to the textbook every machine learning engineer owns, the Irish fingerprints on this technology run deeper than most people realise. Fourteen of the fifty entries are led or co-led by women, which is more than we expected when we started and fewer than there should be.

We will do this again next year, and the 2027 list will be better for your arguments.

So: did we get it right? Did we miss someone who should have been top 10? Hit reply and make your case. Names for the 2027 list are welcome by reply or through our story form. We are already collecting.

Thanks for reading along. Forward this to the most AI-obsessed person you know. 💡

Stephen, Chris & Eoghan

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