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👋 Céad míle fáilte! We are halfway up The Irish AI 50, 2026, our ranked countdown of the Irish minds at the frontier of AI, and from here every edition gets harder to order. ICYMI (surely not 👀) here is the countdown so far:
Last week the list came home: the professors arrived, a Shutterstock AI leader took a seat on the board of Ireland's new AI regulator, and a fried chicken shop turned out to be the origin story of a machine learning company.
Today's ten include two founders who met at the BT Young Scientist when they were twelve and now count Amazon and Tesla as customers, a CEO who sold his company for $180m thirteen months into the job, and a physicist who taught Spotify the difference between correlation and cause.
A 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 30 to 21. 🥁
THE IRISH AI 50, 2026
Numbers 30 to 26
#30 | Mark T. Keane 🇮🇪
Chair of Computer Science, UCD. Dublin. AI Researcher
A psychology graduate whose pedigree bridges cognitive science and computing, he has held UCD's Chair of Computer Science since 1998 and at 65 is still shipping, with papers landing at AAAI in 2026.
His speciality is how machines should explain themselves to actual humans: his counterfactual explanation research with Barry Smyth, the "if you had asked for a smaller loan" school of AI transparency, helped put Irish research at the centre of explainable AI decades before regulators started asking why a model decided what it decided, and his 20,000 plus citations back it up.
The achievement: shaping Irish research from both sides of the funding table, joining Science Foundation Ireland as Director of ICT in 2004 and serving as interim Director General from 2006 to 2007. Generations of students know him for another reason entirely: Cognitive Psychology, the Eysenck and Keane textbook now in its eighth edition, is the standard undergraduate text on the subject.
#29 | Dan Hobbs and Ciarán O'Mara 🇮🇪
Co-founders, Protex AI. Dublin. AI Builder at home
They met at the BT Young Scientist exhibition when they were both twelve, which is the most Irish origin story on this list. Their pedigree is applied computer vision with a hard purpose: Protex runs vision models on the CCTV a factory already has and flags unsafe behaviour before somebody gets hurt. O'Mara started a privacy-focused computer vision PhD at the University of Limerick and began prototyping Protex during it; Hobbs runs the company as CEO, O'Mara as CTO.
The achievement: YC S21, Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe in 2023, $54m raised, and Amazon and Tesla using their AI to prevent warehouse accidents, with the Series B reportedly valuing the company at $150m. Computer vision genuinely deployed on factory floors rather than in demos.
#28 | Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha 🇬🇧
NLU Engineering Manager, Siri, Apple. Cambridge. Frontier lab
An unusually literate route into AI: a Trinity degree in computer science, linguistics and German, then a Cambridge PhD on teaching machines the meaning of noun compounds, then research in Cambridge's NLP group cited more than 5,600 times. He joined Apple in 2015, the year it bought VocalIQ, the Cambridge dialogue systems spinout where his own profile lists him as a senior NLP researcher, and he has been at the heart of Apple's Cambridge Siri operation ever since.
The achievement: managing Siri's natural language understanding layer, the part that decides what you actually meant, with his name still on the rare papers Apple lets out: work on running the assistant's understanding entirely on device, and ASPERA, an ACL 2025 benchmark testing whether assistants can execute complex requests. Language AI shipped at a scale of billions.
#27 | Amelia Kelly 🇮🇪
CTO, AI Labs Curriculum Associates, formerly SoapBox Labs. Dublin. AI Builder at home
Patricia Scanlon's SoapBox Labs as a speech scientist in 2015 and rose to CTO, leading the team behind a recognition engine built specifically for children's voices, the first AI product certified by Digital Promise for algorithmic fairness. When US education giant Curriculum Associates bought SoapBox in 2023 she stayed with the technology, which relaunched last August as AI Labs, the company's internal AI incubator.
The achievement: her engine powers reading tools from McGraw Hill, Scholastic and dyslexia screener EarlyBird across US school districts. A Fulbright Scholar, an Eisenhower Fellow, and AI Person of the Year at the 2022 AI Awards.
#26 | Elizabeth Daly 🇮🇪
Senior Technical Staff Member and Research Manager, Interactive AI, IBM Research. Dublin. Big tech AI
A Trinity engineering graduate whose 2007 Trinity PhD produced her most cited idea, using human social networks to route data between disconnected devices, cited more than 1,600 times since. She joined IBM out of her doctorate and now runs the Interactive AI group at IBM Research Dublin at one of IBM's most senior technical grades, while setting global strategy for trustworthy and human-centred AI across IBM Research worldwide.
The achievement: building the unglamorous machinery that makes responsible AI real, including EvalAssist, her team's open source tool for using LLMs as judges without fooling yourself, and AI governance tools built with the University of Notre Dame. Over 4,500 citations, recent papers at NeurIPS, ACL and EMNLP, and past service on the Royal Irish Academy's Engineering and Computer Sciences Committee.
THE IRISH AI 50, 2026
Numbers 25 to 21
#25 | Ciarán Gilligan-Lee 🇮🇪
Head of the Causal Inference Research Lab, Spotify. Dublin. AI Researcher
Rigour imported from physics: theoretical physics at Trinity, then valedictorian of his master's year at Canada's Perimeter Institute, then an Oxford DPhil on the physics of computation. At health tech firm Babylon he made the leap, applying causal reasoning from quantum foundations to medical diagnosis, work published in Nature Communications that MIT Technology Review said could supercharge medical AI. He now runs Spotify's causal machine learning research from Dublin, and holds an honorary associate professorship at UCL.
The achievement: AI Person of the Year at the 2024 AI Awards, for making causal inference, the unfashionable and necessary corner of machine learning that asks what actually caused what, an Irish speciality. His 2025 TEDx talk is the best fifteen minute introduction to why it matters.
#24 | Jim Dowling 🇸🇪
CEO and co-founder, Hopsworks. Stockholm. AI Startup builder abroad
A Dubliner who spent eleven years at Trinity, taking a first in computer science, a PhD in distributed systems and a lecturing post, then moved to Stockholm in 2005 for love rather than money. Via MySQL, Swedish research institute SICS and an associate professorship at KTH, he spun out the company that became Hopsworks with six of his own students, and in December 2018 it shipped the world's first open source feature store, opening up the ML plumbing that Uber and Facebook had kept behind closed doors.
The achievement: O'Reilly published his book on the category in November 2025, Building Machine Learning Systems with a Feature Store, and this summer Hopsworks 5.0 shipped with Zalando, Europe's largest online retailer, running its AI infrastructure on his platform. We interviewed him in March about building an AI company in Stockholm the Irish way.
#23 | Sean Blanchfield and Dorothy Creaven 🇮🇪
Co-founder and CEO, and co-founder and COO, Jentic. Dublin. AI Builder at home
Two proven operators pointed at the least glamorous problem in agentic AI: how an agent safely touches enterprise systems. Blanchfield is a Trinity computer engineer on his third company, after co-founding Demonware, the networking layer behind Call of Duty's online play that Activision acquired in 2007, and adtech firm PageFair, and he sits on the Government's AI Advisory Council.
Creaven launched and led Rent the Runway's first international office in Galway after nearly seven years running Element Wave, the mobile marketing company she co-founded. Jentic builds on Arazzo, the OpenAPI Initiative's open workflow standard, whose principal author joined the company in 2025, and raised a €4m pre-seed led by Elkstone in January 2025.
The achievement: the first Irish company selected for the AWS Generative AI Accelerator, one of 40 startups chosen from roughly 3,000 applicants, and in March they launched Jentic Mini, a free open source layer giving agents safe access to more than 10,000 APIs.
#22 | Donnchadh Casey 🇮🇪
VP of AI Security, F5, formerly CEO of CalypsoAI. Dublin. AI Builder at home
His pedigree is the business of AI safety, in the commercial sense: CalypsoAI secures enterprise LLMs at the point of inference, guardrails plus automated red teaming against jailbreaks, prompt injection and data leaks, and its public Security Leaderboard ranked the big foundation models on how well they survive attack. He came up through McKinsey and nine years at Qualtrics, finishing as Chief Customer Officer minding a $1.8bn book of business, joined CalypsoAI as COO in early 2024 and took over as CEO that August.
The achievement: F5 bought CalypsoAI for $180m in September 2025, thirteen months after he took the top job, and he now runs AI security for one of the world's biggest application security companies from Dublin, where the platform finds around 10,000 new attack vectors on AI models every month.
#21 | David Barrett 🇮🇪
Staff Research Scientist, Google DeepMind. Dublin. Frontier lab
The theory-first route into frontier AI: theoretical physics at Trinity, then a PhD at UCL's Gatsby unit, the lab that supplied DeepMind with much of its early brainpower, under Peter Latham and Peter Dayan, with postdocs in Paris, Lisbon and Cambridge on how spiking neurons compute. At DeepMind since 2016, he is co-author of the Relation Networks paper and joint first author of Measuring Abstract Reasoning in Neural Networks, the ICML benchmark that asked whether neural networks genuinely reason, with more than 6,000 citations across his work.
The achievement: genuinely frontier research done from Irish soil, and lately pointed at medicine: he is a contributor to Med-Gemini and to AMIE, DeepMind's conversational diagnostic AI, with papers landing in Nature Medicine in 2025 and 2026.
NEXT WEEK
The top 20
A €425m legal AI exit, a TIME100 AI researcher, the human layer the frontier labs train on, and the woman who took brain theory to market.
Know who should be higher? Hit reply. And if you have a name for the 2027 list, reply with it or use our story form.
Thanks for reading. Forward this to the most AI-obsessed person you know. 💡
Stephen, Chris & Eoghan
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