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👋 Céad míle fáilte! Welcome back to The Irish AI 50, 2026.
Last week's first batch(50→ 41) had a pattern you might have noticed: six of them work abroad, in the big labs and the foreign-built startups. This week the list comes home.
Today's ten include an archaeologist who became a professor of AI, a quantitative trader whose fried chicken shop turned into a machine learning company, and a mathematician who taught models to find medicine hiding in a fava bean.
Six of them work from Ireland. One of them was appointed to the board of the new AI Office of Ireland two weeks ago. Another sold his university research for $60m and now spends his spare time mining a million Strava runs.
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 40 to 31. 🥁
THE IRISH AI 50, 2026
Numbers 40 to 36
#40 | Oisin Mac Aodha 🇬🇧
Reader in Machine Learning, University of Edinburgh. Edinburgh. AI Researcher
An NUI Galway electronic engineer whose pedigree runs through a UCL PhD and Pietro Perona's lab at Caltech to a machine learning readership at Edinburgh, as an ELLIS Scholar and former Turing Fellow, with his papers cited more than 17,000 times.
His speciality is teaching machines to see with humans in the loop, and nowhere is that more visible than iNaturalist: he co-created the iNaturalist datasets, the benchmarks that taught the field to recognise species from photos and that sit behind the AI identification tools used by millions of citizen scientists.
The achievement: his latest benchmark, INQUIRE, built with MIT on five million wildlife images, showed that even GPT-4o still struggles with the questions real ecologists ask. When AI learns to watch the natural world properly, his benchmarks will be why.
#39 | Alessandra Sala 🇮🇪
Senior Director of AI and Data Science, Shutterstock. Dublin. Big tech AI
Italian born, Irish by adoption, and one of the most connected AI leaders working out of Dublin. Her pedigree is corporate AI at scale: she runs AI and data science for Shutterstock, one of the world's largest licensed image libraries, at the exact moment training data licensing became the industry's hardest question. Around the day job she co-chairs UNESCO's Women for Ethical AI and is Global President of Women in AI.
The achievement: this month the Government named her to the inaugural board of the AI Office of Ireland, the body that will supervise AI regulation here, weeks after she was named STEM Professional of the Year at the IMAGE PwC Businesswoman of the Year Awards. Industry, governance and recognition, all in the same summer.
#38 | Nora Khaldi 🇮🇪
Founder and CEO, Nuritas. Dublin and Connecticut. AI Builder at home
She trained as a mathematician at Aix-Marseille, took a PhD in bioinformatics and molecular evolution at Trinity, and in 2014 left academia to found Nuritas on a simple bet: that the proteins in everyday plants hide millions of useful peptides, and that machine learning could find them faster than any lab.
Her Magnifier platform did exactly that. PeptiStrong, a muscle-health peptide her models pulled out of the fava bean, has been through three human clinical trials and beat milk protein on muscle protein synthesis in a study published in the Journal of Nutrition, with a fourth trial reading out later this year.
The achievement: molecules discovered by her models are now in more than 100 products on shelves across the US, Europe and Asia, with Nestlé, Mars, BASF and Pharmavite among Nuritas partners, backed by a $42m Series C led by M&G Investments in December 2024 that took total funding to roughly $117m. AI-discovered ingredients, shipped.
#37 | Declan Groves 🇮🇪
Principal AI Engineering and Applied Science Manager, Microsoft. Dublin. Big tech AI
A DCU machine translation PhD under MT pioneer Andy Way, work on the university's MaTrEx translation system, a stint at Irish MT firm Traslán and EU research projects at the Centre for Next Generation Localisation, then industry. He now leads a Microsoft team of applied scientists and engineers in Dublin building the language AI behind products used around the world, and he is one of the people who decides when a machine translation is good enough to ship.
The achievement: his team's "safe velocity" model put machine translation into production across most of the Office range in 37 languages, part of a pipeline handling more than 75 percent of Office content translation, with no measurable dent in customer satisfaction. If you have ever used Office in another language, his team's work was in the room.
#36 | Áine Cahill 🇬🇧
Machine Learning Engineer, Apple. Cambridge. Big tech AI
Her pedigree is the gold-plated academic route: a Trinity engineering gold medallist who also took the Maurice F Fitzgerald Prize, a Trinity Scholar and Naughton Fellow, then a Cambridge machine learning Master's. At Apple she works on private federated learning, the awkward art of training models without hoovering up everyone's data, the hardest version of the privacy problem.
The achievement: co-author on Apple's published federated learning research, including pfl-research, the simulation framework Apple released to speed up the whole field's work on private training. Privacy-preserving AI, built at its sharp end.
THE IRISH AI 50, 2026
Numbers 35 to 31
#35 | Siobhán Savage 🇺🇸
Co-founder and CEO, Reejig. New York. AI Startup builder abroad
Canadian born, Irish raised and educated at Belfast Metropolitan College, she spent fifteen years designing workforces for billion dollar infrastructure projects before co-founding Reejig in 2019 with ML researcher Dr Shujia Zhang.
Reejig builds a proprietary Work Ontology, 23 industry models distilled from more than 130 million real jobs, that breaks every role into tasks and skills so enterprises can see which work AI should take and which needs people. WPP used it to collapse 55,000 job titles into 600 roles across 84,000 employees.
The achievement: Reejig's algorithm was independently assessed for bias by the Data Science Institute at UTS, a world first that helped earn it World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer status and a Forbes Cloud 100 Rising Star spot in 2022, backed by more than $38m from Skip Capital, Airtree and Salesforce Ventures.
#34 | Kate Devlin 🇬🇧
Professor of AI and Society, King's College London. London. AI Researcher
Born and raised in Northern Ireland, she read archaeology at Queen's before switching to computer science, which is a career path you do not see twice. Her pedigree is the human side of the field taken seriously: since January 2025 she has been Chair-Director of KCL's Digital Futures Institute, she wrote Turned On, the Bloomsbury book on intimacy and machines, and she works on the bit everyone finds hardest: what these systems do to people.
The achievement: becoming one of the UK's most prominent voices on AI and society, holding a chair in a subject that barely existed when she started studying it. Her line to Byline Times this summer cuts to the centre of the whole debate: "there's a value in what we produce because we feel, and an AI can't feel."
#33 | Conor Sheridan 🇮🇪
Founder and CEO, Nory. Dublin and London. AI Startup builder abroad
He grew up in Castleknock, took economics at DCU, worked as a quantitative trader, then opened Mad Egg, the free-range fried chicken chain that started on Camden Street in 2017.
Running his own restaurants taught him exactly how badly the industry forecasts demand, and Nory, founded in 2021, is machine learning built on that scar tissue: models trained on a restaurant's sales and operational data to forecast demand, plan labour and automate ordering, now with customers including Jamie Oliver Group, Azzurri and Black Sheep Coffee.
The achievement: a $37m Series B led by Kinnevik in September 2025 took Nory to $62.6m raised four years after founding, with revenue tripled since the Accel-led Series A. Next stop, the US.
#32 | Barry Smyth 🇮🇪
Digital Chair of Computer Science, UCD. Dublin. AI Researcher
One of Ireland's most cited computer scientists, with more than 28,000 citations and an h-index of 85, a Royal Irish Academy member since 2011, SFI Researcher of the Year in 2014, and a co-founder of the Insight Centre for Data Analytics, the country's largest data science research centre. His pedigree is personalisation, the branch of AI that decides what you see next, and he is the rare academic who has shipped it.
The achievement: he spun his recommender systems research out of UCD as ChangingWorlds, grew it past 150 staff and sold it to Amdocs for $60m in 2008. Lately the data obsession has turned personal: his Running with Data project mines millions of Strava records to work out how ordinary runners should train, and earned him a lengthy RTÉ feature ahead of the Dublin Marathon.
#31 | John D. Kelleher 🇮🇪
Chair of Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin, and Director of ADAPT. Dublin. AI Researcher
A DCU degree and PhD in AI, postdocs at Media Lab Europe and Germany's DFKI, nearly two decades at DIT and TU Dublin, then Maynooth, and since 2024 the chair at Trinity and the directorship of ADAPT, Ireland's national research centre for AI-driven digital content.
His MIT Press textbook trio, Fundamentals of Machine Learning, Data Science and Deep Learning, has become standard reading far beyond Ireland, with Data Science alone translated into eight languages.
The achievement: running the centre through which a large share of Irish AI talent passes, with more than 300 researchers and an audited €1.1 billion contribution to the Irish economy, a 27.5x return on the state's investment. The textbooks a generation learned from, and the centre the next generation comes up through.
NEXT WEEK
Numbers 30 to 21
The explainable AI pioneer, the man who named the feature store, a $180m AI security exit, and frontier research done from Dublin.
Spotted a gap? Hit reply with a name for the 2027 list, or send it through our story form.
Thanks for reading. Forward this to the most AI-obsessed person you know. 💡
Stephen, Chris & Eoghan
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