By Donal Laverty, Consulting Partner
It can feel sometimes as if every year of this decade has been billed as a ‘big year for AI’, but this really is the case for 2025. Minister of Finance John O’Dowd has announced his intention to set up an AI working group in his department, and in Westminster, the Data (Use and Access) Bill and the Government’s upcoming AI Bill will govern how it is used across the UK.
Even before AI became ubiquitous, the workplace had undergone a dramatic transformation in recent years, driven by shifting employee priorities and an increasingly diverse workforce. With multiple generations in the mix, companies must adapt their environments to meet evolving expectations.
It can be easy to trace this all back to the Covid pandemic, but the truth is that the traditional nine-to-five office model was under threat long before the pandemic. By 2014, the 40-hour week in US labour data had been lengthened to 47 hours. In Northern Ireland, the average actual weekly hours worked increased from 33.1 per week to 33.5 in 2019, both of which were well ahead of UK averages.
For full-time workers, hours worked per week were the highest in the UK in 2019, with an average of 38.4 hours per week. Something was always likely to give, and since the pandemic, we have seen more people take on the same amount of work: full-time workers in Northern Ireland worked an average of 36.5 hours per week in quarter three of 2024, but the increasing size of the workforce meant that the 29.7 million cumulative hours worked per week were almost equal to the record high of quarter three 2019.
Where Covid did act as a turning point was for digital technologies, speeding up their adoption and allowing them to act as an enabler for those shorter working weeks. Years of underinvestment in digital infrastructure became evident, making employee connectivity a business imperative.
Leadership styles had to evolve and move from micromanagement to trust-based approaches. With employees working remotely and on flexible schedules, leaders were forced to focus on outcomes rather than oversight as platforms like Microsoft Teams and Zoom redefined how teams collaborate.
AI is simply the next step in workplace modernisation. While some fear it will lead to job displacement, the emergence of new roles suggests that technology is as much about creating opportunities as it is about disrupting existing ones.
Transformation requires continuous reskilling and seamless technology adoption, with resistance often stemming from poor implementation, rather than the technology itself. Even in tech-driven changes, human interaction is what proves vital and so it is leadership that is key rather than technological expertise. We adjust seamlessly to updates on our personal gadgets almost every day; implementing that mindset will make adoption intuitive and less disruptive.
To discuss any aspect, please contact Donal Laverty Consulting Partner E: donallaverty@bakertillymm.co.uk T: 028 9032 3466
This article first appeared in The Irish News on 13th May 2025.