TL;DR

Northern Ireland is doing well out of the physical build-out of AI and less well out of its software. Firms supplying data centre electrical systems and storage are recruiting at pace in the north west, while Belfast back-office operations at two US employers absorb cuts justified by AI. One economist puts around 60,000 jobs in the region at high risk from automation.

The hardware side is booming

At Ballykelly, TES makes the electrical systems that data centres depend on, and has just been bought by the French industrial group Legrand. Michael Beagan, who runs the plant, calls the expansion astronomical: a site that began four years ago with two people now employs about 175, with an apprenticeship pipeline being set up through North West Regional College at Limavady. Nearby, Seagate’s Derry plant has effectively sold its hard drive output through to 2028, giving its 1,500 staff some stability after redundancies in 2024. Over the border at Letterkenny, Vertiv is adding 300 posts.

The office side is not

The contrast sits a hundred miles away in Belfast. Baker McKenzie put roughly 500 people into a business services centre there in 2014 — precisely the sort of operation that has driven employment growth in the region for a decade. In February the firm began a review built around its use of AI that could remove as many as 1,000 support posts worldwide, of which about 50 are in Belfast. Rapid7, a cybersecurity firm whose Belfast engineering centre holds upwards of 500 staff, is cutting around 12% globally to fund an AI-first platform, implying roughly 60 local roles.

Set against the 620,000 people now in private sector work across the region — a record — those figures are small. The direction is the point. Dr Lisa Wilson, who has been modelling automation exposure since 2019, put about 7% of jobs in the region at high risk and a further 58% at risk of their tasks changing substantially — an estimate she is about to revise.

Looking forward

Stormont’s economy department points to the £16.3m Artificial Intelligence Collaboration Centre, a joint Ulster University and Queen’s venture whose director David Crozier says it has worked with manufacturers and design firms rather than just software start-ups, alongside Assured Skills Academies and a new ministerial advisory panel. It also confirms involvement in the AI strategy for the public sector now out for consultation. The awkward arithmetic is that the strategy proposes automating exactly the kind of administrative work Belfast has spent a decade selling to international employers.