Top 10 AI Prompts and Use Cases and in the Government Industry in Ireland

Ireland is ramping up a practical, trust-first approach to AI across government: the refreshed National AI Strategy and the Minister's statement set clear goals - aligning with the EU AI Act, prioritising SME-friendly sandboxes and skills, and doubling supports such as the LEO Grow Digital Voucher to €5,000 to accelerate adoption; meanwhile agencies like Revenue are already using LLMs and predictive analytics to lift query routing from 70% to 98% and to draft manuals and spot legislative loopholes, showing how AI can both streamline services and reveal new risks.

That blend of innovation, regulation and upskilling (with a national push to reach 75% cloud/AI adoption by 2030) means practical training matters: public servants and suppliers can follow policy and tool best practices in the government statement and Revenue case studies, while workers can build workplace-ready AI skills via courses such as Nucamp AI Essentials for Work bootcamp to write better prompts, apply AI responsibly, and turn pilots into real public value.

Bootcamp	Length	Early bird cost	Registration
AI Essentials for Work	15 Weeks	$3,582	Register for AI Essentials for Work - view syllabus

“AI is here, and it is Here for Good.”

Selection for the Top 10 prompts and use cases followed a practical, policy‑aligned filter: priority went to ideas that match the Irish National AI Strategy's public‑sector objectives - improving services, boosting productivity and building capacity - while also respecting the new responsible AI guidance coming from government circles; see the Irish National AI Strategy and recent responsible AI guidelines for public sector workers.

Emphasis was placed on

learning by doing

pilots already visible across departments (for example, transcription, translation and MyGovID chatbot proofs of concept), risk‑based adoption paths, measurable productivity gains, and cases that accelerate GovTech procurement and civil service upskilling.

low‑to‑medium risk prompts that deliver quick wins for citizens and staff, use existing secure tooling where possible, and embed human oversight and data‑protection checks so a prompt can move from pilot to policy‑ready without raising ethical or legal red flags.

Selection criterion	Evidence source
Alignment with national strategy and public‑service goals	OECD / National AI Strategy
Conformance with responsible use & guidance	Pinsent Masons – government guidelines
Demonstrated departmental pilots and low‑risk wins	eolas Magazine survey of departments
Training and implementability	AI Ireland training catalog & AI Watch public sector dimension

Policy teams in Ireland - including the Department of Public Expenditure - will increasingly shape bills and guidance around AI by working from the EU's risk‑based playbook: the AI Act's tiered rules mean that a conversational chatbot may only need transparent labelling, while an automated benefits‑eligibility or CV‑screening tool sits squarely in the “high‑risk” bucket and must meet data‑governance, logging and human‑oversight requirements before deployment; the Act even gives practical tools such as an online High-level summary of the AI Act and a fast Compliance Checker to spot obligations.

Practical next steps for legislative analysis include mapping which public systems fall under Annex III, building conformity‑assessment templates, and using the Commission's governance resources - the new AI Office, AI Board and scientific panel will guide Member States on implementation - while national regulators prepare the Article‑57 regulatory sandboxes that must be available for innovators by the 2026 milestones.

The message for drafters: think in lifecycle terms (training data, documentation, post‑market monitoring) so a policy or procurement clause prevents a well‑meaning pilot from becoming an expensive non‑compliance case.

Regulatory compliance in Ireland starts with a clear, evidence-led triage: run your use case through an interactive EU AI Act Compliance Checker to see whether your system is in scope, then map it to the Act's risk tiers so you know which rules apply;

this matters because “high‑risk” public‑sector tools bring strict duties - quality management, exhaustive logging, technical documentation, human oversight and conformity assessments - while even limited‑risk assistants must meet transparency and traceability requirements.

Practical resources such as the IAPP's EU AI Act Compliance Matrix help teams convert legal text into roles and controls, and checklists from industry practitioners show the operational steps (data lineage, post‑market monitoring, incident reporting) that prevent small pilots becoming big liabilities - non‑compliance can trigger fines up to €35,000,000 or 7% of global turnover, so a missing audit trail is not just messy, it's costly.

Irish deployers should pair the interactive checker with the Commission's implementation timeline to prioritise actions now (AI literacy, inventories, and logging) and build governance that survives model updates and procurement cycles.

Date	Key milestone
Feb 2025	Ban on unacceptable‑risk systems; AI literacy requirement takes effect
Aug 2026	Full enforcement for Annex III high‑risk systems (conformity assessments, logging, oversight)
Aug 2027	Final provisions of the AI Act come into force

Revenue's practical, cautious rollout of agentic automation offers a blueprint for benefits casework: routing and triage that jumped from roughly 70% to as much as 98% accuracy show how free‑text intake plus LLM‑assisted routing can put claims and enquiries with the right team faster, while RevAssist's confined knowledge‑base and call‑summary tools speed staff workflows without exposing data to external models - see the Global Government Forum report on Revenue's work and the RevAssist case study in eolas Magazine.

That mix of predictive analytics, document extraction (even OCR for receipts) and concise draft generation can shave weeks off benefits processing cycles, but the Government's public‑service AI guidance warns against unmanaged, public GenAI and stresses human sign‑off, transparency and bias checks so automation augments decisions rather than replaces necessary judgement; the new guidelines set the guardrails for any agentic assistant deployed in benefits casework.

Metric	Value / note
RevAssist live	Since June 2024
Tax & duty manuals	~1,500
Taxes & duties covered	~75
Query processing success (NLP)	94–97% (improved from ~45–65%)
Phone calls per year	~2.5 million

“With great data comes great responsibility, and it's critical for us that we keep the trust of the community and of taxpayers.”

Clear, plain-language communications are the linchpin of effective citizen engagement for the Government Communications Office: practical steps - organising information around the reader, using white space, headings and bullet points, and keeping sentences to about 15–20 words - make guidance more scannable and usable, especially when services must reach everyone, including non‑native speakers; the National Adult Literacy Agency notes plain English saves time and money and highlights that about 1 in 5 adults in Ireland struggle with reading and understanding information, so clearer copy reduces calls and complaints while boosting trust (NALA plain English guidance for clear government communications).

Public‑sector teams can get ahead of incoming plain‑language rules by attending tailored workshops and practical courses that update website text, forms and letters for accessibility and multilingual outreach - see the Plain English for the Public Sector workshop page - so digital notices, translations and chatbots actually help citizens find and act on the right information first time.

For Ireland's National Cyber Security Centre and procurement teams, AI‑driven anomaly detection is rapidly moving from nice‑to‑have to mission‑critical: procurement fraud - from bid‑rigging and pass‑through contracts to “stair‑stepped” invoice schemes - can be unearthed by combining link analysis, peer‑grouping and real‑time monitoring so suspicious networks and collusion show up long before payment runs.

Practical playbooks emphasise a hybrid approach - rules to catch obvious cases, ML and ensemble models to spot subtle collective anomalies, and link analysis to reveal hidden relationships - a mix that recent research found especially effective in public procurement contexts (EPJ Data Science article on procurement fraud detection).

Vendors and teams should prioritise real‑time pipelines and data observability so a sudden spike in near‑identical invoices or an unusual cluster of vendor addresses is treated like a red flag, not an after‑the‑fact curiosity (see practical anomaly‑detection steps and monitoring advice in the Sigma Computing guide to detecting data anomalies and the SAS primer on preventing procurement fraud).

The vivid payoff is simple: catch a ring of fraudulent bids or a collusive vendor chain early, and a potential multi‑million euro loss becomes a single, investigable alert rather than a national scandal.

Technique	Role / Evidence
Ensemble methods	Top performance for procurement anomaly & collusion detection (EPJ Data Science)
Link analysis	Reveals vendor relationships and collusion (SAS)
Real‑time monitoring	Detects anomalies before impact; reduces false positives with layered checks (Sigma)

Data quality and interoperable platforms are becoming the backbone of Ireland's AI-ready public service: the Public Service Data Strategy provides the practical blueprint - 13 themes from interoperability platforms and base registries to trusted identifiers and records management - so a Chief Data Officer can turn scattered datasets into reliable decision‑support assets that drive better policy and services (and honour the once‑only principle so citizens stop re‑submitting the same data).

Irish organisations are being urged to give the CDO a seat at the senior table to balance governance with value creation (EY article: Why Irish organisations need a Chief Data Officer), and the HSE's new Chief Data & Analytics Officer shows the model in action by bringing Integrated Information Systems and the AI & Automation COE under a single CDAO function to improve health data quality and reuse (HSE announcement: Welcoming our first Chief Data & Analytics Officer (CDAO)).

Practical next steps for public bodies include appointing named data leads, implementing the Data Sharing & Governance Act playbooks, and prioritising interoperable APIs and trusted identifiers so data works for people - and for policy - across the National Development Plan alignment.

Theme	Example action
Interoperability Platform	Develop a Data Interoperability Platform (Public Service Data Strategy)
Trusted Identifiers	Promote roll‑out and adoption of PSC, MyGovID and Eircode
Governance & Standards	Establish Data Governance Board and standards aligned with GDPR Article 40

To ensure high-quality health data that can drive value for all of the people who need to use and access data within our health system, while ensuring the right tools and insights are available to all our services and staff to manage this data for the benefit of patients, staff and our services.

Preparing the public service for real-world AI starts with practical, role‑based learning: from Microsoft Ireland's free 6‑week “Introduction to AI” (live virtual sessions, a digital badge and pathways to Professional Certificates) to bespoke, hands‑on courses aimed at public servants through AI Ireland that cover ethical governance, data security and service‑focused implementations, the training ecosystem in Ireland already maps neatly to the EU's new literacy duties under Article 4 of the AI Act.

Senior leaders can choose concise, strategic options such as the IPA's one‑day Artificial Intelligence Masterclass to get board‑level clarity on governance and risk, while department teams can opt for longer applied tracks that move from awareness to tool‑specific fluency - Microsoft's Dream Space even aims to reach almost 1,000,000 students with foundational AI lessons, a vivid reminder that literacy spans the workforce and the classroom.

The practical “so what?” is simple: tiered, documented training (foundational for all staff, advanced for technical teams and targeted workshops for decision‑makers) turns legal obligations into everyday skills, reduces risk and helps pilots scale into compliant, value‑adding services in the Irish public sector.

Program	Format / Length	Key fact / source
Microsoft Ireland 6-week "Introduction to AI" course (Skill Up Ireland)	6 weeks, live virtual	Free course, digital badge, pathway to Professional Certificate; part of Skill Up Ireland
Institute of Public Administration Artificial Intelligence Masterclass for Senior Public Service Leaders	1 day, in‑person	Scheduled dates Sept & Nov 2025; fee €460; strategic governance focus
AI Ireland Public Sector AI Training (ethical governance, privacy, implementation)	Bespoke modules (intro, ethics, implementation)	Hands‑on, role‑tailored courses covering governance, privacy and efficiency

Bringing service design and demand prediction together turns reactive rostering into a practical, preventative tool for Irish health services: by adopting app‑based, on‑demand staffing with predictive analytics - so schedules self‑adjust to day‑of‑week, seasonality and local events - you reduce last‑minute gaps, overtime and burnout while keeping care flowing (see best practices for app‑based staffing with predictive analytics).

Pairing that with call‑analytics to forecast volume spikes gives planners an early warning system so peaks look like predictable swells rather than crises, and integrating driver‑based and scenario planning methods keeps budgets and bed capacity aligned to demand (learn more about call analytics for forecasting and top forecasting methods for 2025).

Practical rollouts start small - pilot templates by unit, involve schedulers early, track KPIs (overtime, FTEs, patient‑to‑staff ratios) and iterate - because forecasting is a journey, not a once‑off change; done well, it turns staffing from a cost centre into a stabiliser that protects both patient care and staff wellbeing.

Transparency and explainability are non‑negotiable for any Irish public body using high‑risk AI: the EU AI Act's classification rules set a clear starting line (see EU AI Act Article 6 classification rules) and the high‑level summary explains that providers and deployers must embed risk‑management, data governance, technical documentation and human‑oversight across the model lifecycle so decisions are auditable and traceable (see the EU AI Act high-level summary of requirements).

Practically this means documenting any assessment that a system isn't high‑risk before deployment, running fundamental‑rights impact checks, keeping event logs for post‑market monitoring and producing explainability reports that translate model behaviour into plain, actionable reasons for affected people.

But explainability has limits and hazards too: researchers warn of an

AI transparency paradox

where explanations can be misleading, manipulated or even help attackers replicate models - think the night‑club bouncer analogy used to show how a plausible justification can hide the real reason for a decision (Explainability of artificial intelligence systems: requirements and limits).

The takeaway for Ireland's public sector is simple: audits and explainability reports must be rigorous, contextual and routine so bias mitigation is demonstrable, explanations are meaningful to people, and nowhere is

black‑box AI

left to speak for itself.

Crisis teams in Ireland must treat synthetic media as an operational risk, not a novelty: practical, machine‑speed detection and narrative monitoring belong in any modern media‑monitoring toolkit so that a viral manipulated clip or impersonated executive can be flagged, contextualised and escalated before it becomes a national story.

Hands‑on training - like AI Ireland's 3‑hour “DeepFake Analysis and Detection” workshop with a 45‑minute practical detection exercise - gives public‑sector communicators and verification teams the forensic skills to spot artefacts and run tool‑assisted checks (AI Ireland DeepFake Analysis and Detection workshop).

At the same time, deployers need scalable verification and audit trails to meet emerging compliance pressures: automated vision+context systems can score, document and surface provenance so decisions are evidence‑backed and regulators can see the chain of custody (Blackbird AI: deepfake detection and EU AI Act compliance).

The stakes are tangible - precision attacks have already cost firms tens of millions - so the “so what?” is clear: integrate detection, train staff with practical exercises, and tie alerts to verified escalation channels so misinformation is a manageable incident, not an existential crisis.

“Audio and visual cues are very important to us as humans, and these technologies are playing on that.” - Rob Greig, Arup CIO

For beginners in the Irish public sector the next steps are pragmatic and sequential: start by checking whether your use case falls under EU rules (use the interactive EU AI Act tools and the government's risk‑based guidance already discussed), pair that legal triage with a tiny, low‑risk pilot (think routing, call summaries or OCR extraction) and document every decision so audits and explainability reports are straightforward to produce; parallel to pilots, invest in role‑based AI literacy so staff can write safer prompts, spot bias and apply human oversight - practical courses like Nucamp's Nucamp AI Essentials for Work bootcamp teach exactly these workplace skills - and borrow the IAA's disciplined approach to forms and training (see the IAA's Irish Aviation Authority Personnel Licensing report forms) as a model for clear documentation.

The goal is simple: small, documented wins that protect citizens and build confidence - each one a repeatable template for the next, larger system.

Bootcamp	Length	Early bird cost	Registration
AI Essentials for Work	15 Weeks	$3,582	Register for Nucamp AI Essentials for Work | AI Essentials for Work syllabus