Olga Mitropoulou, Bidvest Noonan’s Director of Risk & Compliance, shares her expert insight
AI regulation is maturing rapidly across both Ireland and the United Kingdom. Each jurisdiction is taking an ambitious but distinct approach to governance, oversight and digital transformation. Whether your organisation operates in one market or both, these developments matter, because they are changing compliance expectations.
My team and I are tracking how these evolving frameworks will shape both our own operations and the services we deliver. Here is what is happening, and what it means in practice.
Ireland: Building a Trusted Digital Regulatory Hub
Ireland’s updated National Digital and AI Strategy sets out 90 cross-government actions focused on digitalisation, AI governance and national capability building. Central to this is the full digitalisation of key public services by 2030, with 90% delivered online, alongside the creation of a national AI Office responsible for coordinating implementation of the EU AI Act and establishing an AI Regulatory Sandbox.
The strategy also introduces the Observatory for Business AI Readiness (OBAIR) and nationwide AI literacy and SME upskilling campaigns, as well as a new Cyber Security Research Centre of Excellence and enhanced resourcing of digital regulators. Ireland has seen surging AI adoption across industry, with 91% of organisations adopting AI by 2025 and major government investment in sectoral innovation and enterprise support.
For organisations operating in Ireland, this signals a clear move towards stronger compliance and greater transparency. With the new AI Office assuming central oversight, AI-enabled tools used in service delivery will face increased scrutiny and more detailed reporting obligations. The EU AI Act will require robust risk assessments, clear transparency and demonstrable human oversight for higher-risk applications. In regulated sectors in particular, there will be growing expectations around governance, accountability and data protection, with greater emphasis on strong supplier assurance and well-documented AI processes.
At the same time, these changes create real opportunities. National AI literacy initiatives and insights from OBAIR will help organisations and their partners adopt AI responsibly. Participation in regulatory sandboxes and government-supported pilots opens the door to exploring innovative technologies across security, facilities management, automation and workforce management.
The United Kingdom: Strengthening Oversight of Advanced AI
The UK continues to deliver on its long-term National AI Strategy, but recent policy shifts signal a significant move towards stronger regulation, particularly for high-risk and frontier AI systems. The AI Opportunities Action Plan is accelerating AI adoption, increasing compute capacity and targeting the upskilling of 10 million workers by 2030.
A proposed Frontier AI Bill would give the AI Safety Institute (now the AI Security Institute) statutory powers to require testing, technical documentation and pre-market oversight of advanced AI systems. Sector-specific regulation is being reinforced, aligned to a principles-based framework but increasingly backed by binding duties. There is also a renewed focus on AI-enabled cyber threats, advanced model evaluation and national security considerations. The direction of travel is visible in specific sectors. The UK Government’s recent policing White Paper commits £115 million over three years to the responsible adoption of AI across all 43 police forces in England and Wales, including the creation of a National Centre for AI in Policing (Police.AI) and a public register of AI tools in use. This is a clear example of AI governance moving from principles into operational reality, with structured testing, oversight and transparency requirements built in from the outset.
For organisations in the UK, this evolving landscape means preparing for enhanced due diligence of AI suppliers, more stringent technical assurance and ongoing model monitoring obligations. The expanded focus on AI safety and cyber-risk research highlights the importance of strengthening cybersecurity posture, especially where AI tools support physical security, monitoring or decision-support services. AI procurement will need to align increasingly with strict threat-modelling standards as the emphasis on preventing AI-enabled cyberattacks and misuse grows.
What This Means for Organisations
Regardless of jurisdiction, the direction of travel is consistent: expectations around AI governance, supply chain transparency and demonstrable compliance are rising. Organisations that rely on outsourced services are increasingly being asked to show that their partners meet robust standards for responsible AI use, data protection and cyber resilience.
Contractual requirements are becoming more demanding. Regulatory reporting is intensifying. And the question of whether your service providers can evidence their AI governance arrangements is moving from a nice-to-have to a fundamental part of supplier assurance.
How Bidvest Noonan Is Responding
We are integrating EU AI Act obligations and UK oversight expectations into our internal governance, ensuring our organisation and our customers benefit from services that are compliant by design. This includes structured AI impact assessments, supplier assurance, human-oversight measures and clear documentation to support client audits and regulatory reporting.
Both Ireland and the UK emphasise cybersecurity in their strategies, and our teams are prioritising enhanced cyber resilience, data governance practices, and robust incident response readiness. As national strategies invest heavily in AI upskilling and digital capability building, we are also working with clients to identify safe and high-value use cases in automation, analytics, workforce management and service optimisation.
Looking Ahead
Ireland and the UK are both setting ambitious, forward-looking agendas for digitalisation and AI governance. For organisations in every sector, this translates to rising expectations around trust, transparency, security and compliance.
At Bidvest Noonan, we are committed to ensuring that every solution we deliver aligns with these evolving standards. We are strengthening our AI governance framework, embedding rigorous compliance controls and proactively supporting our customers through regulatory change, reinforcing our role as a trusted, innovative and resilient service partner in an increasingly digital world.