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AI at Irish SMEs: Insights from The Irish Times, Buymedia & Coolplanet

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What to expect

Wondering how Irish companies are really using AI in production? This evening brings together data and engineering leaders from The Irish Times, Buymedia, and Coolplanet to share practical war stories about building AI-powered systems at scale in Irish SMEs — no hype, just honest technical discussions about what actually works in the real world.

Hosted by the Snowflake User Group Ireland, this meetup focuses squarely on production implementations: how these companies leverage Snowflake Cortex AI to solve concrete problems like parsing chaotic documents from hundreds of media sources, building personalised news recommendation engines with ethical constraints baked in, and collapsing sprint-long data engineering tasks into hours using AI-powered workflows.

What You'll Learn

Juliana Murphy from The Irish Times walks through building "For Me" — a hybrid news recommendation engine that balances personalisation with editorial integrity. She'll demonstrate the full technical pipeline: converting article text into 1,024-dimensional vector embeddings using Snowflake Cortex, building subscriber preference profiles from behavioural data, and orchestrating end-to-end recommendations entirely within the data warehouse. Crucially, she'll show how editorial curation and ethical constraints are embedded directly into the system architecture — not treated as afterthoughts.

Estella Roberts from Buymedia tackles a messier challenge: extracting structured data from documents across 400+ unique media sources, each with its own quirky formats and layout nightmares. Using Snowflake Cortex AI and CORTEX.COMPLETE, Buymedia transformed a manual, error-prone bottleneck into an automated native pipeline. Expect deep dives into the gnarliest edge cases and practical solutions for when unstructured documents refuse to cooperate.

Niall Magee from Coolplanet shares the journey from Google Sheets chaos to a production-grade modern data stack built on Fivetran, dbt, and Snowflake. The highlight: showing exactly how AI became a force multiplier, turning sprint-long tasks into hour-long workflows. He'll demonstrate the AI-driven build process — from plain-language brief to generated dbt models, semantic layers, and functional Streamlit dashboards.

Jenny Zhou from Snowflake demonstrates **Cortex

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