82% of speaking slots at Ireland AI summit held by corporate executives, civil society absent

Tech Policy Press analysis found that 37 of the 45 speaking slots (82%) on the official agenda of the International AI Summit in Dublin next week are held by executives from corporations or business groups, with the remaining 8 going to three European Commissioners, the Irish Prime Minister, three Irish government ministers, and one trade union representative, with no civil society organizations or academics on the agenda. The summit is hosted by Ireland during its presidency of the Council of the European Union, with US AI companies such as Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI receiving major speaking slots, while Meta, IBM, Intel, Nvidia, Amazon, Anthropic, AMD, as well as Stripe, SAP, and Mistral also appear on panel discussions. The summit coincides with the EU's final-stage negotiations on the Digital Omnibus, a package that would amend digital rules including the GDPR, which critics call deregulation. In July, Irish trade unions publicly criticized the summit for lacking worker representation, and the organizers subsequently added a 10-minute speaking slot for the Communications Workers Union (CWU).