Ep 2 | Aerogen: AI Won’t Take Your Job, But It Will Redesign It

AI is already changing how work gets done. Does that mean people should feel excited, or threatened? In this episode of The Tomorrow People, host Deirdre Finnerty speaks with two senior leaders at one of Ireland’s fastest-growing medtech companies: Diarmuid Cullinan, who came up through industrial engineering and a decade in product management and now leads strategic manufacturing and process development at Aerogen, and Niamh Hall, who joined as the company’s ninetieth employee, with no IT department to join because she was the IT department, and now leads a team across IT, AI, cybersecurity and a new ERP programme. Diarmuid starts somewhere more practical: with what the engineering role itself now has to include. The fundamentals have not moved, the technical base, the curiosity, the disciplined problem solving. The boundaries around the job have. “It’s not good enough to know your engineering space and just focus on that. You have to know how it integrates with the wider organisation, back into R&D, out onto the production floor, into the digital systems you’re connecting to. … You can’t just be an engineer in the corner working on your single project.” Which leads to the uncomfortable question underneath it. If the narrow, self-contained work is the first thing the technology absorbs, what happens to the entry-level tasks through which people traditionally gained their experience? Niamh’s answer is the reassuring one. She has seen this twice before, and both times the panic was aimed at the job title rather than the work underneath it. “When Google came in, people said we don’t need an IT support desk any more. When cloud services came in, they said we wouldn’t need server or network engineers. They’re all still needed, it’s just designed differently. The job specs are redesigned.” Her real concern lies elsewhere: that people are backing away from technology and engineering courses because they have decided the jobs will not be there. Episode highlights: What AI actually changed on the ground, three months of work done in one, and what that costs Why the entry-level role is being redesigned rather than deleted, and how internal knowledge shares keep junior people in the room How a company that isn’t a household name still wins the people it wants The one skill Niamh worries about most, and it isn’t a technical one Whether the four-year degree still holds up, and why some of Aerogen’s best people don’t have one How sustainability targets are quietly pulling manufacturing into digitalisation, and what that asks of a mechanical engineer If you are building a career in engineering or technology, or building the team around one, this conversation will change how you think about the next five years. A huge thank you to our sponsor, Fenero, a multi-award-winning company specialising in financial success for contractors, freelancers, and solopreneurs. For more updates,  / hero-recruitment  , reach out to hello@hero.ie, or explore exciting job opportunities in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths): https://www.hero.ie/permanent/ and https://www.hero.ie/contracting/