FROM THE INDUSTRIAL TO THE IMAGINATIVE

Paul Byrne's deconstruction of AI and its impacts on licensing and professional regulation

The Registrar

Artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed numerous industries by enhancing operational efficiency, driving innovation, and enabling new business models.

In fact, AI was used to craft the introductory sentence above.

Including AI in workflows has sparked debate. The technology has slowly made its way forward in the regulatory sector, with regulators examining how to approach its use in operations. Paul Byrne, Executive Director of Regulatory Operations and Support Services at the Irish Medical Council, provides historical and contemporary insight on how AI could be applied in safe, legal, and ethical ways.

Distinct professional background

Byrne has helped advance regulatory developments for several years throughout his storied career. He was first introduced to regulatory environments and developed a fascination for using tech to optimize workflows, through his work at the Commission for Regulation of Utilities (CRU), where he worked multiple roles in customer complaints, regulatory policy, compliance and investigations.

Making a big career shift, Byrne decided to work in health. Before moving to his current role at the Irish Medical Council in 2023, he worked as head of registration for three years at CORU, Ireland’s regulator for health and social care professionals. It was an abnormal start to his tenure at CORU, as the COVID-19 pandemic had just taken the world by storm.

“I came in just 10 days before COVID-19,” Byrne recalls. “Within the first week [at CORU] I had to very quickly reconstitute how we did registration in 18 days, which normally takes an unlimited budget and 18 months. Since then, I brought in new technologies such as SaaS to help automate registration processes, a first for a European country, and placed a renewed refocus on quality management and technology.”

Byrne attended University College Dublin in 2023, and earned his diploma, with distinction, in AI. He continues to study the impact of AI on the regulatory sector, having presented at numerous international conferences on the impact of technology on frameworks involving regulation.

Ethical impact of AI

Byrne asserts that the rise of AI in recent years is a powerful force and compares it to other key moments in history when technology significantly impacted society. “In the late 18th century, employers brought in cotton milling technology, which eventually led to craftspeople revolting. The Industrial Revolution also demonstrated a shift in society’s response to integrating technology into [the consumer’s] life, but gradually allowed individuals to be reskilled.”

“The point of contention with AI is that this shift is happening in just 10 years, which will develop across every segment of society,” Byrne says. “How, then, do we rescale and retrain people to address this? I’m not sure there’s an immediate answer, and, with respect to regulation, our risk is that professionals will have to keep operating with updated skills and expertise in their practise.”

Byrne uses the example of COMPAS, or Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, a decision support tool used by U.S. courts to determine the likelihood of a defendant reoffending, to highlight the need for careful training of AI platforms to ensure objectivity in assessments of individual profiles. “It was found, through bias-training data, that it disproportionately biased towards certain ethnicities. This impacts people’s lives, and we need to look at these historical examples so that the same mistakes aren’t repeated, especially where the stakes are huge.”

Recently elected President-elect of the Council on Licensure, Enforcement and Regulation (CLEAR), Byrne also Chairs the organization’s Technology and Innovation Task Force. Despite his passion for AI in licensing and regulation, he notes that the rapid pace of AI development has outpaced short-term, solution-focused efforts by those advocating for regulation.

“We need to come up with a higher-level governance principle here,” Byrne says. “In my role at the Task Force, our team will be putting together a high-level approach to using AI, closer to Q4, which is rooted in ethics rather than the technological side of things.”

Paul Byrne will be one of two in-person keynote speakers at the AI in Licensing and Regulation Conference in Toronto, Canada on February 11, 2025.