https://darkoak.ie/posts/Recent content in Journal on Dark OakHugoen-ieWed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://darkoak.ie/posts/questions-before-hiring-ai-builder/Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://darkoak.ie/posts/questions-before-hiring-ai-builder/A practical list of eight questions an SME owner should put to any prospective AI-build vendor before signing — including ushttps://darkoak.ie/posts/ai-in-irish-professional-services/Tue, 14 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://darkoak.ie/posts/ai-in-irish-professional-services/What Irish accountancy, legal, consulting and surveying firms are actually doing with AI in late 2025, and what’s still mostly noisehttps://darkoak.ie/posts/eu-ai-act-for-irish-smes/Tue, 06 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://darkoak.ie/posts/eu-ai-act-for-irish-smes/A plain-English guide to what the EU AI Act actually means for typical Irish SME use cases — chatbots, copilots, document agents and hiring toolshttps://darkoak.ie/posts/year-of-ai-agents-what-worked/Tue, 14 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://darkoak.ie/posts/year-of-ai-agents-what-worked/An honest look back at a year of shipping production AI agents to Irish SMEs — the patterns that paid off, the ones that didn’t, and where we got it wronghttps://darkoak.ie/posts/custom-software-or-off-the-shelf/Sun, 22 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://darkoak.ie/posts/custom-software-or-off-the-shelf/A practical framework for deciding between SaaS, configuration, integration, or a custom build — written by a custom-software shop that often tells clients not to buildhttps://darkoak.ie/posts/simple-architecture-for-ai-agents/Tue, 18 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://darkoak.ie/posts/simple-architecture-for-ai-agents/A four-layer shape we keep coming back to when AI agents have to read and write against the ERP, the accounts package and the CRMhttps://darkoak.ie/posts/irish-manufacturing-smes-losing-hours/Sun, 10 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://darkoak.ie/posts/irish-manufacturing-smes-losing-hours/Five recurring manual-process bottlenecks we keep meeting on first calls with Irish factory operators, and what actually fixes themhttps://darkoak.ie/posts/software-priorities-for-irish-smes-2024/Fri, 15 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://darkoak.ie/posts/software-priorities-for-irish-smes-2024/Heading into 2024, five places where Irish small and medium businesses can actually move the needle with software — without buying anything called a ‘platform’