I got a million or so, which was great. I was over the moon<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
That worked spectacularly: Demonware went on to be acquired for \u20ac17m by Activision five years later. For twenty-somethings, it must have seemed like a lot of money. But Blanchfield said it wasn\u2019t life-changing.<\/p>\n
\u201cFrom my end of it, I got a million or so, which was great. I was over the moon, even if wasn\u2019t retirement money,\u201d Blanchfield said.<\/p>\n
\u201dAt the time we sold, we felt we had to because we didn\u2019t have many other options. It was 2007. The bubble hadn\u2019t burst yet, but we were still in Ireland and Ireland was in Europe and there was no follow-on capital available,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
There wasn\u2019t the idea of, say, taking the player accounts we had in our database across all platforms and doing something more interesting with it, like trying to build Steam or a major distribution platform for PC games. I think we could have done that. We had that idea, but we couldn\u2019t see a way to capitalise it.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe sold it because it was the right thing to do for the company. But if we had that today, with the 300 million player accounts in a database, knowing who they played with and what they liked to play and how good they were at every game, it would be a unicorn. It was a social network without a user interface.\u201d<\/p>\n
A few years later, Blanchfield founded PageFair with Brian McDonnell and Neil O\u2019Connor, a company set up to help companies seeing ads being blocked online. It was acquired by a Canadian company, Blockthrough, in 2018, but didn\u2019t have the kind of financial success of Demonware.<\/p>\n
After that, he hunkered down during the pandemic but by 2022, \u201cthe start-up itch had returned and it was time to go again\u201d.<\/p>\n
He became an \u2018entrepreneur in residence\u2019 in Dog Patch Labs in Dublin.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat basically means I got to hang around the place and advise other companies while trying to cook up my next thing, which suited me\u201d, Blanchfield said.<\/p>\n
\nI was going through my list of 50 ideas and I just crossed them all off<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\u201cI was there about a year-and-a-half, a period that overlapped with the launch of ChatGPT. So I started playing with that and working with other start-ups in Dogpatch Labs and the National Digital Accelerator program and thinking, \u2018okay, how does this change the whole nature of software?\u2019 How does this change the nature of starting a company?<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you\u2019re a software entrepreneur, what are you to do? I was going through my list of 50 ideas and I just crossed them all off one by one because, in an age of AI, none of them made sense because AI had taken over.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe spent 15 years building SaaS [software as a service] applications, that live in the cloud. That makes sense if the human is doing the work. But in an AI age, we\u2019re building an agent that\u2019s going to try to directly connect to the database or the data sources and do the work.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat agent doesn\u2019t need a SaaS application, doesn\u2019t need the user interface and doesn\u2019t need its hand held to go use a computer. It is a computer.\u201d<\/p>\n
These thoughts led him to thinking about what would become Jentic, a new start-ups to help control what AI can access and how to use it efficiently in big businesses.<\/p>\n
\u201cLet\u2019s say that you\u2019ve got a company and you\u2019ve got all kinds of software systems in there,\u201d Blanchfield said.<\/p>\n
\u201dYou\u2019ve got accounting software, you might have email, you might have Microsoft Office, you might have a couple of other bits of common software.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you\u2019re a big company, it\u2019s more complicated. You have your own software. You have stuff that\u2019s running on your own servers, stuff you\u2019ve built up over time, bespoke software that maybe could be 30 years old or more. This is how your business actually runs. So for you, AI is a nice chat bot like Copilot, that kind of runs out of steam in terms of its usefulness pretty quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n
To get to the real work, he said, is a lot messier. \u201cLet\u2019s say a customer emails looking for a refund or they want to cancel an order that you shipped,\u201d Blanchfield said.<\/p>\n
\u201dA human operator would probably look that up and say, who is this customer? What did they buy? And they\u2019d look that up in some logistics system to determine whether it was shipped or not and whether it could be cancelled, whether it had left the warehouse, all of that workflow.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow if you want AI to automate that, you have to hook it, the AI, up to all those systems. That means CRM, the billing system, the logistics system, the inventory system. And that\u2019s difficult. You want a central switchboard that all of this flows through when it\u2019s communicating, not just lots of point-to-point connections. If you don\u2019t have it in a managed way, you have no way to observe or to govern it, to say what happened or why something went wrong.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can\u2019t even begin to approach being compliant. And security is out the window. So the answer is that you need a system in the middle, so that if you have AI hooking up to your systems, it all runs through this one chokepoint where you provide access and you can govern the access. So you can say what happened and you can prevent bad things from happening, like the wrong kind of system getting access to stuff that it shouldn\u2019t have.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/0a77441e-0c16-4630-b90d-4569b3920cd6.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
The team behind Jentic: Sean Blanchfield, Tilman Schaefer, Dorothy Creaven and Michael Cordner<\/p>\n
One of the reasons for all of this, Blanchfield said, is \u2018data sovereignty\u2019. This is the notion that things are moving so quickly, with platforms hoovering up so much, that a premium is will grow on having total control of your own stuff.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you move forward with your AI automations and do it in this format [through a central control point], you\u2019re not just giving your business processes to Sam Altman or into any of the other platforms that will happily allow you to put your business logic into them and they\u2019ll run it for you,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn two or three years time, we\u2019ll be looking at this and it\u2019ll be very important if you\u2019re in business that you actually have your own business logic under your control. Because if you don\u2019t, what do you actually have? You\u2019re just reselling someone else\u2019s product.\u201d<\/p>\n
As for the impact AI is having on jobs and industry, Blanchfield is not in any doubt there is a wave of automation on the way, rarely seen in the jobs market.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t actually code per se anymore,\u201d he said. \u201cWe just go in and debug and check stuff. AI has taken up the reins of the actual writing of the code.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe question of what it should write, the architecture and seeing if it\u2019s all fitting together is still a human activity for now. But sitting down there on the keyboard and typing the code in is not something that people are doing anymore.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs software engineers, we\u2019re automating our own work first. The coding agents are the most advanced agents that are out there and it\u2019s surprising what you can get them to do, right? I think you can kind of look at software engineering for the leading indicators of what\u2019s coming in every other field.\u201d<\/p>\n
Like other AI-adjacent founders, Blanchfield worries about Europe trying to over-regulate AI and missing out on opportunities for companies here.<\/p>\n
\u201cI managed to read 200 pages of the [Mario] Draghi report last Christmas,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt wasn\u2019t what I expected. It\u2019s absolutely scathing of the EU and this is an EU commissioned report. It really calls out the EU AI Act and the comparison I think it made was that Europe essentially missed out on digitisation with the web. In the mid 1990s, European GDP and US GDP were approximately the same.<\/p>\n
\u201cSince then, American GDP has soared ahead. All of the big tech companies are American. We didn\u2019t build them here. Instead, what we do here is that we buy their technology. In Europe we spend something like \u20ac270bn a year on American cloud software, which is a result of that. And it\u2019s all about to happen again.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd what are we doing? We\u2019re trying to regulate it before we can even clearly say what we think it is. I\u2019m not against regulation, by the way, I\u2019m not one of those guys. I actually really like the GDPR. We do need regulation. But this one is unclear.<\/p>\n
All of which destabilises Irish and European prospects, Blanchfield said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt seems to me that it\u2019s clearly China versus America leading the race here,\u201d he said. \u201cWhoever wins this really wins a lot of the future. Europe thinks it\u2019s at that table. I don\u2019t think that it\u2019s in the building. I think probably India is the next to get to that table. Europe is not being real right now.\u201d<\/p>\n
What does Ireland need to do? Do we have any role in this discussion or what happens next?<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are a few things,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not sure we\u2019re doing them. Energy is one piece. We are very good at data centres. A disproportionate amount of the global cloud runs out of Ireland. We can do the same for AI. It needs to run somewhere, but we\u2019ve walked ourselves into the situation where we need to choose it or houses, which is ridiculous.<\/p>\n
\u201cThen you could talk about regulation. Obviously we have a national competency of being seen as a pragmatic location to base yourself, to be regulated if you\u2019re going to address the European market. I don\u2019t think we\u2019re going to produce the actual foundational models from Ireland, or catch up with the bigger companies that are leading that.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut we do have this very interesting economy where we have all of these global companies concentrated in this small society, where we all know each other and we all talk to each other. Big Pharma and Big Tech are on our doorstep. Banking and insurance clusters are here, too.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis can be a place where we can connect AI into those companies and lead at the applied edge of it. And that\u2019s the side of it that we\u2019re trying to lead into in Jentic.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo if not quite a vacuum, there\u2019s certainly an opportunity for us here, given our history, context and position. And I think it\u2019s incredibly important.\u201d<\/p>\n
.\u2026.<\/p>\n
This article was updated on Feb 5th 2026 to clarity a reference to the financial crash in 2008.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On the back of the cover was a small logo saying Demonware, the company he co-founded in Dublin,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":328197,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[261],"tags":[15807,291,289,3498,290,297,381,18,4893,10890,19,17,305,13028,82,455,1543,13031],"class_list":["post-328196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-adrian-weckler","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificial-intelligence-ai","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-chatgpt","tag-china","tag-eire","tag-eu","tag-gdpr","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-microsoft","tag-playstation","tag-technology","tag-technology-news","tag-usa","tag-xbox"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116040782549006316","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=328196"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328196\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/328197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=328196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=328196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=328196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}