Networking for founders, creators, freelancers + rebels ⚡

Rebel Meet-up x Dublin AI Week: Real AI, Real Impact: Community Roundtables

Dublin AI Week is going to be full of hackathons, pitch competitions, panels, people building under pressure. All good stuff, but somewhere in that mix, nobody's actually just talking.
So in collaboration with Give(a)Go, this one's different. No stage, no slides, no pitch. Just a room full of small tables, each one hosted by a business owner from a different industry, having an honest conversation about how they're actually using AI day to day; what's working, what's not, what it's actually changed for their business.

The one thing every table agrees on: AI's a skill, not a replacement. It's helping people sell more, find more customers, work smarter, but the people running these businesses are still very much running them. That's the whole point.

If you're a founder, a freelancer, building something, or just curious about all this AI stuff and want real answers instead of hype, come pull up a chair. Grab a drink. Talk to someone doing the thing you're wondering about. That's it, that's the event.
No dress code. No sales pitches. Just people and real conversation.

Meet the hosts:
🎙️ James Flynn : Co-founder, Coso.ai. From competitive eSports to Salesforce engineer to building AI agents that already run social media for 30+ businesses.
🎙️ Craig Maguire : Country Manager, Office Hub Ireland. AI across flexible workspace strategy, marketing, and commercial real estate — an industry that's always run on relationships first.
🎙️ David Martin : Founder, BuyerRadar. 15+ years in B2B SaaS scaling revenue teams to $20M ARR, now building the tool that fixes sales' real problem — fragmentation — by mapping ICPs and buying committees.
🎙️ Aaron McCormack : Founder, NobleFlow. Works with owner-run businesses too busy to systemise themselves — finding where time and money leak out, then building the fix.
🎙️ Ashley Nichols : Founder & CEO, Familiar Futures. Her thesis: there's no AI skills gap, only a useful-to-me gap. Ex-digital transformation (Accenture, PwC, Booz Allen), former US diplomat, author of Tech to Save the World.
🎙️ James McLaughlin : Founder, AiceBreaker. Helping Irish SMEs govern AI usage, train teams, and adopt AI without losing the people-first approach that makes them work.
🎙️ Polina Ermolaeva : Product Owner and Change Practitioner at Accenture, and a specialist in AI-powered learning platform adoption and growth. A social and cognitive researcher with 15 years in academia, she now focuses increasingly on AI for Digital Humanities.
🎙️ Vita Pashkevich : An events, community and communications professional with 15+ years of experience bringing people together. She co-founded and grew a community of 2,000+ women in Ireland, has delivered 100+ workshops, panels and networking events, and builds practical AI programmes as a SheAI Ambassador. She also supports enterprise operations across EMEA within the Microsoft ecosystem, after a decade in television, journalism and digital production. Her focus is making AI practical, accessible and human-centred.
🎙️ Liana Anca Tomescu : Founder of SonnyLabs.ai, a Dublin-based company that acts as a security and oversight layer for AI agents, chatbots and assistants, protecting AI agents, MCP servers and chatbots from threats like prompt injection and data leaks. Its work is research-backed at University College Dublin. Liana also hosts the AI Hacks with Liana podcast on Spotify and YouTube, and was formerly at Microsoft.

This event is part of Dublin AI Week - check out the full week's lineup at dublinaiweek.com/events.