If James O’Connor had stuck with his original life plan, things would have been very different. The head of Microsoft’s Irish operations was originally planning to go to agricultural college, coming as he did from a farming family in Co Wexford. But a suggestion from a family friend steered him down a different path – to computer science in Carlow Institute of Technology, now known as South East Technological University, setting him up for a career with Microsoft.
It was something of a snap decision, but one that ultimately paid off.
“I made a choice within literally a week,” he says. “I’m the youngest of five. My brother was already home on the farm, so that wasn’t going to work out longer term. Carlow IT was my closest college, so I rang them up, did the interview and got on the course.”
Did his pivot cause any family tension at home? O’Connor says his father was happy that he moved to computer science.
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“My two brothers are farmers, but it’s a tough life and there’s an awful lot of things that you can’t control. I think he was happy that at least one of his sons was going in a different direction,” he says.
“I still have huge passion for farming; there’s an awful lot of joy in it. You can see the impact that you’re having every day, growing crops or taking care of animals, and it’s very community focused as well.”
His working life these days is very different. These days, he is the site lead for Microsoft Ireland, and the corporate vice-president of Microsoft Global Operations Service Centre. That means he oversees the company’s operations in Ireland, in addition to heading up the Microsoft Global Operations Service Centre that supports sales, regional revenue processing and optimising internal processes.
His first job out of college was with SKC (Stokes Kennedy Crowley), now part of KPMG, in their consulting team. That was, he says “incredible experience” but when a recruiter called about a potential job at Microsoft, O’Connor was intrigued.
It was 1993, two years before Windows 95 would hit the desktop and transform personal computing. O’Connor knew the company was working on big things.
“That weekend, I went out and made a big, expensive purchase of the Financial Times where there was a profile on Bill Gates,” he explains. “I saw his crazy mission about putting a PC on every desk. I had a sense this company was probably going to grow. It was at the leading edge of technology at that point.”
Several interviews later, O’Connor was officially a Microsoft employee and working as a systems analyst for the tech giant.
Microsoft was still in its early days in Ireland, having been set up in 1985 as a small manufacturing operation that employed fewer than 100 people. Things were growing quickly, and Ireland was one of its key international hubs.
“When we established here in 1985, the unemployment rate in Ireland was 17 per cent. The 1980s was a very, very tough period. That’s when I was coming out of secondary school, going into college. Most of the people I went to college with ended up going abroad. That was pretty much the norm then,” he says. “But my first week in the job and the first week in the company, when I felt the energy, the focus, the commitment, I knew that this is a company that’s innovating and investing, and bringing the best know-how.”
Today, Microsoft employs more than 4,000 people in Ireland. Add in the staff at Activision Blizzard King, LinkedIn (which Microsoft bought a decade ago) and data centres, and that comes to around 6,400. By the time the group celebrated its 40th anniversary in Ireland last year, it said it had contributed up to $40 billion (€34.4 billion) to the Irish economy.
[ Microsoft has contributed €4.9bn to Irish economy over past year, report findsOpens in new window ]
O’Connor has now been with Microsoft for more than three decades, working in a variety of roles across the company. That has meant balancing raising a family – O’Connor has three children, now largely grown up – with the demands of a career that spans international roles.
“I had a great mentor when I was in SKC and KPMG who I kept in contact with. He said to me once, when you get an opportunity, a big opportunity, particularly if it comes to career, it’s going to probably come at the worst time possible for you personally, it’s probably going to be daunting to you, but if you feel it is just something you could really take on, you can learn from, go for it. The best advice is just go for it.”
He describes his wife, Louise, a primary schoolteacher, as his “bedrock”.
“I could not have done what I’ve done in my career without Louise. We’re lucky to be in a position where she could give up work early on, when the kids were young and I was travelling a lot, I was working long hours,” he says. “It’s a joint effort in terms of my career along the way; I see this as a collective career.”
Since the early 1990s, the company has evolved from tech innovator to Big Tech behemoth. That original vision, a computer on every desk and in every home, has changed.
In 2002, the company’s mission became “to enable people and businesses throughout the world to realise their full potential”. Its current chief executive, Satya Nadella, said in 2015 that its mission had changed again to “empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more”.
Over the years, Microsoft’s operations in Ireland developed, moving from being a manufacturing hub for the tech giant to an operations centre. Sales, which had been managed at the UK subsidiary, were added to the Irish office along with localisation of products. Microsoft’s first data centre outside the US for cloud was also located in Ireland.
[ Microsoft president Brad Smith: ‘Our support for Ireland is steadfast’Opens in new window ]
A significant shift, however, was the decision to locate engineering staff in Ireland.
Instead of simply localising products here, they were being built in Ireland. More than 1,600 engineers are now based at the Irish hub, working on core products for the company, in particular its AI offerings across CoPilot, security, Azure and others.
“All the functions that are here are really facets of the broader Microsoft company. This is the most strategic hub internationally for Microsoft,” O’Connor says.
“We have, I think, a lot of proven capability that is very critical to the company right now. And the company keeps looking to us here in Ireland to basically be at the forefront of not just the technology innovation we’re going through, but how do we service our customers and how do we help them become frontier firms and transfer that.”
These days, Microsoft is throwing its resources behind artificial intelligence, investing billions in Open AI and integrating the technology into its productivity software. Dubbed CoPilot, the digital assistant has been the focus of Microsoft’s AI hopes.
All those functions required a hub. In 2018, Microsoft officially opened its €134 million, 34,000sq m campus in Co Dublin. One Microsoft Place in Leopardstown came with an LED waterfall and digital lake, an indoor “mountain” and a dedicated space for teaching the next generation about technology.
[ Microsoft in Ireland: How the tech giant has developed in four decadesOpens in new window ]
The dedicated learning facility at Microsoft’s Dublin campus, known as Dream Space, started out as a concept in Ireland, created locally by the leadership team. Microsoft invested an initial €5 million to launch the first physical Dream Space at its campus in 2018, followed by one in Belfast. It now serves as a global model, expanding to places such as the Netherlands and South America.
In Ireland alone, more than half a million students have been through Dream Space; O’Connor says the company hopes to continue that momentum.
“It just brings huge energy into the building as well,” he says. “The employees love engaging with the kids.”
As part of the anniversary celebrations, Microsoft said it would give Dream Space an additional €4 million in funding, and open a new Dream Space hub in Dublin’s Grange Castle to facilitate a more technical programme.
That has been further evolved to a broader programme called Skill Up Ireland, which is aimed at giving people across different age groups the digital and AI skills to progress their careers.
“This has to be a partnership between industry, government and education providers around how do we help people reskill, and get access to the right AI skills, help them embrace AI and get comfortable with it, but also helping them evolve their careers. Every job, every role right now, is evolving with AI.”
That includes O’Connor’s own role. He has embraced AI – you would imagine it is part of the job description, given Microsoft’s investment in the technology – using it to summarise key emails every morning, to distil large reports and to run a second eye over emails.
“I use CoPilot on my phone for everything. I don’t go to the search any more at all. I talk to Copilot a lot, which is a bit weird and people are looking at me,” he laughs. “I’m curious. When I see something or read something, and I want to understand more, I go to CoPilot.”
Despite fears that AI will take jobs from people, O’Connor doesn’t see it as a replacement.
“We call it CoPilot because you’re still a pilot. You still have to make the decision around what information AI is providing you. It’s really to help you reduce that mundane work, help you spend more time innovating and putting your own perspective around that as well,” he says.
“I would never let Copilot write a full email for me. I’ll use it to help me to craft it and get input. But at the end of the day, I’ve got to own that.”
O’Connor doesn’t see Microsoft’s commitment to the Irish operation changing, despite the focus of the current administration in the US to be “America first”. It was a sentiment echoed by Microsoft president Brad Smith last year when he accepted a special recognition award from IDA Ireland on behalf of the company.
But it is impossible to discount the impact of global shifts on the business.
Like many technology companies, Microsoft has shed jobs as the global “right-sizing” post-Covid led to a wave of job losses across the industry, starting in 2022.
In 2025, it announced it would cut 1,900 jobs across its video-game divisions, including at Activision Blizzard, which has offices in Dublin and Cork. By the end of the year, Microsoft Ireland had also trimmed jobs, cutting back 250 roles.
“I’ve gone through the four transformations of technology, and every time, there are implications, because roles change and evolve, and technology really enables that. You have to make decisions around where do you need to de-invest in some areas and reinvest in new areas.
“It’s always about how you create the new value for our customers and make sure we have the right people in the right roles to do that, where you have to make some of those more difficult decisions,” he says.
“As a leader, they’re among the toughest decisions you have to make. But at the same time, you know that it’s critical for our customers, it’s critical for us to stay competitive, it’s critical for us to innovate and to bring differentiated value. But we do that very carefully, we do it with a lot of thought and a lot of care and take care of those individuals.”
Despite the job cuts, O’Connor is clear: Microsoft is still hiring. There are 150 roles open on its website for the Dublin operation, and the company committed more than a year ago to hiring up to 550 people over a three to four-year period as part of its heavy investment in AI.
“There’s always going to be the evolution with roles but the strategic commitment to Ireland is long term and I don’t see that changing.
“We have to keep raising our game, and we have to keep innovating and have to bring more value to the company, as well as most importantly, to our customers. So if we keep doing that, I’m pretty optimistic about the future,” he says.
It has been, by most people’s measure, a stressful few years in the tech industry with a lot of change. As with many executives, Covid changed O’Connor’s work habits. He still travels, but is more selective about the frequency of those trips.
That leaves a bit more time for personal pursuits. Over Covid, he says, he learned how to swim – growing up on a farm in north Wexford didn’t give easy access to a swimming pool – and then got into sea swimming. He doesn’t do it as often these days, but he has kept in regular contact with a gym group he joined about 10 years ago.
“There’s a group of us who are called ‘the masters’. We get together four times a week,” he says. “That’s really what de-stresses me.”
Seeing the real-world impact of the company though is what keeps him engaged in the day-to-day job.
“When I see the impact of our technology in the classroom, when I see the impact of what AI is doing in cancer research and some of what our products are doing there, that’s honestly what gives me energy, that’s really what gets me out of bed in the morning,” he says.
“That’s probably what I’m most proud of. At the end of the day, this is having an impact on people around the world, and we want to empower them. We want to keep doing more of that.”
CV
Name: James O’Connor
Age: 57
Position: Site lead for Microsoft Ireland, and the corporate vice-president of Microsoft Global Operations Service Centre
Family: Married to Louise; they have three children.
Interests: He took up swimming during Covid and now sea swims when he can.
Something you might expect: He is passionate about computing, about software engineering and now AI. He uses AI day to day, mainly with Microsoft’s CoPilot.
Something that may surprise: He has a background in agriculture and nearly went to agricultural college instead of doing the computer science course that put him on track for his career in technology.
