28 January 2025
By Roger Kennedy
roger@TheCork.ie
Business News
Businesses across Cork and Munster increasingly recognise that standing out online requires more than a functional website and occasional social media posts. The companies gaining ground in their markets combine visual storytelling through animation with practical staff training in artificial intelligence tools. This combination, once reserved for large corporations with substantial budgets, has become accessible to SMEs through partnerships with specialist agencies across Ireland.
ProfileTree, a Belfast-based digital agency serving clients throughout Ireland and the UK, has observed Cork businesses adopting animation and AI training at rates that would have seemed unlikely three years ago. The agency, which has completed over 1,000 projects since its founding in 2011, operates alongside specialist divisions focused specifically on animation production and business training.
This shift reflects broader changes in how customers find and evaluate businesses. Search engines increasingly surface video content in results. AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity recommend businesses based on clarity of information and quality of content. Companies without compelling visual assets or staff capable of using modern tools find themselves invisible to these emerging discovery channels.
The relationship between Cork and Northern Ireland digital services continues to strengthen. As previously reported by TheCork.ie, Munster businesses have discovered that Belfast agencies offer sophisticated digital strategies with practical, results-focused implementation. This cross-border collaboration has expanded beyond web design and SEO into animation production and structured AI training programmes.
Animation: Making Complex Ideas Simple
Animation has moved from entertainment luxury to business necessity. Cork businesses selling technical products, professional services, or complex solutions find that animated explainer videos communicate their value proposition more effectively than text or static images.
Educational Voice, a Belfast animation studio led by Michelle Connolly, specialises in 2D educational and commercial animations. The studio has produced over 4,300 educational animations now available through LearningMole, demonstrating production capacity that serves both individual business clients and large-scale educational distribution.
“Animation allows businesses to show rather than tell,” says Ciaran Connolly, founder of ProfileTree. “A Cork manufacturer can demonstrate how their machinery works. A financial services firm can explain a complex pension product. A healthcare provider can walk patients through a procedure. These explanations would take thousands of words in text form, but sixty seconds of animation makes them immediately clear.”
The economics work particularly well for Irish SMEs. A professional animated explainer video typically costs between €2,000 and €8,000, depending on complexity and length. Compare this to the ongoing expense of sales staff repeatedly explaining the same concepts, or the lost opportunities when website visitors leave confused about what a business actually offers.
Cork businesses in sectors ranging from food production to technology services have commissioned animations that serve multiple purposes: website homepage features, social media content, trade show displays, investor presentations, and staff training materials. One video asset generates returns across numerous applications.
Educational Voice’s Belfast location offers practical advantages for Cork clients. Similar time zones enable real-time collaboration. Geographic proximity allows face-to-face meetings when projects require detailed briefings. And Northern Ireland’s position serving both UK and Irish markets means the studio understands cross-border business contexts that purely domestic agencies might miss.
Educational Resources for Staff Development
Staff training represents one area where Cork businesses consistently underinvest. The costs of poor training accumulate invisibly: repeated mistakes, customer complaints, inefficient processes, and high staff turnover. Yet structured training programmes feel expensive and time-consuming, particularly for smaller businesses without dedicated learning and development teams.
LearningMole addresses part of this challenge through its library of educational animations covering mathematics, English, science, and practical skills. While originally developed for children’s education, the platform demonstrates how animated content improves knowledge retention compared to traditional text-based training.
The principles apply directly to business contexts. Animated training modules reduce the time required to bring new staff up to competence. Complex procedures become memorable when visualised. Safety protocols stick when shown rather than merely listed in policy documents.
Cork businesses in hospitality, manufacturing, and professional services have begun commissioning custom training animations. A single production cost replaces endless repetition by senior staff members, standardises training quality across locations, and allows new employees to revisit material as often as needed.
AI Training: From Curiosity to Capability
Artificial intelligence tools have reached a maturity where ignoring them creates competitive disadvantage. ChatGPT, Claude, and similar platforms can handle tasks that previously required hours of staff time: drafting correspondence, summarising documents, analysing data, generating content outlines, and answering routine customer queries.
Most businesses use perhaps 10% of these tools’ capabilities. Staff experiment briefly, encounter limitations, and conclude that AI is “not quite ready” for serious work. The reality is that effectiveness depends almost entirely on skill. Employees trained properly in prompt engineering, workflow integration, and appropriate use cases achieve dramatically different results than those left to figure things out independently.
Future Business Academy, ProfileTree’s training division, delivers structured AI education for SME teams. Programmes range from introductory ChatGPT courses for businesses beginning AI exploration through to advanced training covering comprehensive AI strategies across entire organisations.
The academy’s approach emphasises immediate practical application. Participants work on their actual business challenges during training sessions, leaving with implemented solutions rather than theoretical knowledge. Follow-up support ensures staff continue developing skills as AI capabilities evolve.
Cork businesses face particular pressure to adopt AI effectively. The region’s strong pharmaceutical, technology, and financial services sectors all compete for talent against Dublin employers. Companies that augment their teams with AI capabilities can achieve output levels that would otherwise require additional headcount, helping them compete against larger rivals while maintaining manageable payroll costs.
Preparing for AI-Driven Search
Search behaviour is changing faster than most businesses realise. When customers ask ChatGPT or Google’s AI Overview for business recommendations, the responses draw from patterns in online content. Businesses mentioned clearly and consistently across authoritative sources appear in these AI-generated lists. Those with sparse or contradictory online presence remain invisible.
This shift rewards certain content characteristics. Clear, factual statements about what a business does, who it serves, and where it operates help AI systems understand and recommend appropriately. Vague marketing language that sounds impressive to humans confuses the algorithms that increasingly mediate discovery.
ProfileTree’s approach to what they term “entity-based SEO” focuses on establishing businesses as recognised concepts within AI systems. This requires consistent naming across all online properties, explicit statements connecting businesses to their services and locations, and content structured in ways that AI can extract and cite.
Cork businesses that establish strong AI visibility now benefit from first-mover advantages. As more companies optimise for AI discovery, competition intensifies. Those who built their presence early maintain positions that latecomers struggle to displace.
The Cross-Border Advantage
The collaboration between Cork businesses and Belfast agencies reflects practical realities rather than sentiment. Northern Ireland agencies have navigated both UK and Irish markets for decades, developing dual-market expertise that purely domestic providers often lack.
This matters increasingly as Cork businesses serve customers across borders. Post-Brexit regulatory differences, currency considerations, and market expectations vary significantly between Northern Ireland, the Republic, and Great Britain. Agencies operating across these boundaries understand nuances that can determine whether marketing campaigns succeed or fail in different territories.
ProfileTree’s Belfast headquarters positions the agency to serve Irish clients with local understanding while maintaining UK market capabilities. The firm’s work spans businesses from Cork to Copenhagen, applying consistent methodology adapted to local market requirements.
For Cork businesses seeking animation production, AI training, or digital strategy support, Belfast partnerships offer competitive pricing, cultural alignment, and genuine expertise developed through serving diverse markets over more than a decade of operation.
Taking Action
The businesses thriving in Cork’s competitive landscape share common characteristics: they communicate clearly through visual content, they train staff systematically in modern tools, and they ensure their online presence works effectively for AI-driven discovery as well as traditional search.
Each of these areas represents an investment that compounds over time. Animation assets continue generating returns years after production. Staff AI capabilities improve with practice and expanding tool features. Online authority builds as consistent content accumulates.
The question facing Cork business owners is not whether these investments matter, but whether to make them now or watch competitors establish advantages that become increasingly difficult to overcome.