Carpet making may be one of the oldest skilled jobs in the world, but even this traditional industry has begun to adopt the most modern of technologies.
Kukoon Rugs is a family-owned firm in Newry, County Down, selling online and through some of the biggest retail chains in the UK and Ireland.
Where it is actually used
Chief Executive Paul Vallely says AI lets the business compete by scaling up parts of the firm he could not have scaled before.
"I think every department uses it extensively, pretty much daily. That's from finance through to commercial, marketing, supply chain, and product."
Acknowledging the history of his family's business, he believes the technology can only enhance it.
The distinction he draws is the useful one
"Rug making has been around for thousands of years, and has been around in this area for a long, long time," Vallely said.
"The product itself maybe doesn't change too much, but every single bit of the process as to how we design and create the product, market it to the customer, and then get it to the customer, that's fundamentally changing. And that's through AI."
Why that is the right way round
Most coverage of AI in traditional industries asks whether the machine can make the thing. That is the least interesting question, and usually the answer is no — a rug is a physical object with materials, tolerances and a weaving process that software does not touch.
What Vallely describes is the opposite and far more common pattern. The making stays where it was. What changes is everything that surrounds it: how a design is iterated before it is committed, how stock is forecast, how a listing is written, how a customer query is answered, how a shipment is routed.
Those are the parts of a small manufacturer that were always done by whoever had time, and they are where a firm with twenty people can suddenly operate at the scale of one with a hundred.
What that means for the jobs
It is worth being honest about the other side. If a department's throughput rises without its headcount, that is good news for a firm competing with larger rivals — and it is the mechanism by which the next hire does not happen.
Vallely's framing is about competitiveness rather than cost-cutting, and in an exporting firm those are genuinely different things. But "scale up parts of the firm" and "need fewer people per unit of output" are the same sentence seen from two ends.
The read for Bangladesh
This is the most directly transferable story in today's batch. Bangladesh's export economy is full of firms in exactly Kukoon's position — long-established, physical product, competing internationally on price and reliability, with a back office doing design iteration, forecasting, listings and customer correspondence by hand.
None of that requires an AI strategy or a consultant. It requires someone in the firm noticing which of those five functions eats the most hours, and trying the tools there first. That is what a rug maker in Newry did.
