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Digital Discovery for Irish SMEs
Enterprise Ireland's Access Advice: Digital Discovery funds up to 80 percent of a qualified consultant's fee, to a maximum of €5,000. It is designed to help Irish SMEs and start-ups take the first concrete step on digital or artificial intelligence adoption. This page explains how Vendors.ie prepares you for that engagement.
What Digital Discovery actually funds
The programme subsidises human expertise, not software licences. Here is how Irish SMEs typically use it.
Access Advice: Digital Discovery is an Enterprise Ireland grant covering up to 80 percent of qualified consultant fees, capped at €5,000 per business. It falls under Enterprise Ireland's capability-development category and is open to Irish-registered SMEs and start-ups across sectors.
The grant funds two specific pathways. The first is the establishment of foundational digital infrastructure: a consultant works with your business to map processes, identify bottlenecks, and produce a plan you can execute with commercial software. The second is an initial or subsequent step in artificial intelligence adoption: a consultant assesses your data maturity, identifies appropriate AI use cases, and shapes a roadmap for practical deployment.
Two things the programme does not do. It does not pay for software licences, hardware, or cloud subscriptions. And it does not run your digital transformation for you. You pay for the software yourself, separately, and you remain responsible for executing the consultant's plan.
That is where Vendors.ie is useful. The better prepared you are going into the consulting engagement, the more value you extract from the €5,000. And the clearer your software options after the engagement, the faster you execute.
How Vendors.ie complements a Digital Discovery engagement
Three pages that map onto common phases of an EI-funded project.
Digital readiness assessment
A practical assessment of where your SME sits on the digital maturity curve. Understand what a consultant will ask before your Digital Discovery kickoff.
Software roadmap for Irish SMEs
How to sequence your software decisions: banking, accounting, payroll, CRM, operations. The order that fits most Irish SMEs.
Grant-eligible tooling
Which Irish-compliant software commonly gets selected under EI-funded engagements. Based on Vendors.ie verified data.
Before you apply for the grant
A short pre-flight checklist that saves time and money inside the consulting engagement.
- Run the free Vendors.ie AI Readiness Check to establish a baseline. Share the score with your consultant on day one.
- List the tools you already use and where Irish compliance is weakest (Revenue, PAYE Modernisation, GDPR data residency).
- Identify one specific process you want to digitise or one AI use case you want to explore. Vague scopes waste grant hours.
- Confirm the CRO registration and trading status of your business. EI eligibility checks will ask.
- Decide who owns the engagement internally. A named owner with 2 hours a week keeps momentum.
Get a one-page Digital Discovery prep brief
We will email a short brief matching the programme to your company size, sector, and current stack. Useful before you engage a consultant.
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Disclaimer
Vendors.ie is not an Enterprise Ireland-approved consultant and does not deliver Digital Discovery engagements. This page is an independent guide. Always confirm current programme eligibility, funding, and terms directly with Enterprise Ireland before applying.