One of my Department’s Offices, the Companies Registration Office (CRO), uses machine learning to scan digitised annual returns to check whether they are signed in the appropriate places. This technology has proven to be very effective in delivering processing efficiencies for the CRO. The CRO received over 240,000 Annual Returns in 2022, all of which were processed using this signature recognition facility. My Department and the CRO also collaborated on an artificial intelligence project to scan CRO annual returns and derive semantic meaning from the data. Work on data analysis from this project is ongoing.