Danish postal service, PostNord, delivered its final letter on December 30th 2025, shifting its services towards parcel delivery in an increasingly digital Danish society. According to the BBC, “Denmark ranks as one of the world’s most digitalised countries”, with few people using cash and letter volumes falling “by as much as 35 per cent” in 2025 alone. All around the world, though, most written communication is now digital. The postal service, one of the oldest industries in the world, has found it necessary to radically change how it functions in order to survive. With letter deliveries dwindling, what is the role of the postal service in the present day? Ireland’s state-owned postal service, An Post, has been adapting to keep pace with and predict the future demands of Irish society.
An Post CEO, David McRedmond, feels that Denmark’s letter delivery services may have “stopped too soon”. Despite acknowledging that letters are declining and continue to decline each year, he expressed concern over what would be done in the case of “major digital failure” — if commonly used forms of digital communication such as WhatsApp were to suddenly stop working. When asked if An Post was moving away from letter delivery, McRedmond stated that consumer demands change all the time, but that An Post was a “completely different company”, one “driven by the economics of global trade”. Economically, he said, An Post is no longer about “postmen and the Aran Islands” but rather about delivering “essential infrastructure” to Irish consumers amidst a shift toward online retail. He stated that An Post’s “biggest challenge” today is that they are “at capacity”, and that the company is set to announce up to 300 new jobs in order to tackle this.
While the company’s economic focus may be moving away from letter delivery, An Post’s identity still centres around the place of postmen and postwomen in local communities. The brand of An Post is something McRedmond is “very, very proud of”. He referenced An Post’s high approval rating — according to RTÉ, the company came second in the country last year in the annual ranking of the Ireland Reputation Index — and McRedmond explained that An Post is “uniquely popular because of postmen and postwomen, and post clerks, embedded in every community”. Their “presence in every community really, really matters”, he said. He claimed that the uniformed staff of the postal service were a “benign form of the state that people like”. McRedmond reflected on how An Post’s central principle to “always act for the common good, now and for generations to come” became palpable during the pandemic, when postal workers “went to work everyday” and during which An Post was “the only post office in Europe” to keep every postal route operational.
A key way that An Post is adapting to the changes of Irish society and consumer demands is with the use of artificial intelligence. Ireland ranks 4th globally for AI adoption, according to Microsoft, and An Post in particular is leading the charge. McRedmond discussed how Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, had highlighted An Post as one of their “frontier companies” when it comes to AI on a recent earnings call with investors. Microsoft defines “frontier firms” as “those that fully integrate AI into their business model […] they reimagine processes, products, and even their purpose”. This certainly seems to be the case for An Post today; McRedmond says artificial intelligence is “at the corner of An Post”. While artificial intelligence is used by An Post internally for things like customer service and writing code, McRedmond emphasised that An Post was a “data heavy company” and that AI was “amazing at eating up that data” to do things like dynamic routing. Dynamic routing, McRedmond explained, provides “the quickest possible route” for deliveries from the data available. This is especially helpful at busy periods, like the Christmas season, when, McRedmond said, An Post was delivering three million parcels each week. With such a high volume of parcels, one of the costly aspects of the business, he explained, was attempting to deliver parcels to people not at home, and that AI will be useful here too, eventually being able to predict when customers will be at home to cut down wasted time.
McRedmond made multiple references to the online second-hand marketplace Vinted, which was launched in Ireland in 2024. McRedmond says that deliveries from the consumer-to-consumer business now make up 15 per cent of all of An Post’s ecommerce. He said that “traditional companies are transitioning so more of their revenue is digitally started” and, with companies like Vinted, there is in turn a need to be able to manage the journeys of these parcels digitally. Amidst rapidly changing consumer demands, McRedmond says that artificial intelligence is able to “predict very accurately what demand will be and where demand will be”. However, artificial intelligence is far from the only thing driving change. When asked what students should know about An Post, McRedmond stated that the company was “seeing the benefits” of their graduate scheme which was re-introduced in 2017. He said that different generations each have a “different experience of the world” and “are looking at the world differently”, and that the younger generation of workers have helped to drive the company’s ecommerce and climate strategies. He emphasised the importance of “on the ground experience” in an industry, having started his own career on the “shop floor” of Waterstones, before eventually becoming an Operations Director at the company.
McRedmond is also the Independent Chair of the Taoiseach’s Dublin City Taskforce, a role which the Irish Times says he took up in May 2024, and which has offered him a different perspective on Irish society. McRedmond said that “what is increasingly important is how people live their lives”. There is the possibility today, McRedmond explained, for “increased mobility” in daily life, with people no longer being required to live close to shops in order to survive. The nature of cities in the present day is changing, with McRedmond stating the potential for them to become more “experiential” places. McRedmond feels that it is important for students to be able to live in cities in order to be able to be a part of the city’s “ecosystem”. Amidst the shift in how cities operate, McRedmond wants An Post to “become essential infrastructure”.
Due to step down from his role as CEO in June after ten years at the company, McRedmond wants his legacy to be that An Post is “seen as the most relevant, essential infrastructure in the country” as opposed to the dying, old-fashioned business it had been seen as, while continuing to work towards the “common good”.
