The News: Amazon will bring free AI skills training to two million workers around the globe by 2025 as the company moves to broaden its previous worker upskilling programs that were started in 2019. The new AI Ready program is made up of several new training efforts aimed at adults and young learners as well as an expansion of earlier free AI training programs operated by Amazon that aimed to train more workers in an expanding market. Read the full blog post about the AI skills training effort on the Amazon News website.

Amazon to Provide Free AI Skills Training to 2 Million Workers by 2025

Analyst Take: The expansion of Amazon’s free AI skills training initiatives could not come at a better time for the company or for the global AI marketplace as more companies are turning to AI capabilities for new services and to bolster their operations and core technologies. As AI technologies and services continue to explode in availability and popularity, providing expanded AI training for workers will continue to be a critical role for companies such as Amazon to ensure that they will be able to find and hire the skilled workers that are needed to help provide these new capabilities.

For Amazon, this approach is nothing new, as the company has been providing technology skills training for millions of workers around the world since 2019 under several existing initiatives. In 2020, Amazon announced that it would invest more than $1.2 billion to retrain and upskill 300,000 of its own employees to help them move up to better, higher paying technical jobs within the company. Amazon also previously committed to provide free cloud computing skills training to 29 million people around the world by 2025. That program has already trained 21 million workers with new skills, according to the company.

Amazon is not the only big tech vendor to announce a free AI skills training initiative in recent months. In September, IBM unveiled its own AI training effort that pledges to train two million workers with AI skills by 2026.

Details About Amazon’s New Training Offer

Amazon said that the latest AI skills training program expansion is being fueled by the transformative nature of recent AI technologies and developments. To help prepare workers to fill new roles in this growing field, Amazon unveiled three new initiatives.

First, the company announced eight AI and generative AI courses that will be offered for free. Second, Amazon is offering an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Generative AI Scholarship program that will provide more than 50,000 high school and university students around the world with access to coursework on generative AI through online education and job training vendor Udacity.com. Those scholarships are worth a total of more than $12 million. The other new initiative involves a collaboration with educational nonprofit Code.org that is designed to help K-12 students learn all about generative AI so that they might be inspired to pursue it as a career.

The new AI skills training courses include Introduction to Generative Artificial Intelligence, Generative AI Learning Plan for Decision Makers, and Introduction to Amazon CodeWhisperer, all for business and nontechnical audiences. Also new are several courses for developer and technical audiences, including Foundations of Prompt Engineering, Low-Code Machine Learning on AWS, Building Language Models on AWS, Amazon Transcribe, and Building Generative AI Applications Using Amazon Bedrock.

With all the impacts of AI and generative AI in today’s world, Amazon said it believes that the company must be involved in ensuring that there are trained workers who can help bring these technologies to fruition and continue their development. And part of that commitment, the company said, means providing these broad training efforts to make it happen.

In my view, this is a smart business and societal move by Amazon, as the company works to help workers in fading industries gain new skills in a changing marketplace around the world. By providing these AI skills training programs at no charge, Amazon is making these new skills available to workers who might not have been able to take advantage of them if tuition and fees were charged.

A study cited by Amazon also gave the company part of its impetus for the training programs – the study revealed that while hiring workers with AI skills is a priority, three of four respondents reported that they could not find the skilled AI workers that they needed. The study also reported that respondents said they expect their workers to earn up to 47% more in salaries if they gain broad skills in AI. That, I believe, would be good for workers and for the global economy.

Amazon’s AI Skills Training Expansion – What It Means

In my view, Amazon’s move to bring free AI skills training and its other training programs are wise investments in the tech workforce around the world, as well as for Amazon’s own workers. I believe these are smart initiatives that will reward the company far more than its monetary investments by helping to grow and nurture the labor pool of highly skilled workers who can handle the demands of these nascent and complex technologies. Yes, these free AI and other training courses will ultimately help Amazon, but these investments will also help workers who are searching for better opportunities and more challenging careers in technology.

This investment in training is happening because the demand for AI and generative AI technologies is soaring around the world. More enterprises are adopting AI in their operations as the technologies are becoming more integral to their work and operations. According to Amazon, 93% of businesses today say they expect to be using AI technologies across their organizations within the next 5 years. I believe Amazon’s growing mission of expanding free AI skills training to tomorrow’s AI workers is a visionary and important move for the company, for enterprises, and for workers around the world.

Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.

Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.