Amazon has announced a new global initiative called 'AI Ready', seeking to provide free AI skills training to 2 million people by 2025. This program is designed to make AI education accessible to anyone with a desire to learn, removing cost as an obstacle to accessing these essential skills.

The 'AI Ready' program contains three main components:

1. Eight new free AI and generative AI (GenAI) courses are offered to a variety of learners, from beginners to advanced levels, including business leaders and technologists. The courses cover topics from GenAI's foundations to practical applications in prompt engineering and are accessible through the AWS Educate and AWS Skill Builder platforms.
2. AWS Generative AI Scholarship: This initiative offers more than 50,000 high school and university students globally access to a GenAI course on Udacity. The aim is to reach students from underserved and underrepresented communities, providing them with basic AI skills and certification upon completion.
3. Partnership with Code.org: The aim is to introduce students to GenAI with support from Code.org.

Why does it matter?

An analysis by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and research firm Access Partnership found a strong demand for AI talent, and the need for an AI-savvy workforce has never been so blatant. Employees with AI capabilities stand to earn up to 47% higher salaries. Additionally, hiring AI-skilled people is a priority for 73% of businesses. However, three out of four of these firms claim they are unable to satisfy their AI talent demands. The 'AI Ready' program is part of Amazon's broader commitment to provide free cloud computing skills training to 29 million people by 2025.