Dive Brief:
- AWS added eight free generative AI courses for technicians and business professionals to its training portfolio, the company announced last week.
- The tech giant is offering technical courses in prompt engineering, low-code machine learning, building LLMs in SageMaker, building generative AI applications in Bedrock and using Amazon’s Transcribe speech-to-text AI service. Three additional courses for nontechnical business professionals provide training in CodeWhisperer, generative AI project management and generative AI foundations.
- While onboarding AI skills is a priority for most organizations, talent is scarce, according to a cross-industry survey of 1,340 organizations conducted by Access Partnership and AWS. Three-quarters of employers surveyed said they can’t secure needed AI-trained employees.
Dive Insight:
As enterprise-ready generative AI tools proliferate, cloud providers have taken a strategic position as middlemen for proprietary and third-party models.
The hyperscalers moved quickly to stand up generative AI marketplaces, where organizations looking to launch pilot programs or adopt the technology more broadly can shop for off-the-shelf solutions and trainable LLMs.
But if a generative AI boom is going to drive cloud adoption, customers will need to cultivate or outsource skills needed to implement the technology successfully.
Most employers — 9 in 10 — see IT as the biggest beneficiary of AI, the survey found.
Only slightly fewer respondents expect sales, marketing and human resources to derive significant value from the technology, through automating processes, improving workflows and enhancing communication.
But most employees feel they lack training. Four in 5 of nearly 3,300 workers surveyed expressed interest in upskilling.
AWS is casting a wide net with its skills-building options. The company introduced an AI training course for executives in July and launched a 12-course cloud training program for entry-level technologists that includes modules covering AI, ML and generative AI developer tools last month.
“Everybody's saying, ‘I need to do all this stuff in AI, but I don't have anybody who knows anything about AI,’” Craig Thomson, SVP of cloud and application services at SoftwareOne, told CIO Dive.
SoftwareOne highlighted the link between cloud and AI skills gaps in a September survey of 500 IT leaders. Nearly two-thirds of respondents said their organizations had only half of the IT skills needed to effectively leverage AI innovation. Almost all respondents prioritized upskilling IT teams in the next 12 months.
“Customers don’t feel they’ve got the AI skills at scale to cope with the pace at which the world is changing,” Thomson added.
