While several major technology companies are lending a hand to budding engineers and existing employees to upskill them in new technologies amidst talent crunch, global chip maker Intel India is on a mission to demystify artificial intelligence (AI) for all age groups, different levels of students, citizens and researchers with its skilling programmes in India.

As of today, the company has already trained over 2 lakh students between 8th standard and 12th standard in AI and has upskilled 5,000 government officials.

In July this year, Intel launched another programme ‘AI for All’ with a target of enabling over one million citizens with knowledge and know-how of AI, Nivruti Rai, Country Head, Intel India told BusinessLine.

“Talent is a critical need for Intel and everybody else. AI is important and will generate even more jobs. Yet AI is a black box and many people talk about it without really understanding the technology. So, we first trained all our Intel employees. Then, we started looking to train students, government officials and citizens,” Rai said.

Gamified course

“AI for All is a 4-hour long gamified course. You can take it on your phone and it is available in multiple languages. Without even doing much marketing, we already have over 2 lakh people taking this course. Going at this pace, I don’t believe there will be any challenge in getting one million users in a year,” she added.

Intel India is also funding and working with academicians on research programmes. It has partnered with other industry consortiums to enable skilling.

“We are preparing workforce for the needs of tomorrow and in areas we believe are going to be critical. Our goal is to demystify AI and show that AI is mathematics, statistics, programming, data analytics and just generating and creating clean data,” Rai said.

Speaking of her own fear and reluctance of learning a new technology, she shared, “I remember when HTML was new. Everybody thought it was this scary new thing. I had similar inhibitions when I started coding, only to learn that it was even easier than BASIC. Unless people know it and do it themselves, they’ll be scared.”

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