India is at the forefront of the AI upskilling global trend, says Udemy’s Vinay Pradhan

Vinay Pradhan: India is at the forefront of the global trend towards AI upskilling. We track the trends in terms of skills that people across the globe access, and if you look at 2024 trends or towards the end of 2023 trends, Gen AI specifically and AI overall did see an upward trend and that still continues. Caoimhe Carlos: What we have seen happen in the last 12 months is a shift around the kind of AI upskill in demand. In the beginning, there was a lot of demand around technical competency like how do you build large language models. Now, there’s a higher demand for AI productivity course content both on a global level and on an Indian level. At a global level we are now seeing 8 enrolments per minute in our gen AI content every day, and India is actually our second largest market for AI consumption. In terms of AI adoption, we certainly see India’s demand for AI upskilling as the highest. Even the India government was one of the first to have an AI strategy back in 2018.

Vinay Pradhan: AI is actually been a sort of a boon in terms of ability to bridge skill gaps in a more targeted way. In the past, most approaches sort of broadly applied to a large group of people, but those individual differences would still be there in terms of gaps. It’s always a combination of skills at the end of the day. So with AI now, the nuanced gaps in skillsets are being addressed. Caoimhe Carlos: India is actually probably ahead at filling the skills gaps versus other regions that we would work with. As the demand for AI skills has increased, there’s been a similar increase in demand for very specific soft skills. Things like communication, creative thinking, problem solving, those are skills that become more important for humans as AI drives productivity and efficiency. The strategic differentiator for humans then becomes our ability to effectively communicate and think creatively, things that AI can’t do today.

Vinay Pradhan: I think we’re very much of the opinion that humans have a very deep connection to learning from other humans. AI today is capable of driving some efficiencies, but we really believe that technology can’t replace a subject matter expert who’s got deep expertise teaching somebody else that skill set. What we’ve built is a marketplace where we’ve got 75,000 subject matter experts who are highly skilled in their domains. We can use AI technology to help make the learning experience better, but we don’t believe that AI is going to be a replacement for human-to-human or instructor-led training. Caoimhe Carlos: We’re also leveraging AI to help our instructors build better courses. But we don’t see a world where instructors go away. Well, who knows what AI will bring in the next 10 years but not right now.

Caoimhe Carlos: When AI was launched, there was a lot of concern about the cost of leveraging large language models. But the cost of running AI and large language models has actually decelerated at one of the fastest rates of any technology of all time. So actually, the cost impact of leveraging AI is nowhere near as dramatic as the industry expected at the time when AI came out. So I think that perspective has shifted a little bit for the market.

Vinay Pradhan: We’ve seen with the New Education Policy, a shift in terms of the fact that a large chunk of educational credits are now going to be dependent on students acquiring industry-ready skills, which is where we believe we come in with a very significant differentiator, because our content that we bring in comes from almost about 75,000 global experts and subject matter experts in different skill areas, and they’re all practitioners. We also have no plans to collaborate with schools but we do see some kids accessing marketplaces to learn our courses. Caoimhe Carlos: They are not academicians, they’re practitioners, and hence the applied part of the skill is something which the students will be able to acquire. So while we presently do not have a university-specific sort of a product or a plan to really collaborate with a university to come up with something, our existing product itself is actually something which can cater to that need.

Vinay Pradhan: We will continue to support companies as they make a very clear move towards building what’s called a “skills as a currency” because it’s a must-have from a business growth point of view. We want to align more what we do with our customers here in India to helping them achieve those business outcomes. We will also continue to bring in the capabilities that we are constantly enhancing in our platform from an AI point of view as well. We’ve also got a Hindi collection as a part of our offering now. So we are also trying to help expand the coverage. This gives more options to people in India, especially companies that have people in the interior of India, who are more comfortable learning in Hindi.