Amazon Opens Free ‘AI Ready’ Courses on Generative AI Training

E-commerce giant Amazon is set to offer free educational courses on generative AI in a bid to expand its AI talent rosters.

The "AI Ready" program is an extension of Amazon's current Amazon Web Services-based skills training aimed to widen "critical skills" to two million adults and young learners worldwide by 2025.

Amazon reported that 21 million people have already trained on its AWS cloud computing training program.

In collaboration with Code.org, Amazon is offering "nontechnical" lessons on foundations of generative AI, planning projects around AI, and Amazon's CodeWhisperer AI code generator.

For developers and technical learners, Amazon is willing to give lessons on prompt engineering, AWS machine learning and language, and the Bedrock AI app maker.

AI Ready's eight courses are available to through Amazon's learning website and offered to non-Amazon employees.

AI Skills in the Modern Digital Industry

According to Amazon, the free course program was prompted with "AI will become more integral to the way business is done."

An AWS study noted that 73% of employers prioritize hiring AI-skilled talents for their company, while 47% are willing to pay up their employees that upskilled in AI.

Amazon the program will help promote accessibility for AI education and "unlock the full potential of AI to tackle the world's most challenging problems."

The online retail giant vowed to invest more in its AI courses to provide cloud computing skills to 29 million people by 2025.

Amazon in the Fight for AI Use

Amazon's announcement on AI courses comes amidst as other tech giants invest in learning machines and generative content.

The company has already enrolled AI language models to provide review summaries for its products in its platform.

AI tools have also been integrated to streamline operations on its warehouse sites, hiring AI-powered robots over human workers for procurement and delivery.

Amazon's fulfillment centers have been known to have high turnover rates due to accidents during working hours.