An AI-skilled workforce is no longer a luxury—it’s a necessity. Yet, a massive skills gap is a roadblock to many organizations’ efforts to implement AI technologies. Seventy-three percent of employers feel that having AI talent is a priority, while 75% of those employers admit to struggling to find them, according to a study by AWS and Access Partnership.

This shift in the AI landscape, combined with the urgent need to help businesses everywhere meet and thrive in this new AI era, was Amazon’s inspiration for providing free AI skills training for two million people by 2025 as part of its AI Ready commitment.

This commitment became a reality faster than we could have ever imagined because we reached two million people at the end of 2024, one year ahead of schedule.

While this incredible demand for AI upskilling underlines the need for these skills in the workforce, it also reveals how employees, leaders and companies are not casual bystanders—instead, they’re all in on the AI opportunity.

Our AI Ready commitment also revealed four important insights into how businesses and HR leaders can capture this moment and how they can train more employees with AI skills.

See also: How ChatGPT and other generative AI tools are transforming HR jobs

1. Gen AI is for everyone—not just technical professionals.

Generative AI’s impact reaches far beyond the IT department. It offers powerful content creation capabilities, introduces new approaches to customer engagement, optimizes countless workflows and so much more. These capabilities transform how everyone works, regardless of their role, department or industry. As a result, learning the foundations of AI has become important for all professionals.

In fact, in the past year, our most popular course on AWS Skill Builder, our digital learning center, was “Introduction to Generative AI—The Art of the Possible,” a non-technical course that introduces generative AI’s use cases, risks and benefits for people from varying experiences and levels.

The extraordinary demand for this particular course is a direct reflection of how employees and employers everywhere are thinking about generative AI today. Whereas previous technical innovations were eventually left to the CIOs and IT leaders to implement, generative AI is an opportunity for everyone across the organization to work smarter and contribute even greater value to their organization.

2. Prompt engineering is a must-have skill.

The acceleration of generative AI adoption across industries resulted in soaring demand for another skill: prompt engineering. As more employees integrate generative AI into their everyday workflows, the need to develop precise, effective prompts becomes essential to unlock the full potential and possibilities of generative AI solutions.

In fact, prompt engineering was one of our most in-demand courses in 2024. It discussed how to build and fine-tune prompts to generate accurate, relevant and high-quality outputs. With more organizations incorporating generative AI into their systems, having foundational knowledge and comfort with prompt engineering across departments will be mission-critical.

3. Social media is an upskilling accelerant.

Learning is never a one-size-fits-all approach. What we learned by offering different learning formats, such as in-person learning and digital learning available on social media channels like Facebook and YouTube and streaming platforms like Twitch or AWS Training Live, is that social media and streaming stood out.

They were a preferred destination for AI training, helping us reach and train nearly one million people. In particular, social media has been an effective complementary channel as part of our digital training strategy because it excels at driving instant knowledge-sharing and awareness among learners. The traffic around streaming courses proved that flexible, on-demand learning that meets employees where they are accelerates the consumption, engagement and value of AI skills development.

4. Pair new products with new training.

This moment in AI history has shown that companies are eager and willing to bring AI technology into their everyday workflows. No matter what the AI-powered solution is, once new AI technology is introduced, new training is essential.

Our AI Ready commitment was introduced in 2023 when many companies were just starting to announce and roll out new generative AI products and features. Over the past year, we found that training courses need to be developed in concert with new products and services. They also need to be updated as we update products and services, given the rapid changes in the world of AI. This approach ensures that employees learn as fast as possible and effectively contribute to business success by increasing time-to-value and reducing adoption barriers. For example, when we launched Amazon Q, our generative AI-powered assistant, we immediately also launched new courses to help customers and businesses take full advantage of this new technology.

Prepare your team for tomorrow with AI training now

As we reflect on the lessons learned from training two million people in AI skills, it’s clear that the AI transformation is happening now and that upskilling more AI talent must remain a top priority well into 2025 and beyond. That’s why we will develop more AI training to reach more learners. We will also embed more generative AI-powered features into the learning experience to develop more personalized, adaptive learning plans that can help employees quickly grasp the latest AI concepts.

AI is the most impactful technology advancement we’ll see in our lifetime, and its value and potential will only grow if employees and leaders know how to harness, build and create with it safely and responsibly. Now is the time for leaders to embrace a culture of continuous AI learning and nurture skills development to unlock new levels of opportunities for their employees and businesses.

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