New Delhi, June 13, 2019: The US technology giant, Microsoft announced the launch of AI Digital Labs in collaboration with 10 higher educational institutions in India. As part of this partnership, these academic institutes will emerge as the learning centers of emerging technologies and solutions. Nearly 1.5 lakh students will be skilled for a future-ready workforce.

This initiative by Microsoft will provide the required infrastructure, curriculum, content training, access to cloud and AI services and developer training to the chosen institutes. It will be a a 3-year program that the company would be running with the aim to collaborate with more such institutes in the country.

"This is not part of the company's CSR project but part of our plan to build a future ready workforce especially in AI here in India," said Rohini Srivathsa, National Technology Officer, Microsoft Corporation India. She further added, "We are in talks with leading institutes and universities and some more collaborations would be in pipeline which would be announced soon."

Karunya University

In the present-day scenario, AI and intelligent technologies are becoming all-pervasive and a driving change across businesses and communities. The evolution of AI and other emerging technologies is expected to create new jobs in the market. Having the knowledge and properly skilled with the same will lead them to end up in this profile.

According to a recent Microsoft and IDC Asia/Pacific study ‘Future Ready Business: Assessing Asia Pacific’s Growth Potential Through AI’, lack of skills, resources and continuous learning programs emerged as one of the top challenges faced by Indian organizations in adopting AI to accelerate their businesses.

An interesting piece of this entire initiative is that there will be training programs for faculty members in these institutes. These faculty training programs will include workshops on cloud computing, data sciences, AI and IoT. Additionally, the faculty of the institutions will receive assistance in strategizing content and curricula for project-based and experiential learning.

Participating Institutes:

The institutes covered under this program include BITS Pilani, BML Munjal University, ISB, Kalpataru Institute of Technology, KL University, Periyar University, Karunya University, SRM Institute of Science & Technology, SVKM (NMIMS) and Trident Academy of Technology.