#ai-training

#ai-training

AI is moving at an incredible pace and presents huge opportunity for productivity and growth. Skills England has worked rapidly with tech companies to make sure the courses chosen for the AI Skills Boost programme provide the quality and capability businesses need right now. It's also a huge step forward that everyone who completes these short courses will get digital badges that properly recognise what they've learned. It's a simple idea that will make a huge difference.

My role was straightforward: write queries (prompts and tasks) that would train AI agents to engage meaningfully with users. But as a UXer, one question immediately stood out - who are these users? Without a clear understanding of who the agent is interacting with, it's nearly impossible to create realistic queries that reflect how people engage with an agent. That's when I discovered a glitch in the task flow.

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.

My role was straightforward: write queries (prompts and tasks) that would train AI agents to engage meaningfully with users. But as a UXer, one question immediately stood out - who are these users? Without a clear understanding of who the agent is interacting with, it's nearly impossible to create realistic queries that reflect how people engage with an agent. That's when I discovered a glitch in the task flow. There were no defined user archetypes guiding the query creation process. Team members were essentially reverse-engineering the work: you think of a task, write a query to help the agent execute it, and cross your fingers that it aligns with the needs of a hypothetical "ideal" user - one who might not even exist.

For small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs), equipping employees with the latest skills and tools needs to be a priority. After all, as the competition grows, SMEs can't afford to be idle. And it's not always possible for new hires or seasoned employees to know exactly what industry demands will look like. That's why SMEs must budget for upskilling within their workforces.

1X CEO Bernt Børnich told Business Insider that his startup's new " world model" would allow Neo to learn directly from video captured by the robot itself, rather than relying on data collected by human operators. "Essentially, the world model does the same thing as the operator would do," said Børnich, adding that he expected the update to improve Neo's ability to generalize and tackle tasks it has not encountered before.

As AI systems grow more capable, the bar for human training has risen sharply, and generalist data labelers are being pushed aside. That's according to HireArt's 2025 AI Trainer Compensation Report, which collected information from more than 150 sources, including a survey of active workers, public job postings, and internal data. The study shows that today's AI models demand nuanced reasoning, domain expertise, and multilingual fluency, transforming "data labeling" into specialized cognitive work.

You know your team needs to build or strengthen their AI skills, but how do you provide them with the necessary know-how? This AI training rollout checklist covers all the essentials you need, from finding internal AI champions to establishing quarterly review processes. AI Training Rollout Checklist: How To Get Started While some employees might already use AI every day in their workflow, others might be relatively unfamiliar with this emerging tech.

Google Skills is a new home for building skills in AI and more to provide new tools for the entire workforce. Whether you're a student just getting started, an experienced developer looking to certify your knowledge, an organizational leader trying to use AI in your business or anything in between, you can learn and prove your skills on Google's new learning platform.

Meta is rolling out a new Facebook feature that the company says will help users share more photos-but which could also be used to help train its AI. The opt-in feature allows Facebook's AI to access your phone's camera roll in order to find photos it finds "shareworthy," and to suggest edits using its AI tools. Users can then decide if they want to share the images or not.

What we found is that employees want about five hours of hands-on training, and coaching, and mentoring. Only about a third are actually getting that.

Databricks has announced plans to train 100,000 people across the UK and Ireland in AI and data skills. The skills development scheme will target a range of areas, including generative AI, data engineering, machine learning, and analytics. The initiative will be delivered through the company's global education program, Databricks Free Edition, and underpinned by $10 million in funding. Databricks Free Edition offers participants access to self-paced training and AI tools, and is designed to help close what the company claims is a growing AI talent gap.

The partnership will dedicate $5 million to help small businesses embrace AI and incorporate it into everyday business operations. Google's Grow with Google initiative announced the program on Oct. 9. Small Business B(AI)sics will offer workshops and online courses designed to teach owners how to use AI tools to streamline tasks. All aspects of operations, including marketing, budgeting, and inventory planning, can be simplified.

In this episode of the Startup Canada podcast, Natasha Walji, Managing Director at Google Canada, shares insights on leveraging AI for business growth. She emphasizes the transformative power of AI in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and discusses her journey in technology and community service. Key Resources for Canadian Small Businesses Google's AI Essentials Course: Check out this generative AI course on Coursera.

Research and advisory firm Info-Tech Research Group has introduced LEVEL-UP, a series of half-day, on-site training sessions that are free to IT professionals. Topics covered in the training series, which the company says build on its LIVE and IGNITE events, include artificial intelligence (AI) architecture, cybersecurity incident response, and information technology (IT) leadership. "The LEVEL-UP Series is designed to close critical skill gaps for IT teams in a fast-changing technology environment," Info-Tech Research Group's Chief Research Officer Gord Harrison said in a press release.

a critical move

Only calls made or received through the Neon app are recorded. Any conversations you have through the regular phone app on your iPhone or Android phone are excluded. Neon will pay you 30 cents per minute when you speak with another Neon user. In that case, both sides of the conversation are recorded. You'll get 15 cents per minute when you speak with a non-Neon user.

LinkedIn Corp. and Meta Platforms Inc. are among the companies that have been emboldened to train their artificial intelligence on the personal data of European users, testing EU regulators' approach to privacy enforcement.

I started using Google Drive, Gmail, and the whole suite of tools back when they were still invite-only. Back then, the cloud was an unknown entity, and many of us had no idea that it would become the backbone of both business and personal use. According to , the public cloud market alone will break the $1 trillion mark by 2026. indicates that 67% of senior executives say that their organization has accelerated its plans for cloud adoption. That's a lot of people using cloud services, and it's only going to continue to grow.

Google has one crawler, which means they use the same crawler for their search, where they still send us traffic, as they do for their AI products, where they steal our content,

"This effort underscores a collective priority to prepare people of all ages for the AI era. We are proud to stand alongside government and industry leaders in this pledge," said Fran Katsoudas, Cisco's EVP and chief people, policy, and purpose officer.

"In the GitHub Copilot training program, they're learning how to be experts in GitHub Copilot itself," said Carrol Chang, Andela CEO, in an interview with The Register. "The reason we chose GitHub Copilot after having looked at a bunch of different code editing and code creation tools in the market is that GitHub Copilot is the clear winner across enterprise customers."