Free artificial intelligence (AI) training is being offered to up to 650,000 young people in the West Midlands to help them become AI ready.
IT services firm Atos is investing money into Tech First Youth’s Future Readiness initiative which will see schools and colleges in the region receive free access to resources. It will have a focus on AI discernment, which is the ability to discern when AI outputs should be used or when caution is required.
“By teaching AI literacy and critical thinking, Futures Readiness equips young people and educators to live, learn and work in a world increasingly shaped by AI,” said Atos.
Although AI is a concept dating back decades, the widespread take-up of generative AI (GenAI) began around 2022 with the release of ChatGPT. It was a wake-up call for governments and businesses alike, which must prepare for inevitable disruption. Likewise, seemingly all careers must be tailored to work with AI technology.
Because AI will touch all of society, the programme aims to use the AI training resources across the curriculum rather than as an individual course. “Society and the workplace are being reshaped by AI with new capabilities, risks and behaviours emerging in cycles of weeks and months,” said Atos. “Futures Readiness is designed to help education keep up with the development of AI as responsive enrichment to the curriculum, rather than a static course or one-off intervention.”
Every three weeks, interactive videos will be made available to schools to help them respond to live developments in AI.
Atos has made several commitments to educating the UK’s youth. In October last year Michael Herron, the UK head at Atos said he was “utterly determined” not to allow GenAI to pull up a career drawbridge.
Back then, Herron said Atos’s plans will take into account the increasing use of GenAI. “I am working on this whole model around the coexistence of humans and AI together, because AI can do some people’s jobs,” he said.
“We are redefining the skills the next generation of UK-based talent need to thrive in an AI-driven workplace. We believe these will be both technical and softer skills, such as curiosity, experimentation and creativity.”
As a result, careers will be “multi-dimensional and much more ubiquitous”, he said, adding: “I do not subscribe to the view that there are going to be mass redundancies because of AI and agentic. What I do subscribe to is that there are certain roles which will become defunct, but there will be new roles in the world of agentic.
“There is a sad amount of high youth unemployment at the moment, but I don’t buy into the fact that it’s because the junior jobs are going to go – they’re just going to be different.”
In February, also in the West Midlands, Atos’s first UK apprentices began training to become IT staff of the future as part of its programme to train IT support professionals in the era of AI.
As part of this, Atos’s agentic factory, which will feature AI agents and people working together on customer IT projects, was opened at the supplier’s delivery centre in Solihull, on the outskirts of Birmingham.