Databricks has pledged to train 500,000 people in data and AI skills as part of a $3 billion investment plan across EMEA.
The announcement was made just ahead of the 5th edition of its annual Data + AI Tour at the ExCeL in London. Approximately $3 billion will go into various hubs and partner programs across EMEA over the next three years, which represents the largest regional investment the company has made outside the US.
This will include an expansion of Databricks R&D teams with more experts placed alongside its customers and partners as they scale AI across their organizations with Databricks services like Lakebase, Genie, and Unity Gateway.
As part of the investment, Databricks has pledged to train 500,000 students and professionals in data and AI skills across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) by 2030. This includes recent announcements for training 100,000 in the UK and Ireland and the most recent pledge to train 40,000 students and professionals in the Netherlands.
Databricks works with 70% of Fortune 500 companies, and its partners include some of the biggest organizations in EMEA, such as Adidas, Heineken, HelloFresh and Mercedes-Benz, to name just a few.
“EMEA is a talent pool; we have a lot of talented people here, but we still have an AI skills gap,” Samuel Bonamigo, SVP, GM of EMEA at Databricks, said on stage.
Databricks training with partners
So how will Databricks train such a significant pool of talent by 2030?
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“With partners is the answer,” Rich Radley, VP of field engineering EMEA for Databricks, told .
“Many of whom are downstairs in the expo. We think getting the right skills in the market, training up large numbers of people, across the spectrum of society as well, is going to be key for AI adoption.
“Working with partners that have similar goals and vision, we think quite deeply about how we can contribute a little more locally, in the UK and Ireland and across EMEA. That seems to us a kind of obvious way of doing it. We’ve now got an organization of sufficient size; in the UK we’re going to be getting up to 1,000 people over the next couple of years, so we’ve got more of a critical mass to take on such a thing.”
“Localization is super important,” Radley explains. “Italians want folks who can speak Italian, that understand the Italian market, same for the French, same for the Germans, same for the folks in Sweden, so we’re now getting to a critical mass in EMEA where we can do that.”
The training and investment aim to tackle four challenges that help take AI pilots into company-wide use cases via the Databricks Data + AI Platform.
The first is “Context”, which is about grounding agents in real business knowledge. Then “Control”, which deals with governing what agents can access and do.
There’s also “Choice”, so that customers avoid platform lock-in, and finally “Cost”, which will take into account tokenmaxxing and spending controls.