Amazon is starting to offer free educational courses on generative AI with an aim to extend “critical skills” to adults and young learners everywhere. The company’s initiative, called “AI Ready,” is an extension of current AWS-based AI skills training programs offered by Amazon but now includes eight free courses that cover AI project management and development. Amazon says 21 million people have already trained on AWS cloud computing skills through its programs, and it hopes 2 million will use its AI courses by 2025.

Amazon says that demand for talent for AI jobs is increasing, and companies are willing to pay higher salaries for those with the skills, but the courses are also geared toward promoting Amazon’s own AI products. Amazon will offer “nontechnical” learning that introduces people to the foundations of generative AI, planning projects around AI, and how to use Amazon’s CodeWhisperer AI code generator. The remaining courses educate people about AWS machine learning and language models and the Bedrock AI app maker, which could help put Amazon’s AI tech out there among big players like Microsoft / OpenAI and Google.

Those interested in Amazon’s free courses can access the initial generative AI training and intro to CodeWhisperer on the AWS Educate site. The remainder of the free courses, including learning to use Amazon’s Transcribe speech-to-text generator, are on the AWS Skill Builder site.