EY Launches AI Academy After Upskilling 44,000 Staff and Piloting 50+ Enterprise Projects
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Global consulting firm EY has launched its AI Academy in New Delhi on 10 July 2025, aiming to build practical generative artificial intelligence skills across enterprise workforces amid a widening talent shortage that threatens to slow adoption. The programme is grounded in more than 200 real-world AI use cases drawn from industries such as telecommunications, infrastructure, banking, IT/ITeS and FMCG.
The launch comes as India emerges as the world’s largest market for generative AI course enrolments, recording more than 1.3 million GenAI learners in 2024, according to Coursera. Analysts note that while interest in AI upskilling is surging, national proficiency levels remain uneven, creating pressure for structured, competency-driven training models.
Programme Structure and Delivery
The Academy offers four structured learning paths, each aligned with organisational roles to ensure that AI adoption translates into measurable business outcomes.
AI Ambassadors
A two-day hands-on workshop designed for senior leaders, helping them develop an AI manifesto that aligns technology initiatives with business goals such as revenue growth, operational efficiency, customer experience improvement and risk reduction.
AI Transformation Champions
A track for mid-level decision-makers focused on identifying, prioritising and deploying AI use cases across business functions. The curriculum emphasises delivering tangible value through automation and data-augmented decision-making.
AI Aspirants
A foundational programme for broader teams introducing core AI concepts, including prompting techniques and practical productivity applications applicable to everyday workflows.
AI Development and Implementation Specialists
A deep technical track for data scientists, data engineers and generative AI specialists, combining theoretical foundations with project-based learning using AI-enabled enterprise technologies.
EY’s training model blends immersive workshops with scalable, sector-specific learning pathways, deliberately addressing a common challenge in enterprise AI upskilling — education that is too conceptual and not tied to operational impact.
Internal Rollout and Early Enterprise Pilots
Prior to making the Academy available to clients, EY India conducted an extensive internal programme, upskilling more than 44,000 employees in AI and generative AI capabilities. This internal baseline now informs EY’s advisory offerings and implementation services.
The Academy has also been piloted with five enterprises, resulting in the initiation of more than 50 AI projects and the development of organisation-specific AI manifestos. While EY has publicly shared pilot participation and project counts, it has not released detailed ROI or performance metrics for these engagements.
According to Anurag Malik, partner and leader of people consulting at EY India, generative AI has the potential to reshape 38 million jobs in India by 2030, and 97 per cent of enterprises identify the shortage of skilled talent as a central obstacle to deployment.
Global AI Talent Trends
EY’s Academy launch aligns with broader global labour-market shifts. According to PwC’s 2025 Global AI Jobs Barometer, skills for AI-exposed roles are changing 66 per cent faster than in other occupations. India’s AI talent pool is expanding rapidly, projected by Nasscom and Deloitte to exceed 1.25 million professionals by 2027, though demand continues to outpace supply.
Meanwhile, the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs 2025 report indicates that AI will automate many routine administrative tasks while creating new opportunities in fields such as data analytics, AI development, and governance. This dual impact highlights the varied levels of organisational readiness across global industries.
Preparing for Agentic AI and Long-Term Workforce Transformation
EY positions the Academy as a strategic stepping stone toward agentic AI — systems capable of autonomously completing multi-step tasks with limited human intervention. Gartner forecasts that by 2028, 33 per cent of enterprise software applications will incorporate agentic AI capabilities, up from less than 1 per cent in 2024. By 2029, such systems could autonomously resolve as much as 80 per cent of customer service queries, according to Gartner-cited industry analyses.
Parallel research from Capgemini estimates that AI agents could unlock approximately USD 450 billion in economic value by 2028 across major global markets through efficiency gains and new revenue opportunities. Adoption, however, is uneven: only a small proportion of organisations have fully scaled agentic AI capabilities, indicating a widening performance gap between early adopters and slower movers.
Within this context, EY’s Academy emphasises risk mitigation and leadership oversight, equipping organisations to adopt increasingly autonomous AI responsibly while maintaining appropriate human accountability.
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