MIAMI — Google announced on Tuesday that the company’s philanthropic program was donating $2 million in funding to the Miami Dade College-led National Applied Artificial Intelligence Consortium.
MDC, Houston City College, and Maricopa Community Colleges are leading the National Applied AI Consortium, which aims “to build a robust national AI talent pipeline” by making connections.
“We wanted to expand to 30 colleges and we’re donating money to make that possible,” said Ben Gomes, the chief technologist who leads Google’s Learning and Sustainability organization.
Gomes joined Madeline Pumeriega, the president of MDC, on Tuesday morning for the panel of the “Navigating the AI Era: Strategies from Classroom to Career” discussion at MDC’s Wolfson Campus in Downtown Miami.
“Google and Miami Dade College, that’s a Grand Slam,” Pumeriega said with excitement.
Pumeriega said that, so far, 900 MDC faculty have gone through AI training.
“Finding it easy to use the tools, I think, opens up a whole bunch of opportunities for you ... So you’ll have the same job title, but it’ll mean something different because you’re doing the job very differently,” Gomes said.
Gomes lauded MDC for doing “an amazing job in creating this program that brings together the community colleges, the faculty training in there, as well as industry leaders to create that pathway to careers in AI and to really smooth out that pathway for more and more students”
And he explained, it is not just getting students ready for new jobs in AI -- take for example, prompt engineering -- but preparing them for what is already happening as companies are increasingly looking for employees who know how to efficiently harness AI tools to boost productivity.
“The parts of it that might have been hard before, maybe done by machines, and other parts of it will be much more central to your job,” Jose Fernandez-Calvo, of the MDC AI Center, said. “I actually think many existing jobs will change in how they do the job. So you’ll have the same job title, but it’ll mean something different because you’re doing the job very differently.”
And that AI-driven change in how you do your job across a variety of industry sectors is coming fast, Fernandez-Calvo said.
“So right now, we’re doing training for a bank, for example, and we’re training all of the bank employees on how to use the different AI applications in their daily work,” he said.
“I think what’s important for people to understand is that we are at an inflection point where it’s very important to learn how to use AI,” he added. “No matter what your job.”
The partnership with Google also includes co-developing innovative tools using Gemini and Agentspace, according to MDC.
With a growing number of AI tools already in our workplaces across a variety of industry sectors, the aim here is to make sure these students have an advantage and are prepared when they leave college and start their careers.
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