Audi Starts Training Its Employees On Big Data And A.I.

With each passing month, we see more and more car companies taking a deep dive into artificial intelligence and autonomous systems, as well as studying big data that comes with developing autonomous systems for use in city environments. They do this either by partnering with existing companies or absorbing them, or through loose investments with tech sharing agreements. Audi is starting to train their own employees in-house under the new "data.camp" motto, to prepare them for the future of automobile engineering. 

Despite advances in education and the inclusion of information technology in the most syllabuses around the world, there is still a great number of people in the current workforce that don't quite understand the basics of it. This is especially true in Germany where vocational training means most employees have very narrow ranges of expertise, but with new car development requiring integration with the cloud and such, employees need to understand what they're going to be dealing with.

At the Audi Academy, they are carefully analyzing the requirements of various business units in order to prepare a more concise syllabus for each group of employees. Basic programs include programming and data analytics, going up to university level courses on artificial intelligence and machine learning. There are also courses for agile development like scrum, design and thinking and rapid prototyping leading up to qualification in big data.

Audi will also be working together with external partners for this endeavour. The Udacity online platform allows tutors from various departments to manage the learning of participants, and it ensures a tight technical connection with Audi. Audi students are required to participant for 10 hours a week, in parallel to their regular work duties. It's much like a night course class, and at the end of the course participants will receive a nanodegree; eventually the qualifications for big data will help transform Audi's workforce and help them adapt to the digital car economy.