‘AI is by far the channel’s biggest opportunity yet,’ says Google Cloud’s Erin Rifkin.

Google Cloud has added four new learning paths to help developers with generative artificial intelligence skills for building applications, managing and securing machine learning models, generating content and analyzing data–especially important for the vendor’s solution providers bringing AI products and services to market.

Erin Rifkin, managing director of Google Cloud Learning, told CRN in an interview that “AI is by far the channel’s biggest opportunity yet, and we’re moving as fast as we can to provide the training that partners are gonna need to be able to meet that demand.”

“We really have to stop theorizing about AI and really start building,” she said. “These courses are going to give partners that practical experience and knowledge they need for everyday AI tasks.”

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Google Cloud Skills Boost

Miles Ward, chief technology officer at SADA, a Los Angeles-based Google partner and member of CRN’s 2024 MSP 500, told CRN in an interview that the solution provider has seen “an unbelievable amount of demand from customers” for AI offerings.

Some of the demand has ranged from enterprise search capabilities to help workers better find materials to AI tools for salespeople to summarize long interactions, said Ward, whose company is part of Insight–No. 17 on CRN’s 2024 Solution Provider 500.

Ward expects to start building “suites of tools on a job role basis” and continuing to help customers consolidate data centers and modernize infrastructure to take advantage of the new AI era. He described “many” customers as having AI use cases in production.

“Everybody wants a little of the magic right now,” he said. “So we are trying to help companies fan out as they approach doing this for real.”

The Mountain View, Calif.-based AI and cloud giant is leaning on partners for delivering AI products and services and that these collections of courses, hands-on labs and skill badges can help them stand out from the pack, she said.

“This is incredibly important for our partners,” Rifkin said. “With the growing adoption of cloud and AI technologies, organizations are looking for partners who are going to be able to help them in this transformation. AI, frankly, represents probably the biggest, fastest moving, the most lucrative opportunity that we’ve seen for the channel. And it’s urgent because we need to help people skill now to enable customers to be able to make the most out of this and have help partners meet that customer demand.”

The learning paths feature in-depth courses to guide learners through building proficiency before testing skills in a real-life challenge lab, according to Google.

Completing the hands-on training results in a skill badge for showcasing expertise on resumes and social media, according to the vendor, which has more than 100,000 partners worldwide.

The four learning paths are:

• Build and modernize applications with generative AI
• Integrate generative AI into your data workflow, which involves leveraging Google’s BigQuery Machine Learning for inference and Gemini AI models
• Deploy and manage generative AI models
• Generate smarter generative AI outputs, which involves apps that generate text and visuals and builds learners’ skills in vector search, image generation diffusion models and multimodal retrieval augmented generation (RAG)

Partners and users who join the Google Cloud Innovators community can access all the content for free, according to the vendor. Last year, Google started giving community members 35 unrestricted learning credits a month for courses and labs in the Google Cloud Skills Boost learning platform.

Innovators members also have exclusive offers including an AI Skills Quest with labs and badges.

Rifkin said that Google’s learning portfolio spans more than 1,000 pieces of content and more than 80 skill badges. Learning paths can last 10 to 20 hours on average, and they are constantly updated based on the latest learnings and market feedback.

The focus for the new courses is real-world GenAI skills and applicable use cases, she said. Google global system integrator partners collectively committed to train 150,000-plus people to deliver GenAI technology to customers, reflecting the need for Google’s ecosystem in meeting the AI demand.

As of March, Google had 535,000 individuals with advanced technical cloud certifications and credentials, she said.

Google has also launched tailored training and certification learning programs for underrepresented people in technology, including Launchpad for Women. A Launchpad for Veterans is slated for November.