The AI Opportunity Fund is training more than 20,000 people in foundational AI skills across 24 European countries. Here's how one shared course worked for learners from wartime Ukraine to rural Italy.
In Ukraine, a grantee organization sent power generators to learners completing AI training during blackouts caused by the war. In rural Italy, a farmer’s granddaughter took the same course to modernize a three-generation family business. In Hungary, a 74-year-old retired lawyer signed up because she wanted to hold her own in conversations about AI.
They were all taking part in the same AI training program.
The AI Opportunity Fund (AIOF) is training more than 20,000 people in foundational AI skills across 24 European countries. It is run by the Centre for Public Impact (CPI), with training delivered by MinnaLearn, Quadmark, and Codecool, and supported by Google.org. What makes it work at scale is the decision to keep one thing fixed and let everything else move.
The fixed point
CPI’s program runs through a network of 77 grantee organizations across Europe, each working with its own community of learners, from mothers looking to achieve a work-life balance in Poland to librarians in Romania and young people in Germany who have been out of the job market for years. Seventy percent of participants are women, and the age range is wide — from 18 to 74. There is, as Dan Rowson of CPI puts it, no typical participant other than curiosity around AI and a desire to learn.
The two curriculums — Google’s AI Essentials and MinnaLearn’s Elements of AI — gave the program a shared foundation. And, critically, a shared one across language. MinnaLearn’s Elements of AI course — built on the University of Helsinki’s original Elements of AI — was available in Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Swedish, Latvian, Lithuanian, and more, which meant the program could reach more communities across Europe. By the end of the program, MinnaLearn’s curriculum will be taught to nearly 4,000 learners, with MinnaLearn directly training more than 1,000 learners in Finland and in Finnish.
“MinnaLearn allowed us to open the scope and do a truly cross-European program,” says Rowson. “Without removing the language barriers, we simply couldn’t have reached this scale across different geographies and learner contexts.”
What required flexibility
A shared curriculum doesn’t tell you whether your learners need childcare support to attend, or whether they have reliable internet access, or whether printed materials would serve them better than an online course. Those questions can only be answered by someone close enough to the community to ask them.
CPI commissioned the OECD to undertake research on the barriers to participation experienced during the training journey and selected grantee organizations that understood the needs of their learners most. Grantees chose between in-person, hybrid, or online delivery. Some printed course materials and provided travel stipends. Others offered coaching and built sessions around childcare schedules.
To support continual learning, CPI also built feedback loops at every level. In monthly sessions, trainers and grantees shared what was working, and a joint community was set up with MinnaLearn’s own trainer network. When specific challenges, such as making the course material accessible to neurodiverse learners, arose, the networks worked on them together. In this particular example, the CEO of the Danish Dyslexia Association ran a session on removing barriers for learners with dyslexia.
“MinnaLearn has been a great thought and learning partner,” explains Rowson. “They’ve opened up the breadth of the program in many ways.” The curriculum was the foundation, and the partnership was what kept it evolving.
Communities formed organically, too. WhatsApp groups were set up between learners. Cohorts of women who met through the course became friends, which kept motivation high after the structured sessions ended. An older participant who had thought about dropping out of the program was persuaded to stay by younger classmates. She finished the course and came back with her granddaughter — a unique example of the older generation supporting a younger person to become more tech-savvy. A woman in Lisbon completed the course with such confidence and ability that she was able to rejoin the program as an AI trainer, demonstrating the employment possibilities that AI can create.
“Communities formed at every level, from learners to trainers to grantees,” says Rowson. “This is not only important for continual improvements in delivery but to establish a sustainable support network that can last far beyond the program itself.”
What 20,000 learners mean
“The program is about AI and empowerment,” says Rowson. “Whilst we’re supporting 20,000 people from diverse contexts, they’re all going through this same technological change and feeling lots of emotions about it, ranging from cautiousness to excitement. The big thing we see is a real increase in confidence, where people feel they won’t be left behind and can start using AI in their daily and professional lives.”
CPI is now working to feed what it has learned back into policy with evidence on how to roll out AI upskilling in a way that removes barriers, built from the 24 countries and thousands of people taking part. “Twenty thousand is a significant number of people, but just the start when you consider how many more could benefit from foundational AI skills across Europe. Governments need to be thinking about how to ensure AI training is accessible to all so that its benefits are felt equitably,” says Rowson. “But you also have to consider the ripple effect. We know that learners are sharing their new knowledge and skills with their friends, families, and coworkers. The number is just the starting point!”
