At the recent EIT Education and Skills Days event, we spoke with Tomasz Chychrel, CEO at EIT Deep Tech Talent Initiative Pledger, Ideas Generator, and programme director of AIDEAS, their AI training programme, and one of the winning projects in our 2024 Call for Training Proposals. Tomasz was on the panel at the “Empowering Today’s Workforce with AI Skills” discussion, while AIDEAS also featured as the training impact story at the event.
“We expected 3,000. We got 35,000 Applicants!”
Maybe you can start with some numbers to help us get the big picture. How did this initiative begin, and where are you today?
So, the AI Development and Implementation for Enhanced Sectoral Applications, or AIDEAS, started as a partnership between Ideas Generator and Wrocław University of Science and Technology. When we launched, our goal was to recruit 3,000 participants and have at least 600 graduates.
Within just a few weeks of promotion, we had over 35,000 people register. As of September 2025, more than 10,000 people have completed the programme and received their certificates, and our community has grown to over 55,000 people.
However, these aren’t just passive followers, they’re engaged, motivated, and building real AI solutions. We also now have corporate and business partners who collaborate with us to design challenges for the participants, so they can learn by solving actual problems with AI.
That’s an incredible scale. Are most of the participants based in Poland, or is the reach broader?
The vast majority of participants are Polish speakers, but about 10% are Poles living across the EU. What’s really interesting, though, is who they are. Around 15–16% are CEOs, senior managers, or top-level decision-makers, and another 30% are mid- to senior-level professionals, people with real industry knowledge and responsibilities.
More importantly, this isn’t a programme for engineers. We’ve deliberately focused on non-tech specialists, such as people in HR, marketing, finance, or logistics, etc., who want to understand how AI applies in their domain. They come to us because they see the change coming and want to be part of it.
You clearly struck a nerve. So, what happens in the programme itself, what are participants actually doing?
The programme is designed as a two-phase learning experience. First, a three-week self-paced course brings everyone to the same level. This way everyone starts with a shared foundation, so it doesn’t matter if you’re a beginner or you’ve used AI tools before.
In the second phase, we form teams of 5–6 people, who are often complete strangers, and give them a business challenge to solve with AI which come from our corporate partners, and are based on real issues in logistics, marketing, food design, etc. The teams then have four weeks to work on a proof of concept. They meet, build, test, and iterate. It’s a hands-on experience, it’s collaborative, and it’s not about perfection.
We want them to experiment, fail, and try again, like a sandbox.
Do you see more of the momentum coming from individuals, or are companies now getting on board too?
It started with individuals. People were curious, sometimes scared, but motivated. They’d see how AI could support their actual day-to-day tasks and they’d sign up.
But the funny thing is, once we had a few dozen people from the same company sign up using their corporate emails, their HR or innovation teams would call us and say: “Clearly our people want this. Can we do something together?”
So, the bottom-up interest is now pulling top-down engagement from companies.
We’ve even had organisations ask us to help them recruit talent from our alumni pool. They see this as a talent pipeline of AI-aware professionals who are proactive and adaptable.
That’s a strong signal of impact. Do you have any stories that stand out to you personally?
Absolutely. One that really stuck with me came from an engineer whose team had lost a few members, people dropped out, got busy, life happened. He messaged me, mid-programme, saying: “Tomasz, we’re only three people now. I’m not a leader. I don’t know what to do.”
I told him: “Try. Just give it a go. This is a sandbox, a safe space to learn. Organise the first meeting, see what you can build.”
Three weeks later, he wrote back a full-page email, telling me it had been life-changing, and he’d discovered he could lead a team. He now enjoys working with people. Or at least a bit more than before AIDEAS. The experience transformed how he saw himself, not just as a data person, but as someone who can drive things forward. That’s the kind of transformation we want.
It’s not just about AI tools; it’s about growing as a person and a professional.
Let’s talk about what’s next. How are you planning to build on this success?
Right now, we’re working on two big developments for 2026:
- Regional expansion. We’re building partnerships in the Baltics, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Romania. The idea is to localise the experience, by translating the content and adapting the use cases, and run a CEE-wide edition of the programme. We hope this to be a stepping stone to a broader adoption across the whole EU.
- Specialisation. Currently, our programme provides broad, practical knowledge. For the next phase, we want to launch industry-specific tracks, for example the food industry, where AI can be used in packaging design, product development, or sourcing, will have its own tailored course, designed with experts from that sector.
We’re also developing a trainer cohort, where we share our methods with people who want to run these programmes inside their own organisations.
You’ve also experimented with AI mentoring
Yes! We’ve built AI mentors, digital agents based on real experts. For example, we worked with the
Consumer Digital Director Europe at Champion and we have gathered a ton of inspiration, quality sources, and specialized know-how from Dino. Then we turned that into an AI Agent that can answer questions about specific use cases, marketing strategy, or lead insightful discussion on AI future in marketing.
So now, any participant working on a marketing use case can ask “Agent Dino” for feedback, and receive personalised, real-time advice.
We’re moving towards hyper-personalised learning, where the course builds itself for you based on your needs, experience, and goals. You log in, say who you are and what you do, and within 30 minutes the system creates a full AI learning path tailored just for you; videos, quizzes, tasks, everything.
Finally, from your perspective, what does this mean for Europe?
In the last months we could hear a lot about an AI global race. In San Francisco recently, I spoke with a senior engineer at OpenAI, and he told me the US has a huge advantage because it’s one country, with one language, one set of regulations for start-up, so innovation is easier. I agree, in the AI era it can be, but it is not a guarantee
But what if we decided to play another game? The one, where Europe’s diversity is its superpower. Because when people from Germany, Poland, France, and Italy collaborate, we don’t just get new ideas, we get new ways of thinking. We’re not just playing someone else’s game. We’re building our own.
The AIDEAS is a small part of that. What started as an experiment is now a movement, and we’re ready to grow.
If any Pledge members would like to collaborate, let’s talk.
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