Microsoft Pledges $4 Billion Toward A.I. Education

Microsoft said it would provide cash, artificial intelligence tools and computing services to schools, colleges and nonprofit groups.

Microsoft said on Wednesday that it planned to give more than $4 billion in cash and technology services to train millions of people to use artificial intelligence, amid an intensifying Silicon Valley crusade to embed chatbots into classrooms.

Microsoft, the maker of the Copilot chatbot, said the resources would go to schools, community colleges, technical colleges and nonprofits. The company is also starting a new training program, Microsoft Elevate Academy, to “deliver A.I. education and skilling at scale” and help 20 million people earn certificates in A.I.

“Microsoft will serve as an advocate to ensure that students in every school across the country have access to A.I. education,” Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, said in an interview on Sunday.

Microsoft did not immediately specify how much of the more than $4 billion the company planned to dispense as grants and how much of it would be in the form of Microsoft A.I. services and cloud computing credits.

The announcement comes as tech companies are racing to train millions of teachers and students on their new A.I. tools. Even so, researchers say it is too soon to tell whether the classroom chatbots will end up improving educational outcomes or eroding important skills like critical thinking.

On Tuesday, the American Federation of Teachers, a union representing 1.8 million members, said it was setting up a national A.I. training center for educators, with $23 million in funding from Microsoft and two other chatbot makers, OpenAI and Anthropic.

Last week, several dozen companies — including Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAI — signed a White House pledge promising to provide schools with funding, technology and training materials for A.I. education. In 2023, Amazon announced a new company program, “A.I. Ready,” to provide free online Amazon A.I. skills courses for two million people.

Before Microsoft’s new A.I. training campaign, the tech giant worked for over a decade to boost computer science education in schools, including lobbying for new state education laws. Microsoft also funded nonprofit education groups like Code.org; its “Hour of Code” lessons have been used by tens of millions of schoolchildren around the globe.

Now that A.I. tools can generate computer code, tech companies that were once big coding boosters are pivoting to chatbots. As part of Microsoft’s announcement on Wednesday, the company said it was backing a new Code.org program called “Hour of A.I.”

“Coding changed the work of software developers, but it didn’t change every occupation and profession, or the work of every professional, the way A.I. probably will,” Mr. Smith said. “So we need to move faster for A.I. than we did for computer science.”