AcademyAI raises £1.65M to close the workplace AI skills gap

AcademyAI
has raised £1.65 million in an oversubscribed pre-seed funding round to develop
its platform for assessing employees’ AI skills and providing training tailored
to their roles. Investors in the round include Nexus Family Office and Panthera
Family Office.

AcademyAI,
co-founded by Alex Packham, Andy Lambert, Michael Walton and Rob Barnett, is
developing a platform designed to help organisations understand how effectively
employees can use AI tools and identify areas where additional training is
needed. The company is targeting a gap between organisations’ adoption of tools
such as ChatGPT and Copilot and employees’ ability to use them effectively in
their day-to-day work.

The
platform assesses employees using a six-axis AI capability framework developed
with the Alan Turing Institute Methodology. It evaluates areas including
critical thinking, judgement, prompting, assessing AI-generated outputs and
practical AI skills, identifying capability gaps before providing personalised
training and use cases based on each employee’s role.

Rather
than relying on longer webinars or general training programmes, AcademyAI
delivers applied learning through five-minute modules tailored to an
organisation’s context, tools and terminology. The platform uses underlying AI
models to generate and update training content as AI tools and practices
evolve.

For
managers and leadership teams, AcademyAI provides dashboards that track the
development of AI capabilities across individual employees, teams and
departments, giving organisations a view of where skills are improving and
where further training may be required.

Alex
Packham, co-founder of AcademyAI, said the company is addressing a gap between
organisations providing employees with AI tools and understanding whether they
have the skills to use them effectively.

Every
company and CEO we talk to has given their teams access to AI tools. Almost
none of them know if their people can use them properly. It’s a measurement
problem first: leaders don’t know what their teams are capable of, so they
can’t close the distance between buying a tool and getting value from it.
Closing the gap between AI adoption and AI outcomes is what we built AcademyAI
to do,

said Packham.

The
funding will be used to further develop AcademyAI’s platform for assessing
employees’ AI capabilities and delivering role-specific training. It will also
support the company’s efforts to expand its offering as organisations increase
their adoption of AI tools.