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 uderstanding 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.