Amihan sets $1M for academy to train Filipino AI engineers

Insider Spotlight

• Amihan is allocating $1 million to develop an academy for forward deployed engineers.
• The company targets 100 certified engineers by year-end and a national talent pool of 1,000 to 2,000.
• The initiative aims to position the Philippines as a global supplier of AI engineering talent, particularly to the US.

Philippine technology firm Amihan Global Strategies is investing $1 million in a new artificial intelligence training academy, aiming to position the country as a global supplier of engineers capable of deploying AI systems in businesses.

Amihan chair Winston Damarillo said the company intends to increase its pool of trained and certified engineers to 100 by year-end, from about 50 currently, including 22 prompt engineers.

Its longer-term ambition is to develop a national pool of 1,000 to 2,000 forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) through partnerships with universities, technology companies and government agencies.

Winston Damarillo

The tech businessman wants to grow the country's pool of AI-trained professionals.

Targeting global AI demand

FDEs work directly with businesses to integrate AI into existing systems, transforming experimental applications into operational platforms.

Amihan sees an opportunity to position the Philippines as a source of this specialized talent, with the United States as its primary overseas market.

“Every enterprise will become an agentic enterprise, and every one of them will need builders,” Damarillo said. “The question for every Philippine CEO is whether those builders sit inside your company or inside your competitor’s.”

Backed by global technology partners

Launched in Makati City, the Amihan FDE Academy draws on technologies from Anthropic, Amazon Web Services, SpaceX Super Intelligence and Nous Research.

Participants will learn to deploy AI agents using Anthropic's Claude, AWS infrastructure and other engineering platforms, with emphasis on governance and enterprise integration.

“We teach what we’ve actually shipped,” Amihan president Jerry Rapes said. “No single platform wins every problem. What lasts is a team that can govern, integrate, and ship across all of them.”

Moving beyond traditional BPO

Damarillo said the $1-million investment would cover curriculum development, research and engineering resources, with practicing AI engineers conducting the training.

Amihan has also signed a training agreement with the Department of Science and Technology's Advanced Science and Technology Institute.

The initiative could help the Philippine business process outsourcing industry transition toward higher-value AI engineering services as automation reshapes traditional outsourcing work.

The inaugural academy cohort is invitation-only, with applications for succeeding batches open at amihan.net/academy.

— Edited by Daxim L. Lucas