What a great way to end the week. We’re delighted to share that The Gen AI Academy has been named a finalist in the Learning Awards 2027, in the Start-Up Learning Provider of the Year category.
The Learning Awards are organised by the Learning and Performance Institute, the professional body for workplace learning. This year’s programme received 732 entries from 67 countries, so being shortlisted means a great deal to us.
Dave Birss and I founded the Academy in 2024 because AI training was filling up with self-styled experts (the wild-west of AI), and it was becoming hard to know who to trust. We wanted to build a place where people could place their trust and count on real expertise, real humans and real experience, delivering training with tangible outcomes. In a world of AI, we wanted to champion the role of humanity alongside the technology, not spearhead humanity’s replacement. That’s true for our own organisation and for the organisations we teach. We will always champion human first organisations and skills.
Since our launch we’ve seen that organisations have access to AI, but adoption tends to stall once around 20 percent of the workforce engage with AI. The reasons were rarely about the technology, they are about the people: worry about being replaced, no time set aside to learn, leaders who talked about AI without being seen using it, and teams with no shared language for what good looks like.
So we built our services around that stall point and around helping organisations move beyond it. That means going further than a 90-minute inspirational session, towards masterclasses and programmes that take people on a journey from idea to development and encourage peer-to-peer learning inside their own organisations.
In less than two years, that approach has taken us into organisations across financial services, technology, retail and the public sector, in the UK, Europe, Turkey and Australia. Across our flagship workshop clients, participants self-rated confidence with AI skills rose from an average of 3.2 to 4.4 out of 5, and 91 percent said they would recommend us. The measure we care about most, though, is the person who tells us they weren’t using AI at all and now feel open to it.
None of this happens alone. Thank you to our clients for their trust, to our faculty of experts for the care they bring to every programme, and to the small but mighty team Lindsay, Rachel, who make the work possible every day.
The judging takes place virtually in November, and the awards ceremony is in London on 11 February 2027. We’ll be presenting to the judges and doing our best to explain why we do what we do. Wish us luck.
And thank you
Helena & Dave
