Tech firm Amihan investing $1M build pool of AI engineers for PH

Technology company Amihan Global Strategies is investing about $1 million for its newly launched Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) Academy, which aims to pool of 1,000 to 2,000 local professionals and position the Philippines as a global supplier of artificial intelligence (AI) talent.

FDEs are software engineers who work directly inside enterprises or organizations to build AI or software solutions that run in production.

"About a million dollars we will allocate," Amihan chairman Winston Damarillo told reporters at the FDE Academy's launch in Makati City on Friday.

"The investment is almost like building software for us. We're going to invest R&D [research and development] on the training, not just for our use, but make sure it's propagated," Damarillo said.

The Amihan chairman said the company has about 22 prompt engineers and about 50 engineers who are trained and certified.

Damarillo said the company aims to reach about "100 by the end of the year."

Through partnerships with universities, he said Amihan is expects to develop a "pool" of 1,000 to 2,000 FDEs for the country.

"The first mission is to make sure that the world knows that there's a healthy and abundant supply of FDEs in the Philippines," Damarillo said.

The United States will be the primary market for these engineers, he said.

"Once we cross a thousand certified FDEs in the country, people will take notice. There's only about 10,000 in the US, which is really not that big considering how much the demand is in the world," Damarillo said. — VDV, GMA News