IBM pledges AI, cyber and quantum skills for 5M learners in India

This is classic long-game positioning from IBM: if you can’t outspend hyperscalers on frontier models, help staff the ecosystems that will use them. Training 5 million Indians in AI, cybersecurity and quantum doesn’t directly move the model frontier, but it does expand the pool of people who can responsibly deploy and secure these systems. India is already a global outsourcing and IT hub; adding AI- and quantum-literate workers at this scale strengthens its position as a services and integration powerhouse in the AGI era.

Strategically, IBM is also defending relevance. SkillsBuild is tied to IBM tooling and cloud offerings, but the real asset is relationships with universities, technical councils and state skilling programs. As OpenAI, Google and others push into enterprise with agentic platforms, demand for people who can stitch these tools into legacy processes will be enormous. India’s demographic and education system make it the logical backbone for that integration work. In aggregate, programs like this make it easier for companies worldwide to absorb increasingly capable models, indirectly accelerating the practical impact of AGI-class systems when they arrive.