Amihan invests $1Mn to train up to 2,000 Filipino AI engineers
- Amihan Global Strategies is investing $1 million to train Filipino AI engineers.
- Amihan expects a pool of about 1,000 to 2,000 forward deployed engineers.
- Amihan has about 50 certified engineers and aims for 100 by year-end.
- The United States is the initiative’s primary market, Winston Damarillo said.
MANILA, PHILIPPINES — Philippine technology firm Amihan Global Strategies is investing $1 million to build a pool of up to 2,000 Filipino artificial intelligence (AI) engineers, aiming to help the country’s outsourcing industry move toward higher-value services. The money supports its newly launched Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) Academy, which trains specialists to integrate advanced AI into business operations.
The push comes as AI reshapes traditional jobs.
Building a bench of engineers
Amihan chairman Winston Damarillo announced the investment at a media briefing on Nov. 5, Daily Tribune reported.
“Through our community efforts and partnerships with universities, we expect to build a pool of about 1,000 to 2,000 FDEs for the Philippines,” Damarillo said.
Amihan currently has about 50 trained and certified engineers, including 22 prompt engineers. It aims to raise that capacity to 100 by year-end.
The United States comes first
Damarillo said the initiative would help position the Philippines as a global supplier of AI talent, with the U.S. as its primary market.
“The first mission is to make sure the world knows there’s a healthy and abundant supply of FDEs in the Philippines,” he said.
The academy is supported by Anthropic, Amazon Web Services, SpaceX Super Intelligence and Nous Research’s Hermes Agent. It aims to help Philippine enterprises move beyond AI experimentation into full-scale deployment.
Universities and government
Amihan will work with universities including Mapúa and National University to expand its training network. It has also signed an agreement with the Department of Science and Technology’s Advanced Science and Technology Institute to train government scientists and engineers.
The program is part of Amihan’s new Agentic Enterprise Center of Excellence in Makati, which aims to strengthen the country’s competitiveness in the global AI services market.
What it means for buyers
A larger pool of local AI integration specialists would give Philippine providers more to sell than voice and back-office capacity. For buyers, it points to AI deployment work that can sit alongside existing offshore teams in the same country.
The scale is still modest: Amihan’s own certified bench is about 50 engineers today, against a target pool in the thousands. How quickly university partners can add to it will decide whether buyers see the difference.
Companies weighing business process outsourcing (BPO) in the country can compare providers on OA’s list of the top 40 BPO companies in the Philippines.
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Disclosure: Outsource Accelerator uses AI tools in the backend of its editorial workflow. Every article is reviewed and verified by a human editor before publication.
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