New Delhi, Aug 27 (IANS): Microsoft India on Tuesday announced the "Digital Governance Tech Tour" programme to skill government IT officials in new-age technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and intelligent cloud computing,

Microsoft will organise a series of physical and virtual workshops to train 5,000 government IT personnel over a period of 12 months.

"The first-of-its-kind ‘Digital Governance Tech Tour' for government officials reiterates our commitment to be a trusted partner to the government by enabling and empowering officials to do more with technology in service of the citizens," said Anant Maheshwari, President, Microsoft India.

The programme was inaugurated during the "Digital Governance Tech Summit 2019" here by Amitabh Kant, CEO NITI Aayog and Ajay Prakash Sawhney, Secretary Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), in the presence of senior government and Microsoft officials.

As India advances towards fulfilling its vision of becoming a $5 trillion economy, applying AI and data analytics using secure and compliant cloud-based tools can provide actionable, predictive and effective citizen focused services.

"As we move beyond pilots and understand how to scale AI implementation and cloud adoption across states and sectors, it is vital to equip the ecosystem with the right know-how and skills," Kant told the gathering.

The "Digital Governance Tech Tour" will be open to technocrats and IT professionals across the entire government ecosystem, including employees of public sector undertakings, government partners as well as solutions/systems integrators.

Participants will learn a range of skills, including being able to move, transform and analyze data, design and deployment skills for end-to-end solutions, and monitoring and troubleshooting in the cloud, including a deep dive into the fundamentals of Azure Cloud.