Miami Dade College and Google on Tuesday announced a $2 million investment from the tech giant to expand a program to prepare the institution's students for artificial intelligence careers.
The funding will benefit students by strengthening a program to train educators, enhance digital infrastructure and develop AI-centered curriculum resources for college and K–12 faculty, according to MDC representatives.
Professional development programs and certifications will also be available to help educators teach emerging AI technologies.
The investment was announced at a panel Tuesday at the Miami-Dade College Wolfson campus.
" I think Miami has been, Miami Dade College has been, on the frontier for actually training educators and other people to use AI. And that's the grant is to foster that," said Ben Gomes, Google’s chief technologist of learning and sustainability. "I see the ways AI is beginning to be used in the classrooms here, in the colleges as well in the schools, and I'm seeing a lot of innovation — some are things I hadn't thought of as to how teachers are using it."
The $2 million, which is already being disbursed, is channeled through the National Applied AI Consortium (NAAIC), a program designed by community colleges including MDC.
The move is the latest to signal Miami’s embrace of AI education. In the last few years, Mayor Francis Suarez has painted the city as the next tech capital by opening opportunities for investors and headlining local cryptocurrency conferences.
" We were a city that was a collection of amazing people, as we've always been, but we were kind of known as a [place for sun] and fun place to vacation, maybe a place where you could retire," Suarez said, "but we didn't have a reputation for doing serious business."
Saurez was also forthcoming about his own use of AI chatbots. He told the story of being unprepared to deliver a speech at the opening of the Consulate of Morocco earlier this year. He turned to an AI agent.
"I say, ‘Pretend you're the mayor of Miami and you're about to open up the Moroccan Consulate and you only have two facts,''" Suarez said he told the chatbot. "'Fact number one is there are direct flights to Casablanca. Fact number two is, it's the third [Moroccan] consulate in America. What are you gonna say?'
As Suarez was being introduced and he walked to the podium, he said, it wrote his remarks. "I delivered the speech word for word. I had people crying in the audience. They hugged me afterwards."
The crowd at MDC erupted in laughter.
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The conversation also dipped into AI ethics and responsible use.
When asked about implementing policy at the state level to ensure student safety, state Rep. Mike Giallombardo, R-Cape Coral, was critical that policy to "over-regulate" AI would too broadly restrict access to the innovative tool. AI should be regulated like any other tool, he said.
"You hit somebody in the head with a hammer [and] it's illegal, right? I think that's the approach that we have to start taking when you come to regulating AI. You know, punish the bad actors that are using it."
Responsibility and safety have been a large part of the AI conversation as fear builds due to reports of AI encouraging teenage suicide and deepfake photos used for revenge porn.
From the mayor to Miami Dade College, the current positive attitude towards AI is a turn from what it was a few years ago. Largely viewed with skepticism earlier, it’s now commonly seen as a necessary tool for the workplace, which means getting it in the hands of students.
The Miami-Dade school district also partnered with Google earlier this year to make Gemini, Google’s chatbot, available to high schoolers and teachers; 100,000 high schoolers and 18,000 teachers in the country’s third largest school district have access to it.
"Learning has to become something that you want to do. You have to be motivated to do that, and I think that comes from partnership with teachers," Gomes said.
"Teachers are, in our view, fundamental to it. People learn because of other people, for other people. Technology can help, but they learn for people."
