As Parsons’ footprint moves into the cloud, their leadership recognized the need for a change in culture and a fundamental requirement to educate their engineering task force on the new cloud operating model, tools, and technologies. Parsons is observing industry trends that make it imperative to incorporate AI and ML capabilities into the organization’s strategic and tactical decision-making processes. To best serve the customer’s needs, Parsons must upskill its workforce across the board in AI/ML tooling and how to scale it in an enterprise organization. Parsons is on a mission to make AI/ML a foundation of business across the company.
Parsons chose AWS DeepRacer because it’s a fun, interactive, and exciting challenge that appealed to their broader range of employees and didn’t mandate a significant level of expertise to compete. Parsons found that AWS has many dedicated AWS DeepRacer experts in the field who would help plan, setup and run a series of AI/ML events and challenges. Parsons realized success of this event would be driven by efficient mechanisms and processes the AWS DeepRacer community has in place.
Parsons’ goal was to upskill their employees in an enjoyable and competitive way, with virtual leagues among peer groups and an in-person event for the top racers. The education initiative in partnership with AWS was comprised of four phases.