I was alerted by a reader who informed me of the existence of such a program. Unfortunately, the reader was not selected for the program but managed to tip me off to have a quick look at it. I downloaded the "field guide" which can be found here, and was quite stunned at how difficult it is to qualify for this program. Here is my logic :

• There is no official course to train someone to qualify for this program.
• The self-study regime last 12 months and autodidacts must develop a range of skills from Python programming to data science to some expertise in deep learning to stand a chance to qualify.
• The regime is hard. Even for a fresh grad who comes from some soft IS program would struggle with eigenvector decomposition to be able to start on the basics of AI work.
• The program requires some expertise in Microsoft Azure so experienced staff should become familiar with this

...