Women in Data Science Worldwide is proud to introduce the WiDS Apprenticeship, as part of our Next Generation Professional suite of programs designed to cultivate AI-ready talent by connecting university learning with real-world industry practice. This program connects emerging university talent with experienced industry professionals to co-develop real-world solutions while building the technical depth, human capability, and practical judgment required for success in modern AI work. As Chisoo Lyons, Executive Director of WiDS, notes, “Again and again, I’ve seen that the biggest challenges in AI are not technical. They are human. This program creates a learning environment where students can examine bias, navigate ambiguity, and practice the judgment and responsibility that real AI work requires. This is how we prepare the next generation to build systems that expand opportunity rather than reinforce inequity.” Across sectors, organizations face an accelerating need for professionals who can integrate data science, agentic systems, and GenAI tools with sound judgment, responsible decision making, and the ability to work across teams. The WiDS Apprenticeship Program is designed to meet this need directly. Each cross functional team brings together university students and experienced industry professionals in a co-development model, working as one integrated unit to define problems, build solutions, and deliver meaningful results.
A defining feature of the WiDS Apprenticeship Program is its flexibility, allowing industry partners to shape the engagement to best suit their teams. For the inaugural pilot, Accenture Song chose to implement a highly collaborative “co-development” model. In this specific setup, students and industry professionals worked alongside one another as contributors on the same team, rather than in a traditional, one-directional mentorship exchange. Through this approach, students gained direct exposure to how industry teams define analytical problems, make decisions, and communicate insight. Industry professionals, in turn, gained a clearer view of how emerging talent approaches complex AI challenges with speed, curiosity, and new perspective. Reflecting on their pilot’s structure, Robert Duque Ribeiro, Managing Director Americas Lead for Data and AI at Accenture Song, noted, “The WiDS Apprenticeship Program gives students a direct window into how industry teams structure decisions and create value. It also gives consultants a view into how emerging talent approaches complex AI problems with curiosity and speed. That exchange creates a stronger foundation for the kind of workforce the future requires.”
At the core of the WiDS Apprenticeship Program is the WiDS Human Edge™ learning framework, which organizes seven human dimensions where people retain a clear advantage in AI-enabled environments. These dimensions include critical thinking, complex problem solving, communication and storytelling, creativity and innovation, adaptability and learning agility, leadership and social influence, and emotional intelligence and ethical reasoning. Throughout the program, teams move through an iterative process that reflects the demands of real industry work and the Human Edge dimensions become visible in the sequence of work itself, in how teams negotiate their Team Charter, narrow a broad problem into a workable scope, respond to critique from practitioners and WiDS reviewers, and then defend their choices in the Pre-Solutions Pitch and final Datathon submission.
Bryan Muñoz, Director of AI Learning and Datathon at WiDS, designed this challenge to test how teams respond when the conditions are not clean, linear, or fully predictable. Teams may use any tools available to them, but the goal is to see how they work across different levels of experience, question statistical convergence in AI models, and build solutions that make thoughtful use of modern AI and agentic tools. The structure is intended to demonstrate how teams apply Human Edge capabilities when the problem shifts and the path forward is indeterminate.
The annual WiDS University Datathon is a central part of this pilot because it creates an applied environment where analytical rigor matters and teams are expected to justify their decisions with evidence. This year’s collaborator, WatchDuty, provided real-time incident data that allows students to work through the realities of disaster response, public risk, and disruption on the ground. This is a meaningful setting for AI readiness because participants are not working with clean and structured data, rather they are working with wildfire incident data that reflects conditions that shift quickly and have consequential results that extend beyond model performance and into public communication, resource decisions, and community risk.
The program is designed to deepen collaboration between academia and industry. Participating universities include the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of San Francisco, Santa Clara University, Northeastern University Silicon Valley, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico. Together, these institutions are creating an applied environment that gives emerging talent exposure to the pace, ambiguity, and expectations of real industry work.
The WiDS Apprenticeship Program represents a model for collaboration between academia and industry that can grow over time. The inaugural pilot, developed in collaboration with Accenture Song, is already shaping how universities and organizations can strengthen interdisciplinary collaboration and build stronger pathways into modern data and AI work.
Interested in joining the next cohort of the WiDS Apprenticeship program?
Fill out the interest form: https://airtable.com/appdAkAWzyReSX71q/pagmwpgbE0u2Xvf5S/form