AI Academy · Undergraduate & postgraduate students
Applied AI for College Students
A six-week applied AI course that closes the gap between college syllabus and employer expectation: real projects with modern AI tooling — RAG systems, automation pipelines, agent frameworks — taught by practitioners who deploy these systems commercially, with a portfolio to show for it.
- Duration
- 6 weeks
- Format
- In-person, Kochi campus
- Cohort size
- Max 24 students
- Next start
- Rolling cohorts
The gap this course closes
Indian colleges produce technically capable graduates; employers want people who can ship. Between the two sits a specific, teachable skill set that syllabi haven’t caught up with: building with LLMs and retrieval systems, integrating AI into business workflows, deploying agents with guardrails, and the production discipline — testing, monitoring, cost control — that makes any of it employable. Recruiters now screen for exactly this portfolio, and “I completed an online specialisation” no longer clears the bar.
This course teaches that stack in six intensive weeks, in person, in Kochi — taught by the CortexIntel engineering team whose day job is deploying these systems commercially.
How it works
Every week pairs concepts with a build. By week two you’ll have a working retrieval-augmented application over real documents — with the evaluation harness that proves it works, because “it seems fine” is not an engineering statement. Week four’s agent project uses the same guardrail patterns we deploy for business clients: least-privilege tools, action budgets, logged steps. The final fortnight is production discipline and a capstone shipped to a standard our own consultants would sign off.
Cohorts are capped at 24 and taught lab-style: short instruction blocks, long build blocks, instructors circulating. Expect roughly 54 contact hours plus project time. It is deliberately demanding — the certificate means something because the bar does.
What you leave with
A portfolio of three deployed projects (RAG system, automation pipeline, guarded agent) plus a capstone presented to a panel that includes hiring partners; a certificate from a firm employers can verify actually builds this; and membership of an alumni community that shares openings, freelance work and study groups. For students weighing this against a placement-season crash course: ours is the one where you write and deploy the code yourself.
The track sits between our school programme and the professional intensive — ambitious final-years sometimes take the professional track instead; talk to us and we’ll advise honestly which fits. Cohorts run on a rolling basis at the Kochi campus. Contact us for the next start date, fees and the pre-course module.
Week by week
Week 1
Modern AI stack, hands-on
LLMs, embeddings and APIs from a builder’s seat. Setting up a professional dev environment; first working application in session two.
Week 2
Retrieval & knowledge systems
Build a RAG application over real documents: chunking, embeddings, evaluation, and why naive implementations fail.
Week 3
Automation & integration
Wire AI into real workflows with APIs, webhooks and orchestration tools — the skill mid-sized employers are hiring for right now.
Week 4
AI agents
Tool-calling, planning loops, guardrails and evaluation. Build an agent that does a real multi-step job, safely.
Week 5
Production discipline
Testing, monitoring, cost control, security basics — what separates a demo from a system a business will pay for.
Week 6
Portfolio capstone
Scope and ship a capstone to production standard; present to a panel including hiring partners from our network.
Questions families and participants ask
How is this different from my college electives or an online course?
Three ways: it is taught by people who deploy these systems for paying clients, every exercise uses real messy data rather than clean tutorial sets, and the output is a working portfolio — deployed projects with code employers can run — rather than a completion certificate.
Which branch or degree do I need?
Any degree with basic programming exposure — CS and engineering students are the majority, but we regularly train commerce and science students who have picked up Python. A short pre-course module gets your environment and Python fundamentals ready before day one.
Does the academy help with placement?
We are a consultancy, not a placement agency — but capstone panels include hiring partners, strong graduates get referred into our client and partner network, and the portfolio itself does the heavy lifting in interviews. Several alumni also freelance on automation projects sourced through the community.