Entain’s Data and AI Academy is building practical capability across a workforce of 14,000, moving beyond course completions to change how colleagues work with data and AI. With personalised learning, role-specific pathways, and its new ORBIT AI agent, the Academy is creating confidence, reducing dependency on specialist teams, and unlocking significant potential business value.
For a global workforce spanning data engineering, retail, product, trading, customer operations, finance, and HR, data and AI literacy cannot be delivered through a one-size-fits-all training programme. In response, Entain created a Data and AI Academy designed around people’s roles, starting points, and real business challenges.
The Academy’s ambition is deliberately broader than increasing participation in learning. It is designed to create practical capability that changes how people make decisions and enables colleagues to solve problems with data without automatically depending on specialist teams.
Building Skills Around the Business
The Academy operates across four areas:
- Data Skills Development
- Data Functions and Roles
- Data Technology
- Data Maturity and Excellence
Learning is connected to Entain’s own priorities, including customer acquisition, engagement and retention, player analytics, and behavioural segmentation, ensuring skills development remains grounded in business outcomes.
The approach recognises radically different levels of existing capability. A four-level Journey Rewards Programme, from Explorer to Data MVP, sits alongside specialist pathways for different roles and technologies.
That personalisation is extended through ORBIT, Entain’s purpose-built conversational AI learning agent. Accessible through the company’s internal network and Slack, ORBIT assesses an individual’s AI capability and proximity to data before creating a personalised pathway from more than 2,800 courses across eight providers.
The Academy is working with Entain’s Global People and L&D teams on company-wide AI upskilling through four stages:
- Awareness
- Experiment
- Adopt
- Innovate
This shared model makes AI literacy an organisational responsibility.
“Very strong academy model: personalised, role-based, scalable and commercially-linked, with strong adoption, learning hours, projects and quantified ROI. Clear evidence of cultural and operational impact.” – Judges’ comments
Turning Learning into Business Capability
The scale of engagement demonstrates strong demand with clear evidence of impact from colleagues applying their skills. Programme outcomes include:
- More than 1,500 learners and 8,000 learning hours.
- 54% active adoption, compared with an industry benchmark cited by Entain of approximately 20%.
- 2,041 course completions across 184 unique courses.
- 533 completed learning tracks and 102 hands-on projects.
- More than 12 job families reached across the organisation.
- One manual validation process reduced from 20 minutes to under two minutes.
- A five-day reporting cycle reduced to three days.
- Modelled annual capacity value of £3.2–£9.7 million, representing an estimated 10x return on investment.
These outcomes point to a more important cultural shift. Colleagues who previously relied on data teams are increasingly solving problems themselves. Employees without data backgrounds are building Power BI dashboards, writing Snowflake queries, and using analytics to identify customer patterns.
The impact is also multiplying organically. After progressing through the Academy, one participant became an advocate within his department before helping create a separate internal learning programme modelled on the Academy’s structure. Rather than learning remaining an individual activity, capability is spreading through peer influence.
A Scaled Literary Future
Entain is now using the Academy as the infrastructure for organisation-wide AI readiness. ORBIT is being rolled out across the company, Microsoft Copilot is being deployed enterprise-wide, and role-specific AI communities of practice are being established.
The significance of the Academy lies in this transition from training to capability. Personalisation makes learning relevant, business-aligned pathways connect skills with outcomes, and peer adoption helps new behaviours spread beyond formal programmes.
By creating a model capable of meeting 14,000 colleagues at very different starting points, Entain has shown how a data academy can evolve into something broader: a scalable foundation for building the data and AI capability the organisation needs to execute its strategy.
