ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Digital Education
The "Skills-First" Illusion: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Microsoft's AI Skilling Initiative [Frontiers in Education, Forthcoming 2025]
Provisionally accepted
- University of Los Andes, Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia
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This paper critically examines Microsoft's AI Skilling Initiative as a paradigmatic case of corporate intervention in digital education. Drawing on Norman Fairclough's three-dimensional model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), it interrogates the language, narratives, and ideological work embedded in Microsoft's public-facing materials. The study analyzed 15 official Microsoft communications—including blogs, press releases, and reports—published mainly in 2025, coded inductively to identify recurring discursive markers such as empowerment, democratization, and upskilling. While the initiative promotes itself as democratizing AI knowledge and empowering learners, the analysis reveals how a "skills-first" discourse reframes systemic challenges of automation and labor precarity as individual deficits solvable through continuous upskilling. Learners are constructed as units of human capital, their value tied to productivity and adaptability within a corporate-driven economy. Furthermore, the initiative's product-centric curriculum functions less as neutral education and more as a market-entrenchment strategy, cultivating a workforce "Microsoft-AI-ready." The paper also highlights contradictions in Microsoft's discourse: while AI is presented as augmenting human potential, the company's own research warns of cognitive offloading and diminished critical thinking. Situating these findings within broader debates on neoliberalism, philanthro-capitalism, and the coloniality of power, the paper argues that corporate-led skilling initiatives risk narrowing educational agendas, reinforcing dependencies, and displacing public responsibility for workforce development. It concludes by calling for critical, vendor-agnostic pedagogies that prioritize equity, critical consciousness, and democratic control over digital education.
Keywords: empowerment, Democratization, Upskilling, philanthrocapitalism, Epistemic dependency, Decolonial AI ethics, Technological determinism
Received: 10 Sep 2025; Accepted: 18 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Balán. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Laura Balán, lm.balan@uniandes.edu.co
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.