Launch Overview
IIT Delhi’s Continuing Education Programme (CEP) announced a new Certificate Programme in Generative AI, a six‑month, online‑first course running from 17 October 2026 to April 2027. The programme costs ₹1,69,000 plus applicable GST and offers an optional on‑campus immersion at IIT Delhi.
Rationale and Market Context
According to Michael Page’s Talent Trends India 2026, 73 % of Indian professionals now use Generative AI at work, up from 47 % in 2024, underscoring a rapid rise in demand for professionals who can build and apply these technologies.
Eligibility and Admission Process
The programme is open to final‑year and pre‑final‑year students, graduates, and working professionals from computer science, information technology, allied engineering disciplines, as well as B.Sc. and BCA students with backgrounds in mathematics, statistics, computing or data science. STEM graduates, post‑graduates with programming exposure, and professionals with coding experience may also apply. No prior AI or machine‑learning experience is required. Admission follows a four‑step process: application submission, shortlisting and screening by the Programme Coordinator, offer and payment, and orientation.
Curriculum and Learning Structure
The curriculum delivers 86 hours of live classes and tutorials covering:
- Mathematics and Machine‑Learning foundations
- Natural Language Processing
- Transformer architecture
- Pre‑training and fine‑tuning
- Prompt engineering and Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF)
- Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG)
- Agentic AI and multi‑agent systems
- Generative AI for vision
- Responsible AI, safety and privacy
Participants will complete six hands‑on projects, including training a neural network from scratch, fine‑tuning a pre‑trained transformer, building a transformer from first principles, applying parameter‑efficient fine‑tuning to a large language model, constructing a reward model with an RLHF loop, and benchmarking LLMs across prompting strategies. A final capstone project requires learners to build and deploy a Generative AI or Agentic AI application for a real‑world business use case, presented during the campus immersion.
Skills and Career Outcomes
The programme is designed to develop capabilities relevant to AI research, engineering, data science, NLP, Generative AI, conversational AI, autonomous systems, and computer vision. Graduates are prepared for roles such as AI Research Scientist, Machine Learning Engineer, Generative AI Specialist, NLP Engineer, and Vision Engineer.
Faculty Insight
Prof. Tanmoy Chakraborty, Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Yardi School of Artificial Intelligence, and Prof. Rajiv Khemani, Young Faculty Chair Professor in AI at IIT Delhi, highlighted that Generative AI is transitioning from a promising technology to a practical capability across sectors including software, financial services, healthcare, and education. They emphasized the need for expertise that combines deep technical grounding with real‑world application skills.
Certification
Learners who meet academic and attendance requirements will receive an e‑certificate issued by the Continuing Education Programme, IIT Delhi.
Additional Information
The press release was produced on behalf of CEP, IIT Delhi by the empanelled service provider InterviewBit (Varsity). The programme is part of IIT Delhi’s eVIDYA@IITD initiative, which offers virtual and interactive learning for Indian and international participants.