Choose Your Path — Five AI-Augmented Careers, One Academy
A visual guide to AICademy's five hands-on paths — Service Desk, SysAdmin, IT Project Manager, RAG Engineering, and Agentic AI Leadership — and how to pick the one that matches the job you already do.

I’ve been building AICademy — a multi-course academy for the people who design, lead, and run real infrastructure. Not an abstract “intro to AI,” but five hands-on paths that each apply AI to the exact work you already own: a ticket queue, a server estate, a transformation programme, a team.
The hard part for anyone landing on it isn’t motivation — it’s which path. So I made a visual “Choose Your Path” guide that answers one question: what do you do all day?
The five live paths, and who each is for:
🎫 AI-Augmented Service Desk Professional (8 weeks) — for L1/L2, EUC, and desktop support. Work the queue with AI and leave with your own AI-Assisted Service Desk Playbook.
🖥️ AI-Augmented System Administrator (10 weeks) — for SysAdmins on Windows, Linux, and hybrid estates. AI generates scripts, reads logs, and drafts runbooks — generated fast, validated always.
🧭 AI-Augmented IT Project Manager (8 weeks) — for infra transformation and transition PMs. An AI co-pilot across planning, risk, comms, change control, and cutover.
🤖 Agentic AI & RAG Engineering (30 weeks, flagship) — for infra pros who want to build. RAG, agents, multi-agent, MCP, and production engineering — with code — modelled on the IITM Pravartak curriculum. Its rank ladder literally runs from L1 Service Desk to Agentic AI Engineer.
🧭 Agentic AI Leadership (18 weeks, Executive Certificate) — for executives and managers, no coding required. Explain, prioritise, and govern agentic AI, with a weekly Apply-at-Work mission in your real job. Modelled on NTU Singapore’s programme.
The guide lays these out on a career map (two tracks — Build & Run and Lead & Deliver — both pointing toward running agentic AI in production), an interactive “find your fit” picker, and a full breakdown of every path’s phases, skills, and capstone. It’s themed after the cinematic teal-and-gold palette of Silo, with a hero image generated in Grok Imagine and animated course “consoles” for each path.
The thesis under all five paths is the same: AI won’t replace infrastructure people — it rewrites what they do all day. The fastest way to get in front of that is to apply it to work you already own, ship something real every week, and keep the artifact that proves what changed.

About the Author
Ajay Walia
AI {IT Architect} focusing on local-first multi-agent AI engineering, zero-data-egress systems. Ideator, Creator and Executor on Curious Bit.
Keep Reading

Building a Support Agent That Knows When to Stop — My Agentic AI Capstone
A technical deep-dive into my IIT Madras Agentic AI capstone: a framework-free customer-support resolution agent with deterministic pre-LLM safety, grounded RAG, guarded tool use, memory — and the live date-arithmetic failure that reshaped its architecture.

Aether, Rethought — The Shape Was Wrong All Along
Our first build mirrored the org chart. It was the wrong shape. Here's how five recognised agentic design patterns, scored against the same criteria, led to a hybrid recommendation — and what changes in v3.

I Built My Own RSS Reader in an Afternoon — With AI Doing the Typing
How I built LumenAI — a local-first, native macOS RSS reader with full-text search, offline reading, and pluggable AI summaries — from an empty folder to a signed DMG in about an hour, with Claude writing every line.