Squadra promotes the graduation of New Thinkers 2026 and positions AI as a social lever
The scarcity of qualified talent to operationalize advanced AI projects remains the main innovation bottleneck in corporate organizations.
The industry's conventional response has been an inflationary competition for senior talent or a blind bet on technologies that promise to replace engineering gaps. These approaches fail by ignoring the root cause of the problem: the lack of an efficient, sustainable, and continuous pipeline for training professionals in emerging skills.
The democratization of access to technical knowledge in AI should not be seen as an isolated social responsibility action, but rather as a talent pipeline formation strategy for immediate labor market insertion.
The 2026 edition of New Thinkers, enabled by Squadra, is a continuation of the COLAÍ initiative, a partnership between Microsoft and Gerando Falcões.
This edition was designed to continue the journey of young people who participated in COLAÍ with a complementary technical training track, creating a concrete bridge between initial training and the insertion of young people into the technology market.
At the recent graduation of this New Thinkers 2026 class, held on September 11 at Microsoft's headquarters in Brazil, the milestone celebrated was not just the completion of the program, but the beginning of a technological professional career. Some of them will be selected to start their careers within Squadra itself.
The certificate these young people received attests to their learning of the tools, but the real value is generated in the continuous application of this knowledge in solving technology challenges in companies.
The future of software engineering and technology leadership belongs to organizations that build their own bridges for talent access and development. Investing in the training and hiring of these young people goes beyond rhetoric and uses technology as a social lever, as it should be.
More details about the partnership between Squadra, Microsoft, and Gerando Falcões can be found on the Microsoft website.
