TL;DR: The Frontier Fellowship is now taking applications — a free 12-week programme placing 250 women on a route towards AI deployment consultant roles. Girls Talk Corporation and Enterprise4all deliver it with Innovate UK funding through the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, with cohorts starting in October and November.

Eligibility is deliberately wide and geographically narrow. Applicants must be women aged 18 or over based in the capital or the North West of England who are out of work, returning to work, or employed with too few hours or no route upward; full-time students are excluded. No degree, technology background or prior AI experience is expected. The application asks for no CV — an online form, a ten-minute scenario assessment, then a 45-minute case study for those shortlisted, briefed 90 minutes in advance. Organisers say they are testing how candidates think rather than looking for a polished answer.

The structure splits into three. Weeks one to four cover workflow construction and business process mapping, with ChatGPT, Copilot from Microsoft and Anthropic’s Claude as the tools taught. Weeks five to eight put teams of four or five onto a month-long live project inside a British SME, each with a named client, defined scope, weekly milestones and a deliverable. Host firms pay nothing but must supply a project lead for four hours a week, system and data access, and a place to work. The final month covers interview coaching, CVs, insight days with corporate partners and introductions to employers, followed by six months of alumni support.

Two details deserve scrutiny before anyone treats the numbers at face value. The placement is unpaid for the host and unwaged for the Fellow, which is a real barrier for exactly the cohort the scheme targets — though support with equipment and internet access is available. And while the programme calls itself placement-first, its published terms guarantee training and the four-week project, not a permanent job at the end.

Girls Talk claims a community exceeding 60,000 women and an independently assessed 80% sustained job outcome rate on earlier programmes; Enterprise4all reports work with over 5,000 smaller businesses. Funding comes via Innovate UK’s TechLocal programme.

Looking forward: Applications run through August. For UK SMEs, the offer is four weeks of scoped AI deployment work at no cash cost, across sales, finance, HR, operations and marketing — the pipeline automation and month-end reporting jobs that repeatedly stall for want of anyone to run them.