Antonio
Cangiano

I've been at IBM for over 20 years. I co-founded and currently lead IBM Skills Network, the team and platform behind IBM's courses and labs across Coursera, edX, and CognitiveClass.ai. Our platform covers the LMS, the delivery pipeline, automation, support, and Kubernetes-based lab environments where learners run real code in the cloud.

I manage developers, data scientists, designers, and marketers. Developing engineers is the part I'm proudest of. I've hired hundreds of technical interns who went on to perform well beyond their years of experience.

I co-founded Cognitive Class and helped grow it as its Marketing Lead from zero to more than 3.5 million learners worldwide, organically, with no marketing budget.

I teach under my own name on Coursera, edX, and Cognitive Class. My course Generative AI: Prompt Engineering Basics on Coursera has reached over 669,000 learners, with a 4.7 rating and 97% recommending it.

Across all platforms, my courses on prompt engineering and conversational AI have passed 1.1 million enrollments.

I'm a hands-on engineering leader. I was a software developer and technical advocate at the IBM Toronto Software Lab for many years, and I still ship code.

I built Linguetto end to end. I write the Python data pipelines behind Italy with Antonio, turning ISTAT demographic data into choropleth maps, alongside image processing and EPUB generation. I run Any New Books, including an agentic curation workflow that handles the first pass on new releases.

Earlier, I wrote the original DB2 adapter for Ruby on Rails, which IBM has shipped and supported ever since, and received an Outstanding Technical Achievement Award for it. I created the Ruby Benchmark Suite and ran the Great Ruby Shootout, VM performance comparisons that language implementers used as a reference. I was an early adopter of Rails, Django, and Elixir, and brought each of them into IBM.

I'm Italian, naturalized Canadian. Outside work, I write a Substack about Italy and the Italian language that has reached Bestseller status. My hobbies include photography, fishing, reading, and exploring the outdoors.