The accelerating pace of developments in Artificial Intelligence~(AI) and the increasing role that technology plays in society necessitates substantial changes in the structure of the workforce. Besides scientists and engineers, there is a need for a very large workforce of competent AI technicians (maintainers, integrators) and users (operators). As traditional 4-year and 2-year degree-based education cannot fill this quickly opening gap, alternative training methods have to be developed. We present the results of the first four years of the AI technicians project which is a unique collaboration between a large governmental organization and an R1 university in the United States to design, implement and evaluate novel rapid occupational training methods to create a competitive AI workforce at the technicians level. Through this multi-year effort we trained 60 AI technicians, and we found that regular frequent updates to the training are necessary since the adoption of AI is evolving rapidly. Hence, a tight collaboration among the stakeholders is essential for successful development and maintenance of the training for the evolving role. Our findings can be leveraged by large organizations that face the challenge of developing a competent AI workforce as well as educators and researchers engaged in solving the challenge.