Boost your AI knowledge and skills with these free online courses
The world of artificial intelligence, and generative AI in particular, has evolved at a startling pace in the last few years. An understanding of AI is now a must-have in many job roles and keeping knowledge and skills up to date is seen as crucial for career progression.
To help, we have curated a list of what we feel are the best free online courses available from reputable suppliers including Microsoft, AWS, and Harvard University.
Whether you are a developer looking to take your skills to the next level, a marketer finding out how you can use AI to boost your campaign results, or a business leader preparing your organization for a future dominated by AI – there will be a course just right for you.
23 free online courses on artificial intelligence
AI courses suitable for everyone
1. Generative AI for Everyone
Provider: DeepLearning.AI
Audience: All
Duration: 3 hours
An excellent general overview of Generative AI technology, suitable for all audiences. The three-hour course covers what gen AI can and can’t do, an overview of AI tools, and the future impact of generative AI on society,
2. Introduction to Generative AI
Provider: Google
Audience: All
Duration: 30 mins + videos and a quiz
This is an introductory level microlearning course aimed at explaining what Generative AI is, how it is used, and how it differs from traditional machine learning methods. It also covers the Google tools available to help you develop your own Gen AI apps.
3. An introduction to Generative AI
Provider: LinkedIn Learning
Audience: All
Duration: 45 mins
Generative AI expert Pinar Seyhan Demirdag covers the basics of generative AI, with topics including what it is, how it works, how to create your own content, different types of models, future predictions, and ethical implications.
4. Introduction to Responsible AI
Provider: Google
Audience: All
Duration: 8 hours
This is an introductory-level microlearning course aimed at explaining what responsible AI is, why it’s important, and how Google implements responsible AI in their products. It also introduces Google’s 7 AI principles.
5. Using Bing Chat as a productivity tool
Provider: LinkedIn
Audience: Everyone
Duration: 35 mins
Learn how the Gen AI capabilities of Bing Chat can help you perform a wide variety of tasks from generating ideas and summarizing data to solving common work problems such as planning itineraries, scheduling, and communicating with coworkers.
6. Fundamentals of AI
Provider: Cognitive Class
Audience: Everyone
Duration: 3 hours
Consisting of three one-hour modules, this well-rounded course provides an introduction to the concepts of AI in an informal and engaging way. A great course to watch in your lunch hour over a few days and learn about the technology behind machine learning, computer vision, and even self-driving cars.
AI courses for more technical people
1. Elements of AI
Provider: University of Helsinki
Audience: Everyone to Technical
Duration: Various
Elements of AI is the most popular course in the history of the University of Helsinki. It forms part of their free Artificial Intelligence Collection, which is arguably the most comprehensive and flexible set of free AI courses available from any university in the world. Depending on your background and what you are looking to achieve, there will be a module for you. From a simple introduction to the concepts of AI, all the way through to practical courses on machine learning and neural networks for developers.
2. Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals: Generative AI
Provider: Microsoft
Audience: Light technical
Duration: 40 mins
A more technical course designed to provide an understanding of how large language models form the foundation of generative AI, how the Azure OpenAI Service provides access to the latest generative AI technology, and how generative AI applications, such as copilots, support efficiencies.
3. ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers
Provider: DeepLearning.AI
Audience: Developer intermediate
Duration: 1 hour
Learn prompt engineering best practices for application development. Discover new ways to use large language models (LLMs), including how to build your own custom chatbot. Gain hands-on practice writing and iterating on prompts yourself using the OpenAI API.
4. Foundations of Prompt Engineering
Provider: AWS
Audience: Developer intermediate
Duration: 4 hours
In this course, you will learn the principles, techniques, and the best practices for designing effective prompts. This course introduces the basics of prompt engineering, and progresses to advanced prompt techniques. You will also learn how to guard against prompt misuse and how to mitigate bias when interacting with FMs.
5. Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT)
Provider: University of Glasgow
Audience: Developer intermediate
Duration: 11 hours
This course introduces the fundamental ideas of natural language processing and language modelling, including how language models work, and how neural-based models are built. Learn about the key innovations that have enabled Transformer-based large language models to become dominant in solving various language tasks. Finally, learn about the challenges of applying these large language models to real-world problems.
6. Generative AI with Large Language Models
Provider: AWS
Audience: Light technical
Duration: 15 hours
Gain foundational knowledge, practical skills, and a functional understanding of how generative AI works. Dive into the latest research on Gen AI to understand how companies are creating value with cutting-edge technology. The course instructors are expert AWS AI practitioners who actively build and deploy AI in business use-cases.
7. Vertex AI: Qwik Start
Provider: Google Cloud Training
Audience: Developer intermediate
Duration: 1.5 hours
Vertex AI is the flagship machine learning platform from Google Cloud that lets you train and deploy ML models and AI applications, and customize large language models (LLMs) for use in your AI-powered applications. The goal of the course is to provide an introduction to Vertex AI through a high value real world use case – predictive CLV. Starting with a local BigQuery and TensorFlow workflow, you will progress toward training and deploying your model in the cloud with Vertex AI.
8. LangChain for LLM Application Development
Provider: DeepLearning.AI
Audience: Developer intermediate
Duration: 1 hour
In this course, you will gain essential skills in expanding the use cases and capabilities of language models in application development using the LangChain framework.
9. How to Build LLM Apps that can See, Hear, and Speak
Provider: SingleStore
Audience: Developer Intermediate
Duration: 2 hours
This developer tutorial includes a demo architecture and code snippets using SingleStore.
10. Introduction to Artificial Intelligence with Python
Provider: Harvard University
Audience: Light technical – intermediate dev
Duration: 7 weeks (10-30 hours per week)
This comprehensive course explores the concepts and algorithms at the foundation of modern artificial intelligence, diving into the ideas that give rise to technologies like game-playing engines, handwriting recognition, and machine translation.
11. Data Science: Machine Learning
Provider: Harvard University
Audience: Light technical
Duration: 32 weeks 2-4 hours per week
In this course you will learn popular machine learning algorithms, principal component analysis, and regularization by building a movie recommendation system. You will learn about training data, and how to use a set of data to discover potentially predictive relationships. As you build the movie recommendation system, you will learn how to train algorithms using training data so you can predict the outcome for future datasets. You will also learn about overtraining and techniques to avoid it such as cross-validation.
12. Machine Learning Crash Course
Provider: Google for Developers
Audience: Developer Intermediate
Duration: 15 hours
This detailed course forms part of Googles foundational machine learning courses for developers. They recommend taking the courses in order, but for developers that are already familiar with the basic concepts we suggest that you skip to the Crash Course module which they describe as ‘a fast-paced, practical introduction to machine learning, featuring a series of lessons with video lectures, real-world case studies, and hands-on practice exercises’. What we love in particular about this course are the Interactive visualizations which help to explain the concepts in an original and compelling way.
AI courses for product managers
1. AI for Product Management
Provider: Pendo
Audience: Product Managers
Duration: 2-3 hours
Consisting of six modules, this in-depth course explores AI’s place in product management—including how to leverage AI throughout the development life cycle, best practices for building AI-powered features, and why product managers should view AI as a strategic tool, not a threat.
AI courses for decision makers
1. Generative AI Learning Plan for Decision Makers
Provider: AWS
Audience: Business and technical decision makers
Duration: 3-4 hours
This unique course has been designed to equip the decision makers in any organization with the skills to both benefit from AI and transition their organizations to a future where machine learning will play an increasing role. Topics covered include Generative AI – Art of the Possible, Planning a Generative AI Project, and Building a Generative AI-ready organization.
AI courses for project managers
1. Generative AI Overview for Project Managers
Provider: Project Management Institute
Audience: New and experienced project managers
Duration: 3-4 hours
This course is focused on providing project managers in all industries with practical skills and methods for using GenAI to improve the velocity, accuracy, and quality of their work. It recognizes that every project is unique and teaches how project managers can work with AI to improve productivity and results without losing the human touch.
AI courses for HR professionals
1. AI Applications in People Management
Provider: University of Pennsylvania
Audience: HR professionals at any level
Duration: 7 hours
This course covers how AI and machine learning can be practically applied in people management. You will explore concepts related to the role of data in machine learning, AI application, limitations of using data in HR decisions, and how bias can be mitigated using blockchain technology. By the end of this course participants will be able to identify how AI can be used to streamline all HR functions.
Free prompt engineering courses
The people that are getting the most benefit out of generative AI models like ChatGPT, Copilot and Gemini are those that understand how important it is to provide the AI with the correct prompts to get the output that they require. Rather than learning by trial and error, these free online courses will provide you with a good grounding on which to build your skills.
1. Prompt Engineering for Everyone
Provider: IBM Skills Network
Audience: Everyone
Duration: 5 hours
Learn the skills to craft compelling prompts that yield better, more accurate responses. From understanding contextual cues to mitigating biases, the course aims to provide learners with the skills and techniques to effectively interact with AI systems.
2. Generative AI: Prompt Engineering Basics
Provider: IBM
Audience: Everyone
Duration: 7 hours
This popular course has a 98% approval rating from participant who learn about the concept and relevance of prompt engineering in generative AI models, how to apply best practices for creating prompts and explore examples of impactful prompts. They also get to practice common prompt engineering techniques and explore commonly used tools that can be used to make their prompts more effective.
Apply for an AWS scholarship in AI and machine learning
In addition to the excellent free courses and certifications offered by the AWS machine learning division, they also offer a full scholarship program for 2,000 students every year.
Although the full AWS AI & ML Scholarship program is aimed at students from backgrounds that are underrepresented in the machine learning industry, the definition is quite wide – “Underrepresented and underserved students include (but are not limited to) women, people with disabilities, people of color (Black, Latinx, and Indigenous), and members of the LGBTQ+ community.”
Learn how to build chatbots with no coding required
These days you don’t have to be a developer to build sophisticated chatbots that can be easily deployed on the web, on chat apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Viber, and even via SMS.
Check out these free step-by-step guides that show you how to do it.