Boost your AI knowledge and skills with these free online courses

Senior Content Marketing Specialist

Dave Hitchins

Senior Content Marketing Specialist

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.

19 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. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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.

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.

Want to try building your own chatbot?

Sign up for a free trial.

Click here
Mar 15th, 2024
8 min read
Senior Content Marketing Specialist

Dave Hitchins

Senior Content Marketing Specialist