With businesses finding new, inventive ways to use AI almost every day, it's no surprise that AI training courses are becoming increasingly sought after.

Workers in all sorts of industries are looking to upskill themselves in line with the rapid technological changes occurring. Luckily, companies like Microsoft and Google offer free AI training courses, as do some higher education institutions.

In this guide, we cover the best AI training courses currently available, as well as the benefits of learning about AI in the current job market. We've largely focused on free courses that offer immediate, foundational learning opportunities that you can start applying to your job role or career straight away, rather than paid degree courses that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars.

1. Google’s Generative AI Learning Path (10 Courses)

The first two introductory courses cover a lot of immediately applicable content, such as how to use prompt tuning to get the best out of large language models. There's also a course on the responsible usage of AI.

Although there's no official qualification, you will be awarded a completion badge that you can attach to your digital resume.

This Microsoft learning path is designed, as the tech giant says, to help businesspeople acquire “the knowledge and resources to adopt AI in their organizations”, and explores “planning, strategizing, and scaling AI projects in a responsible way.”

Microsoft says the objectives for this course are to become familiar with existing AI tools, understand basic AI terminology and practices, and use prebuilt AI to build intelligent applications.

To enroll in this course, which is 2 hours and 40 minutes long, Microsoft says you’ll need a “basic understanding” of IT and business concepts. Modules included in the pathway are:

• Leverage AI tools and resources for your business (55 mins)
• Create business value from AI (21 min)
• Embrace responsible AI principles and practices (48 mins)
• Scale AI in your organization (36 mins)

3. Linkedin’s “Career Essentials In Generative AI” training course

Linkedin’s AI Career Essentials Course is made up of five different videos, with a total run time of around four hours. Each video is hosted by a different AI expert, covering a range of core concepts and ethical considerations relating to AI models.

One of the videos provides a detailed explanation of how to streamline your work with Microsoft Bing Chat, while another discusses the key differences between search engines and reasoning engines. Although there’s no accreditation or certification, completing this course will earn you a badge of completion from LinkedIn, which can be displayed on your profile.

The fifth video in the series, entitled “an introduction to artificial intelligence” is an hour and a half long and provides a simplified overview of the best AI tools for businesses, which is handy for those who haven’t taken the plunge yet and implemented a tool in work.

IBM offers a course entitled “AI Foundations for Everyone” through Coursera, of which over 19,000 people have already enrolled in. You can audit the course for free, which will give you access to all of the materials and some of the assignments, but you won't be graded or get a certificate at the end.

It’s geared toward beginners and you don’t need prior experience to enroll, and the schedule is flexible so you can learn at your own pace. Along with AI fundamentals, the course will also ensure you’re familiar with IBM’s own AI services, which help businesses integrate artificial intelligence into their existing infrastructure.

IBM says that, by the end of the course, participants will have had “hands-on interactions with several AI environments and applications”.

The course has three modules: “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence”, “Getting Started with AI using IBM Watson”, and “Building AI-Powered Chatbots Without Programming”. Each module takes between nine and eleven hours to complete.

5. Digital Partner's “The Fundamentals of ChatGPT” training course

Digital Partner’s course entitled “The fundamentals of ChatGPT” is a great option for anyone who wants to take a free, accredited course that covers the basics of Generative AI.

During the course, you’ll spend time learning about OpenAI’s role in global AI development, and be able to learn about how ChatGPT works, its advantages and limitations. There’s also a variety of examples included within the course that will show you how to leverage ChatGPT for different tasks, and you'll learn more about the difference between ChatGPT and ChatGPT Plus.

Modules include “Working With ChatGPT”, “ChatGPT and Its Shortcomings” and “Training a GPT Model”.

This free course is available on Alison.com, and is published by a digital marketing firm called Digital Partner. The course is CPD accredited and a certificate will be awarded upon completion of a small assessment at the end of the 1.5-3 hour program.

The course is almost two hours long and also includes content that will help you better use tools like ChatGPT to generate text responses as well as images.

The “AI for Visual Creativity” section, however, will show you how to use both MidJourney and Dall-E to create “photorealistic images, illustrations, and digital art in a variety of styles.”

On Udemy, you don’t receive certificates of completion for free courses, but if you're just looking to upskill yourself free of charge, this course is definitely worth a look.

Best Free AI Training courses for Programmers, Developers & Tech Experts

Up next, we have more advanced courses geared towards programming and development.

1. Harvard University’s “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence with Python”
2. DeepLearning.AI’s “ChatGPT Prompt Engineering For Developers” (Coursera)
3. Intro to TensorFlow for Machine Learning (Udacity)
4. Georgia Tech’s Reinforcement Learning (Udacity)
5. Become an AI-Powered Engineer: ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot (Udemy)
6. Great Learning’s “ChatGPT for Beginners” training course

1. Harvard University’s “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence with Python”

Harvard University offers a self-paced, 7-week course on the “concepts and algorithms at the foundation of modern artificial intelligence”.

The time commitment of between 10-30 hours a week – but it’s completely free to enroll and you’ll be supported as you complete projects and attend lectures. However, you need to have taken Harvard’s “Introduction to Computer Science” course first to enroll.

The course is run by AI expert and DeelLearning.AI co-founder Andrew Ng and OpenAI’s Isa Fulford, and it’s only an hour long. DeepLearning.AI says the course is “free for a limited time”. A basic understanding of Python is needed, but aside from that, it’s beginner friendly.

The estimated completion time for the course is approximately two months, and you should have some experience with Python syntax, including variables, functions, and classes, as well as a grasp of basic algebra.

If you take the course, providers Udacity say, you’ll get “hands-on experience building your own state-of-the-art image classifiers” as well as other types of deep learning models.

At the end of the course – which takes approximately four months to complete, but is also described as self-paced – participants will recreate a result from a published paper on reinforcement learning.

However, it is recommended you have a graduate-level machine-learning qualification and some prior experience with reinforcement learning from previous studies. Experience with Java is also required.

Although there’s no official certificate awarded for completing the course, you can earn a nano degree program certificate by completing Udacity's 4-month long “Deep Reinforcement Learning”, although this costs $1116.

This might be a free tutorial, but the course has much better reviews than some of the other AI courses available on Udemy, with 56% of watchers who left a review giving the course five stars, and a further 24% giving it four stars at the time of writing.

The course will be best suited to developers who want to leverage AI tools for coding responsibilities in general, and also, to become more efficient in their coding practices.

This is a completely free, two-hour long beginners-focused ChatGPT course. It’s one of the only beginner's courses on the internet that includes a section on coding prompts, although it also covers quite a bit of other ground, including email prompting.

There are no prerequisites needed for this course, and it has an average rating of 4.61/5, with 75% of reviewers giving the course 5 stars.

Free College AI Courses and Training

A number of universities and colleges offer AI-focused courses.

1. Stanford University’s “Machine Learning” Course (Coursera)
2. Vanderbilt University’s “Prompt Engineering for ChatGPT”
3. Georgia Tech’s “Machine Learning” Course (Udacity)
4. The Open University’s “AI Matters” Course (OpenLearn)
5. University of Pennsylvania’s “AI For Business” (Coursera)
6. University of Helsinki's “Elements of AI” and “Ethics of AI” Course

1. Stanford University’s “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” course (Udacity)

This foundational online program, which takes around 10 months to complete at a rate of 10 hours a week, focuses on fundamental AI concepts and practical machine learning skills but is classified as an intermediate course.

The course, which is split into two umbrella sections (“Fundamentals of AI” and “Applications of AI) is completely free if you sign up for Udacity (which also doesn't cost anything).  It consists of 22 different lessons and a string of interactive quizzes.

Jules White, Vanderbilt University’s associate dean for strategic learning programs and associate professor of computer science, has launched a free online course available through Coursera focusing on prompt engineering.

It goes through the most effective approaches for prompt engineering, covering summarization, simulation, programming, and other useful ways you can harness the power of ChatGPT with your inputs.

The course takes around 18 hours to complete and is made up of an introduction to prompts and three separate sessions on prompt patterns, as well as a 2-hour module on examples.

3. Georgia Tech’s “Machine Learning” course (Udacity)

In collaboration with Georgia Tech, Udacity has made an intermediate machine-learning course available for free, which takes around 4 months to complete, although the course listing says you can do it at your own pace.

The course is offered as part of an online master’s degree at Georiga Tech, but taking this course won’t earn you credit toward this degree.

The course covers Supervised and Unsupervised Learning, which are two different types of machine learning, and covers how they're used in AI systems.

However, having a “strong familiarity with Probability Theory, Linear Algebra, and Statistics” and prior experience with statistics is helpful. Students should also have some experience with programming.

4. The Open University’s “AI Matters” course (OpenLearn)

The Open University is a UK-based institution that offers a free course through its learning portal OpenLearn entitled “AI Matters”.

In the course, you'll learn about the “historical, social, political and economic issues in AI”, explore the benefits and limitations of the technology, and discuss ethical risks relating to AI.

The course is six hours long, and you'll be eligible for a certificate of participation.

5. University of Pennsylvania’s “AI For Business” (Coursera)

The University of Pennsylvania's “AI for Business” specialization is made up of four different, free courses:

• AI Applications in People Management
• AI Fundamentals for Non-Data Scientists
• AI Applications in Marketing and Finance
• AI Strategy and Finance

According to the University of Pennsylvania's website, although the course itself costs $39 to complete, you can enroll in the four individual modules that take up the course for free. Each module will take up around two hours a week to complete.

6. University of Helsinki's “Elements of AI” and “Ethics of AI”

The University of Helsinki has two, free online courses available. The course entitled “Ethics of AI” is geared towards “anyone who is interested in the ethical aspects of AI”, the university says.

The course will familiarize you with common questions that arise in AI ethics and the various ways to approach them.

“Elements of AI” is a broader course with 6 chapters, focusing on subjects such as “neural networks”, “machine learning” and “AI problem solving”.  All you need to do to access the course materials is sign up.

The Benefits of Learning About AI

Of course, completing an AI training course can have a number of benefits. From a personal learning perspective, it's one of the best ways you can spend your time – AI is here to stay, and getting a better grasp of how it works might just help you out in the near future.

Plus, the things you learn about AI will be applicable to a wide variety of job roles in almost every sector of the economy, so it's arguably a safer bet than completing a course on a niche or industry-specific topic.

What's more, right now, businesses are looking for people who understand how generative AI tools like ChatGPT work, and how to leverage them effectively. Employees that are conscious of the limitations of AI tools and able to generate useful responses using prompts are going to become more sought after than employees without these skills.

Completing an AI training course is going to look good on your CV, which will help if you're applying for a new job. Evidence that you've taken the initiative to explore an emerging technology is definitely something an employer will find desirable.

Of course, if you don't have much of a budget – or you're not entirely sure what AI training course would be the best use of your time – then trying out some free options is a great place to start.