What do taxes, medicine, and the air in your bag of chips all have in common? They’re necessary evils: We may all suffer from them, but we rely on them to prevent even worse catastophies. For most average white collar workers in 2025, learning how to handle AI is a similar challenge.
Sure, large language models like ChatGPT won’t deliver perfect answers, they’re bad for the environment, and they’re cribbing countless copyrighted works without credit or payment. But they’re taking over the world, and your job could be next.
The only solution for anyone without a little systemic weight to throw around is to learn enough about AI to convince their boss that they’re hip to the modern workplace. Although we’d recommend not using the term “hip” if you’re trying to convince anyone that you are.
Here, we’ve rounded up the best AI training courses that you can take online today, at no cost to yourself. Sign up for one or two, and you’ll be among the AI-knowledgeable IT crowd in no time.
LinkedIn Learning: Data-Centric Visual AI
⏰Length: 2 hours
LinkedIn might be best known as a business-brained social media platform, but the service offers a LinkedIn Learning program as well, aimed at giving users a host of video training courses. This one, “Data-Centric Visual AI,” just debuted in December of last year, making it one of the freshest options.
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It’s just barely over two hours as well, so you’ll be able to tackle it and complete it within a single afternoon. And, since it’s aimed specifically at data visualization, it’s very actionable. Who hasn’t been called among to throw together a quick slideshow presentation for their team?
With this course, you’ll learn how to “train computer vision models, critically evaluate their performance, identify weaknesses, and continuously improve your datasets for better results.” Videos cover topics ranging from “Bias detection and mitigation” to “GenAI risks to data and an introduction to FiftyOne.”
Sign up for your free month of LinkedIn Learning, and you’ll have more than enough time to complete this course before your trial runs out. Check it out here.
BabsonX: AI for Leaders
⏰Length: 24 hours
Billed as “the first self-directed AI program for leaders,” this course from Babson College combines videos, case studies, and practice sessions to teach leaders how to reshape the course of their organization.
What does that incorporate? The course separates the lessons into a few groups: You’ll learn to apply AI insights to customer offerings and interactions; employee engagement and capabilities, operations; competitive positioning; and “the seven attributes of AI-centered leadership.”
No prerequisites are required, and with a time investment of between 4 to 6 hours per week, the whole course should be completed across a 4-week period. It’s explicitly designed to catch you up on the uses of AI and data for business’s in today’s world, making it a good fit for any leaders that just want to make sure the AI hype cycle doesn’t roll right over them.
If that sounds like a fit, you can check it out on edX now.
Google: Google Prompting Essentials
⏰Length: Approx. 9 hours
Google is a big AI heavy-hitter, as you may have noticed from all those unavoidable AI summaries. And while the tech giant has seen plenty of AI snafus — including a recent Superbowl ad for Gemini AI that included a false fact — it has invested billions upon billions into the technology.
This course lets anyone who signs up in on the secrets behind how to interact with LLMs by writing the perfect prompt. Knowing what to say and how to say it isn’t as easy as you might think.
Students will learn lessons including the five steps that can guide them towards crafting a useful prompt, the different tactics that can help speed up common work tasks, how to speed up data analysis and build presentations, and which prompts can design AI agents to deliver feedback through a conversational chat.
“Throughout the course, you’ll build a library of reusable prompts, so the next time that you need a little help from AI, you’re not prompting from scratch. And, you’ll earn a certificate from Google to share with your network and employer.” ~Google
You can try out the course today at Coursera.
Microsoft: Microsoft Copilot for Sales Specialization
⏰Length: About 20 hours
Since it’s such a popular business-oriented software brand, Microsoft is locked in as the one software suite that many white collar workers will ever use. That means that its AI solution, Microsoft Copilot, has an edge in the business world, despite being less popular than brands like ChatGPT and less splashy than Deepseek.
If you need to get to grips with Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft has the answer for you with their own series of lesson plans for using the tool to help you with everything from Github to Excel to cybersecurity. You can check out all its courses here, but for now, we’re highlighting the company’s Sales Specialization course.
With it, you’ll learn how to create tailored emails, better manage sales meetings, use customer insights for personalized engagement, and deploy Copilot for “forecasting, pipeline management, and future-proofing your sales strategy,” among other takeaways.
The company recommends taking one month to complete the entire course, at around five hours per week. Get started on Coursera here.
Stanford: Machine Learning Specialization
⏰Length: 80 hours
Finally, if the above courses are too easy for you, try investing the next 80 hours you have to spare into completing this offering from Stanford University’s Andrew Ng, a well-respected AI computer science expert.
This course first debuted way back in 2012, so it’s time-tested, although it has, of course, been updated plenty since then. It’s currently holding down a 4.9 (out of 5) star rating alongside 30,847 reviews, and its been viewed by millions.
It’s very hands-on, too: Among the tasks you’ll accomplish are building ML models with NumPy & scikit-learn, building and training a neural network with TensorFlow to perform multi-class classification, using unsupervised learning techniques for “clustering and anomaly detection,” and much more.
At ten hours a week, you’ll be able to spend two months letting all the knowledge sink in. You can head over to Coursera to check it out now.
Additional AI Resources
Maybe you don’t have time to sit through video lectures, or perhaps you learn better by reading. Maybe you’ve already completed a course, and you just need a few additional resources. Whatever the case, look no further!
Here’s a list of AI-related guides that we’ve previously released at Tech.co, crammed with research and tips for getting the most from your experience:
How ChatGPT Hallucinations Work
In the end, you’ll be able to get up to speed on the basics fairly quickly, even if you can spend a lifetime going deeper and deeper into the ins and outs of AI and machine learning tech.
