The AI hype cycle has finally hit a major milestone in tech advancement: The point where it all gets bogged down in regulatory disagreements.
OpenAI is seemingly arguing that it will die unless it’s allowed to train on copyrighted material for free, an argument it’s making while undergoing infringement lawsuits from the Authors Guild and the New York Times. Other lawsuits concerning harmful outcomes from AI are dogging the company as well. On top of that, half of the company’s safety team quit, which is rarely a good sign.
Still, AI adoption continues apace across plenty of industries, and may be responsible at least in part for an under-reported slowdown in US employment, as many bosses weigh the potential profit boosts associated with replacing proven workers with unseasoned AI.
Don’t want to be replaced? Upskilling with a few AI-related online courses might do the trick when it comes to convincing your boss that you’re hip and with it.
Here are the top courses we’ve uncovered that you can start today. Some only take a few hours, while others are more in-depth and can be worked on for months.
AWS: Foundations of Prompt Engineering
⏰Length: About 4 hours
We’ve covered this one in the past, but this course was freshly updated in August 2024, so it’s worth taking a second look at in September.
It remains among the most popular courses at Amazon Web Services (AWS), giving users an intermediate-level four-hour dive into creating prompts for generative AI models.
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Creating prompts is easily the most common form of interaction with a text or image generating large language model (LLM), so it’s little wonder that this quick and completely free course is a popular one. Most ordinary people won’t want to get into the coding side of AI interactions, but anyone can write plain language prompts.
With this course, you’ll learn general best practices, the basic types of prompt techniques, common misuses, and how to mitigate biases that can easily slip into AI results, thanks to the biases found in all the data they’re trained on. You can check it out online at AWS now, and complete it in a day if you want.
LinkedIn: Thriving as a Project Manager in the Age of AI
⏰Length: About 1 hour
LinkedIn isn’t just for bragging about work accomplishments in a series of one-sentence paragraphs: The business-focused social platform also offer video courses on a wide range of business tools, from Excel to AI. One of the more popular options is a quick hour-long guide specificially for project managers. If that’s you, and you just want to see how AI might fit into your career, check this one out.
Run by Hussain Bandukwala, CEO at Parwaaz Consulting, the course covers information on the impact of AI on project management, best practices surrounding the tech, and how to put together a personal development plan to address these trends.
Technically, this one is not a free course. However, you can still easily get it for free: LinkedIn offers a hefty month-long free trial. You can sign up, watch this entirely through a few times, and cancel, all in one afternoon. And before you ask, yes, the first video segment in this course is titled “The elephant in the room: Will AI replace project managers?”
You can find the course here.
MIT: AI – Implications for Business Strategy
⏰ Length: 36-48 hours
MIT’s business school is behind this course, which is available for free to those who want to access it through the edX platform online.
You’ll work through six modules, covering the business applications of concepts including machine learning, natural language processing, robotics, and the future of artificial intelligence.
It’s an executive level course, so you’ll get a zoomed-out understanding of the potential impact of AI across an organization, as opposed to other courses that offer a prompt-focused look at individual tasks you can accomplish. As the organizers put it, “this course will guide the creation of a road map for the implementation of AI and ML in your organization and provide you with the skills to drive innovation forward.”
You can sign up for the course today at edX.com, although you’ll actually have a wait a little while for the next cohort to start up: The first lesson won’t happen until Oct 9.
UVA: Artificial Intelligence in Marketing
⏰ Length: About 10 hours
Customer engagement, network effects, personalized relationships with individual customers — these are all core concepts for successful marketing across any industry. Plus, they’re all areas in which you can potentially apply AI and take your marketing actions to the next level.
That’s what you’ll learn more about with this free online course, which covers topics from how to develop networked business models and leverage network effects to how to apply data-driven insights in your daily marketing efforts.
This course is out from the University of Virginia and taught by Rajkumar Venkatesan. It’s rated as a beginner level course, and it’s only four modules, taking an estimated total of about 10 hours to complete. It’s not the quickest option on this list, but it’s not the longest, either, making it a great entry option for the committed marketer.
Check out the course and get started today, over on Coursera.
UAlberta: Reinforcement Learning Specialization
⏰ Length: About 80 hours
The term “reinforcement learning” (RL) refers to an interdisciplinary machine learning technique in which a piece of software is taught to make decisions that achieve the best results. It’s a broad concept, since it’s essentially about how to teach an AI to think.
The University of Alberta, a top university and a global leader in AI, offers a course explaining the ins and outs of implementing a complete RL solution — and thanks to the wonders of the internet, anyone anywhere can enroll and start learning it today!
You’ll be gettting the real deal with this one: It’s the lengthiest course on this list, with a recommended timeline of two months at 10 hours per week. But that’s just what it takes it puzzle through how you can build a Reinforcement Learning system for sequential decision making, understand RL algorithms, and learn how RL “complements deep learning, supervised and unsupervised learning.”
I don’t know what that all means, but if you have a spare 80 hours, you sure can. Check it out now, over on Coursera.
Navigating the Modern World With AI Knowledge
Artifical intelligence is a big buzzword in today’s working world by any definition of the term: By making sure you know a thing or two about it, you can stay on the cusp of tech advancement. But upskilling doesn’t need to require a lot of work.
Figuring out how to prompt an AI tool to give you a quick summary or generate a to-do list can be even more simple than any of the in-depth lesson plans listed above. It just takes a few minutes to take a look at our top AI prompts or consider a how to create a resume template with ChatGPT.
We have yet to see how AI might reshape modern work, whether that’s positive, like the promise of an AI-powered four-day work week, or negative, like the study finding low-wage workers were 14 times more likely to be replaced by AI.
AI’s ultimate impact on our daily lives probably won’t be as seismic as the hyped-up tech CEO talking points suggest. In the end, simply knowing a little bit about how AI works might wind up helping your career more than actually using it.
