Training11 courses
Free AI courses, checked by hand.
More companies give away AI training than anyone has time to compare. These are the 11 worth taking — grouped by how you learn, labelled by level and time, from a one-hour beginner sprint to a twelve-week course for people who code. 9 never ask for money; the rest say exactly where they do.
Hands-on and project-based
Courses where you build something. Start here if you learn by doing rather than by watching.
- FreeBeginner to intermediate
AI Summer Adventure
Nufar Gaspar, with The AI Daily Brief and Superintelligent
Twenty-three hands-on stations in three tiers, at your own pace — from the tools you already own to workflows that run on their own. Free with an account.
What you actually build
- Everyday productivity assistantsTier one works on the daily grind — turning messy notes and transcripts into something you would actually send.
- Custom knowledge assistantsTier two builds assistants that answer from documents you supply, rather than from whatever the model happens to know.
- Autonomous agents and multi-tool workflowsTier three chains steps together so a task runs without you sitting over it.
- FreeBeginner to intermediateAbout 2 to 3 hours for the relevant tracks
OpenAI Academy
OpenAI
Self-paced video walkthroughs with sandbox exercises, plus live sessions. No quizzes, no progress tracking — closer to a well-organised help centre than a classic course.
What you actually build
- Structured output you can rely onGetting clean, consistent formatting out of unstructured input — the difference between a demo and something a process can depend on.
- A custom assistant for your teamConfiguring an assistant with its own instructions and reference documents, so it answers the way your function needs.
- Workflows that run in stepsBreaking a large task into stages an assistant handles in sequence, which is where agents start to be useful rather than impressive.
“practical and hands-on, and most importantly, there are no ads or paywall” Fabio Dantas, Class Central · Dec 2025
- Free to startBeginnerAbout 7 hours
AI Prompting for Everyone
DeepLearning.AI, taught by Andrew Ng
Twenty-one video lessons with guided browser exercises. No coding at any point — built, in its own words, for anyone who uses ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini at work.
What you actually build
- Dense reports into executive summariesWorking a long document down to the version a board would read, and knowing what got lost.
- The model as a criticInstructing it to argue against you as a sceptical director or a strict editor, which is where it earns its keep.
- Thinking through an ambiguous problemUsing it on scenarios that have no clean answer, rather than on tasks you already know how to do.
Where it costsThe videos are free. Graded assignments and the certificate need a Pro membership at $25 a month, billed annually.
Built for your department
Role-specific courses that work on your own material — your contracts, your close, your campaign brief.
- FreeBeginner to intermediate
AI for Finance and Accounting
FreeAcademy.ai
Twelve applied lessons worked directly against financial statements, reports and spreadsheets. No signup needed to start; the certificate takes a final exam.
What you actually build
- Statement analysis you can checkPulling variance drivers and ratios out of a P&L or cash flow statement, with the working visible.
- A repeatable board-reporting templateTurning a monthly close into narrative commentary, the same way every month.
- Pressure-testing a forecastRunning scenarios against your own assumptions and flagging expense entries that look wrong.
“If you can use a spreadsheet and write an email, you can use these workflows” FreeAcademy.ai, from the course page
- FreeBeginner60 minutes
Free AI HR Course
Johannes Sundlo
A sixty-minute sprint. You leave with four things built in your own tools, and the certificate is free — no payment details, just an email.
What you actually build
- A job-ad prompt in your voiceA role description generated the way your company actually writes, plus scoring criteria to judge candidates consistently.
- A screening summary workflowA repeatable way to summarise applications against the role before a human decides.
- Your first prompt libraryThe prompts you built, organised for reuse, and a one-page guardrail checklist for using AI on people decisions.
“This is a doing course, not a watching course” Johannes Sundlo, from the course page
- FreeBeginner to intermediate
AI for Legal Professionals
FreeAcademy.ai
Text-analysis labs on risk, compliance and disclosure duties, grounded in real legal workflows.
What you actually build
- Contract triageReading an NDA or vendor agreement down to a table of non-standard terms, auto-renewals and liability caps.
- Research and summarisingTurning regulatory filings into a briefing memo a business colleague will actually read.
- Confidentiality and disclosureFull modules on privilege, client confidentiality and when you have to say AI was involved.
- FreeBeginner to intermediate2 hours 49 minutes
AI for Marketing
HubSpot Academy
Six lessons, fifteen videos and four quizzes, from brief through to performance analysis. Needs a free HubSpot account.
What you actually build
- One brief into a full campaignTaking a single brief out to social, email and long-form without losing the voice.
- Testing a message before launchTrying headlines and value propositions against a described audience while it is still cheap to change them.
- Reading the resultsTurning campaign performance data into what to change next week.
Foundations and technical
How the technology actually works. The first two suit anyone; the last two are for people who write code.
- FreeBeginner
Elements of AI
University of Helsinki and MinnaLearn
Interactive quizzes and logic problems — no maths, no code, no videos. Helsinki's own count: two million students. It predates chatbots, so it teaches the foundations rather than ChatGPT.
What you actually build
- What the technology is actually doingHow a prediction gets made, and where machine learning differs from ordinary software that follows rules.
- Judgement about its limitsBias in training data, and the failures that are built into the method rather than fixable by a better vendor.
“Conceptually rigorous without being technical” Hashmeta review · May 2026
- FreeIntermediate to advancedTwelve weeks
AI for Beginners
Microsoft
Microsoft's own pitch: twelve weeks, twenty-four lessons, with quizzes and runnable notebooks. For people comfortable in Python — it teaches how neural networks work, not how to use ChatGPT.
What you actually build
- Working models, from scratchBuilding small networks that classify images and read handwriting, so the mechanism stops being a metaphor.
- How language models work underneathText classification and the transformer architecture that everything else on this page is built on.
- Bias you can measureEvaluating algorithmic bias in vision models rather than discussing it in the abstract.
“Free, MIT-licensed, no account or certificate paywall” explainx.ai review · Aug 2026
- FreeAdvanced
Practical Deep Learning for Coders
fast.ai
Top-down coding projects in Python. fast.ai's stated prerequisite: knowing how to code, with a year of experience enough.
What you actually build
- A trained model in lesson oneFine-tuning a real vision model on your own images before any theory is explained.
- Models tuned to your own textTaking an open-weight model and adapting it to a specialised body of documents.
- Something deployedPackaging a trained model into an application, which is where most courses stop and this one does not.
“Your courses completely changed my perspective on what was possible for me” Hacker News · Jul 2022
- Free to startBeginner to intermediate
Learn Prompting
Learn Prompting
A reference library of prompting techniques, plus a seven-day course on where prompts break. It was written before ChatGPT existed; its own count since is three million readers.
What you actually build
- A method, not a list of tricksThe named techniques, organised, so you can look one up rather than remember it.
- Knowing how prompts failThe security material on prompt injection is unusual and worth the time if anything you build faces outward.
“one of the largest online resources for learning prompting” Louis Bouchard · Apr 2023
Where it costsThe reference docs and the seven-day course are free. The certification tracks are paid.