The 8 best AI courses for beginners in 2026

Upskilling in AI is just about the most productive thing you could do with your free time right now. With every day that passes, AI technology is making strides, and the demand for AI-related skills increases along with it. In fact, a Zapier survey found that 35% of enterprise leaders say AI skill gaps among their employees are a barrier to AI adoption at their company. To help close the knowledge gap, big tech companies have been publishing high-quality AI learning content.

Whether you’re looking to upskill in a particular AI-related area or you just want a better understanding of where we are now and where we’re heading, investing time to learn this stuff will unequivocally pay off.

The problem: there’s a lot of AI learning content out there, and some of it is not so great, while others cost thousands of dollars to complete. So I spent time sifting through swaths of online AI courses available right now to pull out the best, most actionable (and affordable!) ones on offer.

The courses on this list are meant for beginners who want to introduce AI into their work, so check your impostor syndrome at the door, and start learning.

The best AI courses for beginners at a glance

Why learn about AI?

Instead of spending your time asking Google “will AI take my job?” you’re better off learning how to use AI to your advantage. Because if you don’t, the answer will likely be a hard yes.

Regardless of how you feel about AI, it’s a tool that every knowledge worker can use to do their job better and faster. That’s true for writers, coders, project managers, HR professionals, marketers, salespeople, business owners—and everyone in between.

The good news: you don’t have to be tech-advanced to be able to learn how to leverage AI. If you have access to the internet, you can take any of these online courses and start putting what you learn into practice straight away.

So learn how to embrace AI at work—these classes can help.

1. AI for Everyone (DeepLearning.AI)

DeepLearning.AI is an ed tech company that’s solely dedicated to educating the world on AI. The company is headed up by Dr. Andrew Ng, who’s pretty much the global leading voice in artificial intelligence. Any courses you enroll in with him, you know you’re in good hands.

As you can imagine, there’s a whole load of different AI courses available through the DeepLearning.AI website—that’s literally their business model. I was surprised to see how affordable the courses are too. The vast majority of their short courses are hosted natively on the DeepLearning website and are free to enroll once you register. Andrew Ng also happens to be the co-founder of Coursera, so some courses (like the one I’m recommending) are also available on Coursera and cost $49 (which includes graded assignments and a certificate of completion).

AI for Everyone is by far the most popular online AI course I’ve come across. Nearly 2.7 million people have taken it so far, and it’s had well over 50,000 positive reviews.

The course itself covers a whole lot of introductory ground across its four modules, including how to build AI into your business and how AI is impacting society. And thanks to AI, the course is available in 27 languages too.

While the course information says you should be able to complete the whole thing in around 7 hours, there’s a lot of content to get through. Modules include 8-10 videos, and there’s an assessment at the end of each block, so it could easily take a lot longer to complete. If you’re looking for something shorter, keep scrolling.

Price: Free to take the course as read-only; $30/month for Pro membership (or $49 one-time through Coursera), which includes four graded assignments and a course completion certificate.

2. Applying Generative AI as a Business Professional (LinkedIn)

If there’s one platform that knows the value of upskilling, it’s LinkedIn. So it’s not surprising that if you run a search on LinkedIn Learning, you’ll see there’s a whole bunch of educational AI video content available on the platform.

I’ve watched a lot of the free AI video content and found most of it really useful for providing top-level context to using AI at work. Helpfully, LinkedIn has organized a lot of the content into cohesive learning paths, and it’s all general enough that you can apply it to most industries.

If you’re very new to AI, there’s a Career Essentials in Generative AI path that focuses on what generative AI is and how you can use it in the workplace. But Applying Generative AI as a Business Professional is the one I found to be the most practical. There’s content in there that will show you how to generate the best prompts, use generative AI to write content, perform solid research, and create AI-generated images. Everything that will help you leverage generative AI in your job, basically.

There are eight courses to the path, which includes 7.5 hours of video content and quizzes to complete as you move through each chapter. And if you take the exam at the end, you’ll get a Professional Certificate from Microsoft that you can display on your LinkedIn profile.

A subscription to LinkedIn Learning is free for the first month, so you could do one of these courses (or both, depending on how much free time you have) within the free month trial. If you already pay for any LinkedIn Premium plan, Learning is included at no extra cost.

Price: Free for 1 month; $39.99/month (or $239.88 annually, working out at $19.99/month) after that

3. Generative AI Leader Certification (Google)

To no one’s surprise, Google is also offering a whole load of different AI-related online courses and educational content. Of all Google’s AI material I’ve found (and there is a lot), the Generative AI Leader Certification path seems to be the best value in terms of the amount of course material involved.

This is an introductory course aimed at business leaders, or anyone tasked with leading AI transformation for an organization. The learning path is made up of five courses, with each course containing a bunch of bite-sized video lessons and some quizzes.

Course content begins by taking you through foundational concepts of gen AI, then moves on to building solutions to transform how you work, and ends with transforming how an entire organization works with AI.

Google recommends you dedicate one day per course, as you make your way through various videos, reading material, and quizzes. Some blocks involve more material than others, and completing each course within the path will earn you a skills badge. This path is offered through the Google Skills program (previously Google Cloud Skills Boost).

You can consume all the content for free, but to take a “Lab” (to test your knowledge and earn a skills badge that will go on your Google profile), you need to subscribe to Google Skills Pro or have earned enough credits. With the free Starter subscription, you can earn up to 35 credits per month, while a Pro subscription is $29/month (but comes with a 7-day free trial). To get the Generative AI Leader official certification, you can take an exam at the end of the course for a $99 fee.

Price: Free (with limitations); $29/month for Pro subscription (with no limitations, 7-day free trial available); $99 for certificate of completion.

4. AI for Business Specialization (University of Pennsylvania)

The University of Pennsylvania offers an AI For Business Specialization course through Coursera that covers a broad spectrum of interest areas within it. The course is made up of four modules:

• AI Fundamentals for Non-Data Scientists

• AI Applications in Marketing and Finance

• AI Applications in People Management

• AI Strategy and Governance

The course is suitable for beginners, but the content is aimed at business leaders and managers, as you can probably guess from the module topics. It focuses on providing a holistic overview of these different areas of AI and how they relate to each other. The content also gives guidance on how you can best implement AI across different areas of your organization and use it to your advantage.

This course is taught by professors at the Wharton School, one of the top-ranking business schools in the world. Completing the entire course should take around six months. You’re also expected to take assessments at the end of each module, including two peer-reviewed assessments. If you complete them all, you’ll come away with a certificate that’s shareable on your LinkedIn profile.

Coursera has a free seven-day trial, in which time you could complete one of the modules (around 10 hours) to be sure it was worth your time. After the free trial, a Coursera Plus subscription is $59/month.

Price: 7-day free trial; $59/month after that or $399 for the year

5. AI Foundations for Everyone Specialization (IBM)

IBM offers a few different beginner-level AI courses through online learning platforms. One great example is its AI for Everyone: Master the Basics course on EdX, which offers a pretty comprehensive overview of AI in just eight hours of content.

But my pick here is IBM’s AI Foundations for Everyone Specialization course on Coursera. It’s also a beginner’s course, but the modules are a bit more practical and specialized, meaning you’ll come out with slightly more actionable knowledge.

It’s delivered in four blocks. The first is an introduction to AI and its uses in the workplace. The next two blocks focus on generative AI, introducing applications, use cases, and how prompts work. The final block is a bit more practical, where you’ll get an introduction to IBM’s generative AI product, IBM Watson, then learn how to use Watson to create a chatbot code-free. It’s a bit of a sales tool, but it’ll also give you insights into how big tech companies are developing these tools and how you would potentially bring them into your organization.

Similar to UPenn’s course above, you can take this course for free if you complete it within the Coursera Plus seven-day free trial.

Price: 7-day free trial; $59/month after that (or $399/year) for a Coursera Plus subscription

6. Elements of AI (University of Helsinki)

The University of Helsinki launched its introductory Elements of AI course way back in 2018 (but don’t worry—the content is up to date now). Since then, over 2 million people have taken the course, and it’s available in 30 languages.

Elements of AI is one of the many courses hosted through the University’s own MOOC (massive open online course), in partnership with MinnaLearn. The course is made up of six core blocks, including chapters on AI problem solving, machine learning, neural networks, and the societal implications of the technology. (If implications and ethics is a side of AI you’re interested in, the University also runs an Ethics of AI course that’s worth checking out.)

This is a great course that comes with practical exercises scattered through each block to allow you to apply some of the information you’re consuming. There’s a certification of completion, the course is completely free, and you can complete it at your own pace.

But there’s one thing I need to flag: if you’re a visual learner, you might find this course a bit challenging. The whole course is text-based, and there’s no video accompaniment. But I will say that the interface is clean and nice to navigate, so it doesn’t feel overly text-heavy when you’re making your way through the course material.

Price: Free

7. AI for Marketing Course (HubSpot)

You don’t have to be a paying user to take HubSpot’s AI for Marketing Course. In fact, you don’t have to be a HubSpot user at all. In this introductory course, they cover all the AI marketing essentials without even giving you a flash of the HubSpot dashboard.

Instead, they bring in a range of marketing experts—both from HubSpot and external to the company—to give a clear overview and offer insights into how they’re currently using AI in their own campaigns.

It’s a six-lesson video course that covers a lot of ground, from practical tips on how to use and optimize AI prompts to generate the content you want, to using your data to make AI-driven marketing decisions. There are 15 videos in total and four quizzes to get through, but I still managed to complete the course comfortably in under three hours. The scope of the content makes it broad enough that it’s valuable for marketing beginners all the way through to business owners and leaders.

What really stood out for me in this course was the informal but informative delivery of the content and how relatable the discussions were. A lot of the AI video courses out there can get a bit stiff and scripted (you might even say robotic), so bringing in a range of speakers made this course more engaging for me.

Price: Free

8. AI Fluency: Framework and foundations (Anthropic)

Learning to use AI today is as much about knowing when to use it (and when not to) as it is about knowing how. Now that we’re a handful of years into broad AI availability, AI’s strengths, weaknesses, and the implications of using it are clearer than ever—while questions around auditing AI’s work and who’s ultimately responsible for it remain.

Anthropic’s course on AI Fluency: Frameworks and foundations, offered for free through Claude Academy, tackles this head-on. Modules include an introduction to the 4D framework (Delegation, Description, Discernment, and Diligence) and a deep dive on each step. The course is based on—and was developed in partnership with—professors Rick Dakan and Joseph Feller, who developed their own AI Fluency Framework that inspired Anthropic.

Broken up into 14 lessons, a number of practical exercises, and a final quiz, the course can be completed in as little as 4 hours. It’s completely self-paced—and free, including the completion badge (though you’ll need to log in with a Claude account to access it).

A small but mighty thing: I appreciated Anthropic’s clear and transparent explanation of where Claude did and didn’t help with the creation of the course.

Price: Free

Learn about AI—and then put it to work

Regardless of which course you go for, any time you spend educating yourself on AI is going to be a smart investment. If you have a particular area of interest in relation to AI that’s not covered in this list, it’s worth running a search to see if there’s learning content already available on that topic.

If you’re a bit tight for time to complete a full AI course, you’ll find a load of different AI-related advice and hacks over the Zapier webinar page. And for every hour you spend learning about AI, spend an hour tinkering with it too. ChatGPT and Zapier are two easy places to get started.

Related reading:

• What is AI?

• Machine learning vs. AI: What’s the difference?

• Embracing AI at work: 4 ways to make AI less scary for your team

• What is multimodal AI? Large multimodal models, explained

• The best HubSpot certifications

• How to implement AI training for your employees

• What is just-in-time learning?

This article was originally published in October 2023. The most recent update was in November 2026.