The best free AI courses and certificates for upskilling in 2025 - and I've tried them all

I've been working with AI for a very long time. I conducted one of the first-ever academic studies of AI ethics as a thesis project way back in the day. I created and launched an expert system development environment before the first link was connected on the World Wide Web.

I did some of the first research on AI on RISC-based computing architectures (the chips in your phone) when RISC processors were the size of refrigerators.

I also wrote and deployed the AI Editor, a generative AI tool that built news and content dynamically. That may not seem like much today, but I did it way back in 2010, when I had to create a generative AI engine from scratch. At that point, to work, it had to be distributed across five individual servers, each running one agent of a team of clustered AI agents.

I just finished coding a free AI defense product available to all WordPress users that enables them to defend against AI training and scraping, plus an advanced version (which folks pay for) that enables active countermeasures against AI scraping for training.

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I also have a master's degree in education, focusing on learning and technology. My specialty is adult online learning, so this kind of stuff is right up my alley.

When it comes to the courses and programs I'm spotlighting here, there's no way I could take all of them. But I have taken at least one course from each vendor to test them out and report back to you. And, given my long background in the world of AI, this is a topic that has fascinated and enthralled me for most of my academic and professional career.

With all that, I will say that the absolute high point was when I could get an AI to talk like a pirate.

Yes, but how much value they have depends on your prospective employer's perspective. A certificate says you completed a course of study successfully. That might be something of value to you as well.

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You can set a goal to learn a topic, and if you get a credential, you can be fairly confident you have achieved some learning. Accredited degrees, by contrast, are an assurance that you not only learned the material but did so according to some level of standard and rigor common to other accredited institutions.

My advice: If you can get a certificate and the price for getting it doesn't overly stretch your budget, go ahead and get it. It still is a résumé point. But don't fork over bucks on the scale of a college tuition for some promise that you'll get qualified for a job faster and easier than, you know, going to college.