AI 101: Coursera offers employers a syllabus for learning about AI

Most company leaders understand that artificial intelligence will soon play a vital role in their business if it hasn't already. But first they have to educate their employees — and themselves — on how best to use it. 

Over 50% of employees believe that a comprehensive AI skill set will be essential for their role in the future, according to a recent survey from HR consulting firm Randstad. And yet, only one in 10 have been offered any AI training in the last year — an issue online course provider Coursera is attempting to address with its new Generative AI Academy, designed specifically to equip executives and employees with the skills needed to successfully navigate an AI-driven workplace.

"We're taking AI, which is a bit of a mystery for a lot of employees, and we're making it attainable and digestible," says Trena Minudri, VP and chief learning officer at Coursera. "Because if you really engage and understand how the whole system works, you can be so much more efficient with the way that you and your employees are interacting with AI." 

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Generative AI Academy includes five core educational programs from top AI research universities and companies such as Microsoft, Stanford Online, Vanderbilt, DeepLearning.AI, Google Cloud, and AWS. The courses cover a range of topics like ethics and risk policy as well as more tangential topics like prompt engineering. The program sets up learning objectives for users, walks them through the different modules they'll be moving through and tracks their progress as they do. 

Most notably, Coursera also included a course that targets company leaders and tailors the subject matter to basic knowledge and implementation strategies they need to grasp before imparting it onto their workforce. 

"On one end of the innovation spectrum there have always been employees that are early adopters, those in the middle who need more of a push and those that are holding out on learning about AI until they have to," Minudri says. "The same dynamic is playing out in companies all over the world. They're asking themselves, 'Is this something we engage in now? If we wait, are we going to miss out on having a competitive edge? If we jump in now, is it too risky?'"

And while it's understandable that the rapid growth of AI has overwhelmed even leaders, failing to understand the complexities of AI and being hesitant to act can cost them. By 2026, two-thirds of cloud applications will use AI, leaving 80% of global organizations struggling to find enough skilled AI professionals to manage and update them, at a loss of $6.5 trillion worldwide. 

Those hardships aren't unique to just the leaders of today, but future CEOs and executives too. To ensure that the information continues to spread, Coursera made the classes — one even led by the education platform's own CEO — accessible to anyone with access to the academy as a whole. Once an organization purchases the Gen AI Academy, employees across the whole company have access to it, whether or not they plan to climb the corporate ladder at their current company.

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"The abilities and the experiences of an employee population is how a company evolves, because their talent is ultimately their driver," Minudri says. "So whether it's frontline workers interacting with customers that come into a store with questions or cloud engineers who are directly working within programming, making sure that they are as skilled as possible is really key."

Over the next few months, new courses and credentials will be added to Coursera's existing suite of exercises, reflections, guided projects and hands-on learning opportunities to further expand and evolve as the AI conversation progresses. In tandem with the courses, Minduri urges companies to foster their own internal conversations about AI to continue making employees and their leaders as comfortable with the subject as possible. 

"If companies don't understand the way AI works, they're not going to get the most value out of their relationship with it," Minudri says. "Once they begin to understand, it begins to take away any of the fear they had and they can make it work better for them."