Here's the AI Roadmap You Actually Need – Transcript

00:00Learning AI isn't a straight path anymore. Actually, it's old school RPG themed. Everybody starts off on tutorial island. Those are like the basics of AI models, prompting, and using generalized AI tools. But then, the map opens up and you get to choose your class. There is the strategist, the rogue, alchemist, crafter, sage, and machinist. So, by the end of this video, you will have the full map, the skill tree for your class, quests worth doing, and achievements

00:26worth unlocking. Plus, I will include a prompt that helps you determine your class and the right quest log for you based upon your learning style and your goals. Sounds good? Let's go. A portion of this video is sponsored by Coursera. All right. So, everybody starts off on tutorial island, in which everybody picks up a starter pack. These are skills that you need regardless of what class that you choose. Here is the skills tree. The first skill is to understand generative AI, the basics of

00:53it. What is it and what can it do? Next, you need to learn how to prompt correctly, because this is the way that you talk to these AIs. Because if you can't communicate, how are you going to get it to do what you want? Then, we need to learn the general tools. Tools that everybody should know how to use, like chat, deep research, image, video, audio generation, and how to incorporate the right data. This allows you to integrate AI into your day-to-day life.

01:13So, the good news is that there are a lot of quests, resources to choose from. The combo that I first did, like many moons ago, was the Google Essentials combo. These are two courses on Coursera, the AI Essentials course and the Prompting Essentials course. These two courses cover all the skills for you to get your starter pack. They're very popular, sub 10 hours, you can probably get this done just during a weekend. The learning style is video-based with some assignments and interactive components to it, but honestly mostly just video.

01:39And it takes less than 10 hours to cover both courses. And price-wise, it requires a Coursera sub for around $49 per month, but you do get a 7-day trial. So, I quite enjoyed taking these courses. I even made a video as summarizing them. However, more recently, Google has come up with a new certificate program called the Google AI Professional Certificate. And I think if I had this option, I would take this instead. It currently has eight different courses going from AI fundamentals to brainstorming, planning, research and insights, writing, content creation, data analysis, app building,

02:06and app deployment. So, the breadth is much wider. It is primarily still video-based, but I think it's more interactive because it has more activity sprinkled throughout the certificate. It would take you around 13 hours to complete this. And price-wise, it's still around $49 per month using Coursera Plus with a 7-day uh free trial. So, yeah, personally, if I were to do this today, I would go with this certificate as opposed to the combo from earlier. But, with the caveat that this is a lot more Google-flavored. Like, they focus a lot more on Google ecosystem tools, while the Google's

02:35Essential combo was pretty tool agnostic. So, just something to keep in mind. Another quest path that you can take if you're into the video plus some exercises style of learning is the Andrew Ng path, aka deeplearning.ai. As many of you guys know, Andrew Ng is like a superstar AI educator amongst many other things that he does. And the two courses that will cover the starter pack skills would be GenAI for everyone followed by AI Prompting Take you about 12 to 15 hours to cover both courses.

02:58And price-wise, it's actually free to audit all of the videos. But, if you want to have access to the labs, quizzes, and certificate, you need to pay for a deeplearning.ai Pro, which is around $25 to $30 per month. I would say pick this path if you want something that's more tool agnostic and more not theoretical, but more about like frameworks and like big pictures.

03:15Because Andrew is just so knowledgeable and experienced in this field. He's able to give you insights about the industry and the specific skills in a way that I would say is pretty unmatched. But, he does have a pretty specific way of teaching. So, if you're interested in this path, I would definitely recommend checking out some of his videos and teaching style first before committing.

03:31By the way, just to be super clear, I'm presenting a lot of different options for you, so you can make your best choice based upon your budget, your time, and your learning style. But, you don't need to be doing like multiple different paths. You just need to choose one and you would get all the foundational skills that you need. Okay, so the next choice you have is called the Elements of AI by the University of Helsinki. The format of this course is interactive text with exercises. Also very popular, takes around 30 to 50 hours to complete. So it is a big course. It's also free and includes certificate as well. Great option if

04:00you're looking for something very thorough, free, and you're more into the interactive text-based learning style. Quest path number five is the Anthropic Claude path. Anthropic has a series of courses that covers all of the skills needed for the starter pack, including Claude 101, AI fluency framework and foundations, AI capabilities and limitations, as well as prompting docs.

04:18By the way, I'll be linking all the course links in the free resource in the description. So no need to like try to write down all the course names. Anyways, yes. So the format is interactive structured lessons with quizzes. Probably take you around 10 to 15 hours. It's also completely free and you get a badge per course as well.

04:32However, the caveat here is that because it's produced by Anthropic, naturally the course heavily flavors Claude and Anthropic products. So having done these courses, they do teach you like really great foundations as well. But obviously they'll be teaching you based upon like the Claude stack. And of course, we also have to talk about Claude's biggest competitor, which is OpenAI. OpenAI also has some really great free resources.

04:51Specifically, their AI foundations course and the applied AI foundations course. These two courses will cover all the skills you need for the starter pack. It's also a self-paced exercise and assessment-based. Content is great, obviously also has a very strong bias uh towards OpenAI products, which makes sense. So I would recommend this path only to people who are very into the OpenAI ecosystem. It is also completely free. You also get a badge per course.

05:12And if you do those two courses, plus there's a third one called agents and workflows, you would also get a certificate. Time wise, it'll take you around two to five hours to complete. So shorter than the Anthropic courses. I also got to say that the vibe of the Anthropic courses with the OpenAI courses are really, really different.

05:26Now of course, there are a lot of other courses and options. I just tried to pick what I think is the most comprehensive, but also give you guys like different options based upon learning style and budget and things like that, right? So I'm going to put on screen some of the other options that you can check out as well. And there are two other options I want to do a quick shoutout. The first one is the Kaggle five-day GenAI intensive with Google.

05:44This was a live and recorded cohort with different project assignments and very community based. I really love this because it's like a 5-day intensive situation in which you cover all the basics. And there's a capstone project in that, too. It's also completely free. You get a Kaggle badge, too. However, they only did this one time. It seems like they're probably not going to do it live again, but you can access all of the recordings and go through it. So, if you're someone who prefers cohort-based intensive live sessions, I would recommend checking this out. Although, it's no longer live and maintained, sadly. The other path that I want to give a shout-out is the Careers

06:11Essential in Generative AI by Microsoft and LinkedIn. This is a very, very popular course back in 2024. It's video-based plus a final exam and Microsoft flavored. Takes around 6 hours to complete and also free. However, it is quite outdated. I went on their landing page and it says that they're going to be updating it in September 25th, 2026. I'm filming this video prior to that, so I haven't been able to check out this new updated version yet. But, by the time that you see this video, it will definitely be after 25th. So, if they actually release this course, I would recommend checking it out, especially if you like Microsoft

06:39flavored things. All right, here is the summary slide again with all of the different options that I talked about and ones that I didn't explicitly mention, too. I will also include a prompt in the description, which you can copy-paste into your favorite AI chatbot to help you figure out which quest path is the best for you, as well. Hopefully, that's helpful, too, cuz there's just like so many resources and options. It's good that there are so many options, but, you know, paradox of choice. All right, amazing. So, at this point, if you complete one of these quest paths, you would have gotten your starter kit and you're ready to leave Tutorial Island. Now, you get to make the very

07:07exciting choice of which AI class you want to belong to and level up in. There is the Strategist, Rogue, Alchemist, Crafter, Sage, and Machinist. I will go through each of these classes, their skills tree, and the quest paths, the resources that you can choose from.

07:25The first class I will cover is the Strategist. The Strategists are the people who are interested in AI leadership and strategy. Your goal is to understand AI in a way that leads adoption and sets the AI direction in your organization. You are the AI thought leader. And your skill tree, after getting the starter pack, of course, starts off with understanding the vendor landscape, like Google, Microsoft, AWS, OpenAI, Anthropic, so many different options. What do they actually offer, and what's the most suitable for you, your business, and your clients? You also need to

07:52acquire the skill of how to run a team with AI. That this is actually very non-trivial. You can't just give your colleagues, your employees, the people you work with AI tools and just be like, "Hey, like you guys figure it out." That doesn't work. You need to know how to create human-AI agent teams. What are the delegation norms? How do you evaluate them? You also need to learn the skill to set strategy. Where is it that AI actually matters? What's the AI roadmap for your team? And of course, you need to lead this adoption, the execution part. How do you get buy-in from everybody you work with, your investors? And how do you actually get

08:19your team to adopt your AI roadmap and strategy? Doing this while also balancing, of course, business metrics like ROI. Now, let's talk about some quests, some paths to choose from. Now, for someone who isn't already like deeply affiliated with a specific vendor, and someone who is not necessarily really into certificates, like official certificates, either, I would actually recommend the AI leadership course by OpenAI. It is a self-paced text-based with different activities and an assessment. And I think it actually really does a good job of covering what AI leadership looks like, and different

08:46considerations and frameworks that you can apply, including business priorities, governance, stakeholders, how to come up with an adoption roadmap, and how to draft an initial AI strategy. And it does this in a pretty objective way, regardless of the type of business that you have, and the type of tools that you're using. It'll take you around 3 to 4 hours to complete, and it is free. And after the AI leadership course, you can also supplement it with the very, very popular course called AI for Everyone from Andrew Ng. I believe this is literally like the most enrolled AI course ever. Takes around 7 hours, and it's free to audit. But the catch of

09:14why I say this is optional is because this course was actually created prior to the GenAI boom. So, a lot of things are pretty outdated, although a lot of the organization and team-building frameworks that Andrew gives is evergreen. Okay, so that's the path I would recommend if you're not already like deeply affiliated with a specific vendor. But if you are, no worries, because most of the major AI vendors do have their own version of a AI leadership course or certificate.

09:36Anthropic does, Google does, Microsoft, AWS, Open AI, etc. So, my suggestion is to just go learn from that specific vendor and get an official certificate if you wish. I'm going to put on screen now some of the different options by vendor. There are also a bunch of university certificates and degrees for AI leadership as well. And I'll list some of the cohort-based ones, too.

09:53Finally, books. There are two books that I would recommend that you check out if you're into reading books. The first one is called Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick. Gives a lot of frameworks for organizational thinking. And AI Snake Oil by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor. This is like from the skeptical perspective about what AI can't do in organizations. So, it's pretty refreshing. All right, I'm going to put on screen now a summary slide now for the strategist class. And with that, let's move on to the rogue class.

10:22The rogue class is all about using AI agents really well and hacking things together. Getting your agents to do your work for you. If you're someone who's all about hacking and tinkering and speed and learning by doing, then you are probably in the rogue class. Like creating your own custom Hermit setups, Cohere setups. By the way, Cohere is just called Claude now, I think. And your own agents and workflows. And here is your skill tree. First skill is knowing what agents can do. What's the difference between an agent versus a chatbot? When to trust them and when do they fail? The next skill is delegating your real work to AI agents. Testing it

10:51out, pushing the boundaries, see what they can do. Over days and weeks, you also have to learn how to make them repeatable. The amazing agentic workflows that you make, you want to make sure that you can actually use them on a day-to-day basis. And finally, building your own AI agent setups. Learning things like a Hermit setup that runs your entire life and your work. A Cohere setup that helps you with content and all sorts of different custom agents and workflows that help you throughout your life and work. Along the way, you'll learn things about gateways, memory, skills, security, and how to self-host different models, too. Now, since the rogue class is all about

11:18hacking things together and figuring out your own custom agent builds, there isn't really like a general course that would teach you all of these skills. You learn them as you hack along. So, the first task of the rogue class is to figure out which system or tool or ecosystem you want to start building with. It's all about mastering how to use AI agents and chaining them together in a way so that it can do what you want it to do. And there are a lot of different AI agents to play with. You have Claude co-work agents, now called just Claude from Anthropic. You can use agents and build multi-agent workflows with OpenAI, Microsoft and Copilot