Everyone’s Learning AI—Should You?
25 July 2025 6:00 AM IST
If you haven’t heard of or used AI or Artificial Intelligence tools you’re probably living under a rock. Still, according to an IIM-Ahmedabad study, even though Indian workers recognize how big AI is and will be, many don’t feel adequately prepared to deal with this shift.
There’s several courses in the market that teach people AI skills. Traditional institutes like IIMs offer certificate courses, there’s also free classes on youtube, as well as low cost ones on coursera, udemy and linkedin.
Which one should you choose?
In the latest episode of The Signal Daily, we’ll learn about what these AI courses are. And, depending on your goals and your budget, what course should you go for?
The Core produces The Signal Daily. At The Signal Daily, we don’t do hot takes, instead we bring you deep dives into the how and why of consumer trends.
To check out the rest of our work, go to www.thecore.in. Thank you for listening!
The Core produces The Signal Daily. Find us wherever you get your favourite podcasts. To check out the rest of our work, go to www.thecore.in
NOTE: A machine transcribed this episode. A human has looked at this text but there might still be errors. Please refer to the audio above, if you need to clarify something. If you want to give us feedback, please write to us at [email protected].
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TRANSCRIPT
Kudrat (Host): Last week, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology announced that it's going to train 10 lakh village entrepreneurs in AI. IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw cited UPI. When the government first announced it, people scoffed at whether it would be possible to bring that technology to the masses of India. But today, UPI is common in all corners of the country.
Kudrat (Host): Artificial intelligence is the new internet. Everyone's talking about it. Everyone wants to learn it. Even traditional colleges like IIMs and IITs now offer short-term certificate courses that teach AI skills to both programmers as well as non-programmers. Beyond these institutions, there are several other courses out there too. There are free AI courses on YouTube and courses at a very low cost, for just a couple hundred or a couple thousand rupees on Udemy, Coursera, and even on LinkedIn.
But the data shows that while Indian workers recognise how big AI will become, they don't feel adequately prepared to deal with this shift. An IIM Ahmedabad study of over 500 white-collar workers found that 68% of respondents expect that AI will partially or fully automate their current roles within the next five years. 40% fear that their skills will become redundant. Almost half of the people surveyed felt unprepared or underprepared to effectively work with AI.
As AI becomes an integral part of both our workplaces and our personal lives, how do we navigate it and upskill ourselves?
Kudrat (Host): I'm your host Kudrat Wadhwa and you're listening to The Signal Daily. We don't do hot takes. Instead, we bring you deep dives into the how and why of consumer trends. In this episode, we learn about what AI skills are essential in today's age and what courses are a good fit for you.
Kudrat (Host): Madhukurna Roy Sukul is a content writer who specialises in SEO writing and content strategy. She said that she was at first hesitant about the AI boom when it started about two years ago. But she's always been pro-upskilling herself.
Madhu: Yes, I was a little apprehensive in the beginning, but gradually I started understanding that this is the new trend. You know how internet was earlier? It was just a tool for people, a tool for fun. They did not know, and probably you wouldn't know, I would know, in my time, like when internet was actually growing in India and people were like curious but scared and obviously taking it as a tool, as fun, as a toy. So that's exactly what is happening with AI right now.
Kudrat (Host): Her workplace integrated AI and trained their employees in it as well. I mean, even our management was encouraging.
Madhu: They were telling us that why don't you use AI for energies? Why don't you use AI to speed things up? Because there was more work left people and they needed productivity.
Kudrat (Host): Through the training her workplace offered, Madhu learned two things. The first is how to write good prompts. How does one write solid prompts for AI that don't beat around the bush? The second thing Madhu learned was how to adequately evaluate the output that AI models generate.
Madhu: Evaluate the quality of the responses it generates. Like there are AI tools being developed every day. You even have platforms where you can create your own GPT. People are generating GPTs and making AIs every day. Like it's about five in a day getting generated. So you have to evaluate these GPTs, the responses that they are generating, how they are doing, whether they are good enough in the current market. That's called evaluation.
Kudrat (Host): Though Madhu already learned these skills at her job, she didn't receive an official credential that certified her. So now she signed up for a course on Coursera that's going to teach her the same things and also give her an official certification.
If you already have the skills, why do you need this credential?
Madhu: I also want to know if there's something more into it. Obviously, we had a crash course. We had a boot camp sort of for two days and the certificate course will be a little more advanced. I'm sure I will learn a few things more. Yes, I'm curious about it. I want to see what's being offered in the prompt and during certificate courses. So I just want to explore it. And certificate, yes, that matters in certain cases. If I'm applying for a better brand or a better company, maybe they need a certificate course. So it's good to have.
Kudrat (Host): There are three kinds of courses out there for working professionals. If they want to learn AI, you can sign up for certificate courses from traditional management institutes like your IIMs and so on. Or you could teach yourself using YouTube. The third kind are cohort-based courses that you can find on Coursera or Udemy. Some of them will grant you certificates. Some won't.
According to the experts The Signal Daily spoke to, the most important thing for consumers is to figure out what their goals are when it comes to these courses. Do you head an organisation and want to make your entire workplace more productive? Or are you an employee who's trying to become more efficient yourself? Or maybe are you entering the job market and want to find better opportunities? In which case, a course that grants you an official certificate is the best bet.
Moreover, you should also understand the basics of what AI is and what LLMs or large language models are. You don't need to be familiar with the ins and outs of coding, but you do need to comprehend the basics. What coding is and how it works.
Prasad: Hi, my name is Prasad. I run a consultancy called Up Your Marketing, which basically does three things. I teach, I train, and I build with AI tools.
Kudrat (Host): For non-coders, the two things that are crucial to understand are prompt engineering and output evaluation, as Madhu had talked about earlier. Moreover, Prasad also said that AI tools that improve your productivity offer a lot more than just the chat function.
Prasad: So in the first one, where you're improving your productivity, improving the way you work, you will try to use an LLM like a chat GPT or a Gemini or a Perplexity, try to maximise all the features in it, right? It's not about chat anymore. There is so much more. There is deep research. The models have evolved. There is advanced voice. There is advanced video. There is now agents inside these tools with agentic browsers coming. The prosumer tools are going to have a lot of edge. So somewhat we are migrating from the MS Office age to an AI office age. So that is the first journey where you maximise your LLMs, understand tools that will help you other than the LLM. So like my tool stack has evolved. Now I have a set of five tools that I regularly use. So all of us will have a different AI tool stack going ahead.
Kudrat (Host): As far as choosing what kind of course you should take, that's dependent on your needs and your budget. Institutes offer courses that are more theoretical. So if you have some money and a background in coding, you should opt for that. Having an official certificate from an institute like an IIM will also make your resume stand out in case you're venturing into the job market. A lot of YouTube courses are free. So if you have time on your hand and don't want to spend money, go for those. Cohort-based courses have a minimal fee and they can be a sweet middle spot. But the most important thing, according to Prasad, is to actually practise those AI skills.
Prasad: My personal take is these tools are changing so rapidly. Three months back, what you learn is irrelevant now. And the last is cohort courses that typically what even I take, right? It's more classroom one-on-one. It's more relevant to the jobs, what you can do and implement today and see those quick wins immediately. So these are the three types of courses available. There is nothing right or wrong. I think what is important is, you know, building the AI mindset through these courses and start implementing.
Kudrat (Host): Prasad said that he's noticed that a lot of people tend to take courses, but then they don't implement those skills regularly. That's a big fallacy.
Prasad: I've seen people in getting into this loop of doing courses, like you have 10 rupee courses, 15 rupee courses, a lot of free webinars. What happens is you jump from one course to another. You just keep on listening. You're not implementing. So rather than jumping from one course to another, trying to find that silver bullet, that this is going to be the course that is going to teach me. I don't think that's going to help do any one of them and start using it from day one.
Kudrat (Host): Courses are nice, of course, but it's more important to put your skills to use. There's just no other way around it. The next decade for Prasad will be all about AI adoption. You either adapt or you fall behind. Today's AI tools are performing better than what they did even a month ago. I remember when ChatGPT first came out, its output was often clunky and the writing was just too formal and awkward. But now talking to ChatGPT feels like talking to a friend. It even uses emoji and slang and nicknames.
At the same time, one worry that many people, including myself, have is whether using these tools regularly will make humans less sharp and intelligent.
Prasad: Any tool, it doesn't matter. You need to know how to use it well. What happens is most of the time, people are using it in a way that they're trying to be intellectually lazy or creatively shallow. Those two things you need to avoid. It's very, very important. Like I'm repeating it like intellectually lazy and creatively shallow. That has nothing to do with AI. That is a human trait of finding a shortcut, finding an easy way out. You know, the people who are going to do well are going to be the ones who are good at their jobs and can use these tools better. Like most of the mediocre level work you will soon see will be called out or it will become, you know, very uniform in nature because everyone is going to be able to do it. 80% of the people are going to be able to work efficiently.
Kudrat (Host): Another concern that many have is the security angle. A lot of us now use AI for both professional and personal tasks. We're sharing all kinds of our data with these platforms. How safe is that?
Prasad: They're trying to do the best on the security front. At your personal level, I think you should always have prudence. It's same like any digital media, right? Instagram or Facebook, how much you want to provide and what is that you don't want to provide, right? So that is something that everybody has to be conscious about. Obviously, there are tools in grey areas. That's why I obviously prefer to use tools which are known, which are frontrunners, which are funded by probably bigger companies. The founders are there in the open, right? So, you know, something like OpenAI is not going to necessarily do something malicious. Okay, obviously, you don't know what is at the back because Facebook also had a big spat with security, right? But at the face value, I will be more prudent if I know that the company is building in public. The founders are there. We have a lot of open public information and credibility. That is one way to avoid it. And second is your own personal guide rails. I'm not going to upload some really sensitive data.
Kudrat (Host): It's crucial to have your own guardrails in place when you use AI tools. Also, as Prasad said, yes, AI is a threat to our jobs, but really it's a threat to mediocre work. Madhu, the content writer we heard from earlier is aware of that. That's in part why she's decided to become proficient in AI.
Madhu: Upskilling definitely as a content writer is very important these days because just content writing is not required anymore. I definitely feel more confident because I have to stay in sync with the trend, of course, and I really love to upscale. I understand that whenever you are doing something, anything, it's not just content writing, you're into any kind of field. Like even if you are into coding, you will have to keep learning. When coding started, people learned C++ and then Java, and then they moved on to Python, and then Python was again developed into an advanced form. So people kept learning. That's called upskilling.
Kudrat (Host): We're still early in the AI era. But one thing that's become clear is that knowing how to use AI is going to be a non-negotiable for most jobs in the near future. So take that AI course. Make sure to have clear goals though. If you're trying to boost your resume and want to learn theory as well, a course from an established institute is the way to go. But if you have time and want to self-teach, check out YouTube. If you want to compromise between the two, check out Coursera or Udemy or deeplearning.ai. You don't necessarily need to know coding, though, of course, understanding the basics will only help. Most of all, make sure to actually get your hands dirty and use these tools regularly. Because like it or not, AI is here to stay.
Kudrat (Host): That's all for today. You just heard The Signal Daily. We don't do hot takes. Instead, we bring you deep dives into the how and why of consumer trends. The Core produces The Signal Daily. Follow us wherever you get your favourite podcasts.
To check out the rest of our work, go to www.thecore.in.
If you have feedback, we'd love to hear from you. Write to us at feedback at thecore.in or you can write to me personally at kudrat at thecore.in.
Thank you for listening.
