Indiana University just gave away our most popular AI skills course by making it completely free and open to all, with no application or tuition required. Anyone who completes the course that we’ve come to know as GenAI 101 will earn an AI skills badge from our world-renowned Kelley School of Business at no cost.
Our decision to make such a highly sought-after course available for free is rather unconventional for a major university. Tuition is one of the ways we pay the bills, yet we know that the ability to wisely work alongside artificial intelligence is too important of a skill to lock behind a paywall.
When our faculty developed and launched GenAI 101 eight months ago, we could not fully predict the continuing and accelerating appetite for AI literacy among corporations, small businesses, state agencies, and universities across the country. They asked us to share it, and we have now done so by making the class freely available to anyone.
The decision was, perhaps surprisingly, straightforward.
AI skills for anyone, anywhere
Guided by some of our leading faculty, we believe that the people who will thrive in the years ahead will be those who learn to work alongside AI. It will be those who have the ability to think critically and solve problems responsibly, with fluency in a newly emerging technological landscape.
A 2025 McKinsey and Company report showed 92% of companies surveyed plan to increase AI investment over the next three years. The World Economic Forum’s 2025 The Future of Jobs Survey found “86% of employers expect AI and information processing technologies to transform their business by 2030.”
AI will not affect all jobs equally, but the workers who don’t know how to use it will be at a stark disadvantage. It will not be the ones who lack talent or ambition, but those who lack access, who get left behind. They will be the people who never learned what these systems can do, and just as importantly, what they can’t.
Public universities were built for urgent societal moments like this. We are grounded in the idea that knowledge should be a public good, available to any person willing to learn.
That principle made us a key historic driver of economic mobility and the American middle class. It continues to shape how we contribute to Indiana’s workforce and talent needs. And it is the principle that guides our decision to open GenAI 101 to anyone, anywhere.
Fastest technological change of our lives
Of course, we are not the only university prioritizing AI skills development. Peers nationally and in the Big Ten are taking on this challenge in their own ways, with some driving curriculum changes and others expanding access to new AI credentials.
Every public research university in this country has the capacity to do something similar. The scale of the workforce transition ahead is too large for any single institution to address alone, and the cost of inaction will be measured in real careers and real communities.
At the same time, acting with purpose also means navigating the new challenges that AI brings. Ethical questions demand thoughtful consideration, as do concerns about AI’s impact on energy and water use.
This is precisely why access to foundational AI training matters now. If AI is reshaping systems this rapidly, we have a responsibility to move quickly as well. By making GenAI 101 broadly available, we are purposefully helping upskill the talent that drives our state and our nation’s economic growth.
We are preparing a generation to apply these tools responsibly and ethically, wherever in the world they live and work. And we are setting a standard for ourselves about the pace at which our courses and approach must evolve.
This is a moment that asks something of all of us. It is an opportunity for America’s leading public universities to help society prepare for the fastest technological change of our lives.
