If you’re like me, you can’t get through a news update, grocery store trip, or polite conversation without someone talking about AI. It’s great. It’s terrible. It’s a bubble. It’s coming for our jobs …
If you need to cut through the noise and get a good grounding in AI, you might consider the Google Generative AI Leader course. It’s a foundational class for non-coders that give you the orientation to what it is, how it works, and what tools are available on the google platform. Armed with this knowledge, a leader can create business strategies that take advantage of Google’s offerings to save time and money. Generative AI has potential to reshape many industries, but to take advantage of it your technical AND non-technical folks need to know more about it.
The exam itself is broken up into 3 parts:
- Fundamentals of AI: This gives you a basis to understand the concepts and terms that will inevitably get throuwn around. Armed with this knowledge you can follow the conversation and build on what you know. This information is common to most of th eAI projects, no matter the platform.
- Google’s Cloud Offerings: Just because yo know how to hammer doesn’t mean you have to build a whole house. It’s the same way with AI in that with a little knowledge of what’s available you can make better decisions about what tools and techniques you use with AI.
- Techniques to Improve Model Output: How do things like prompt engineering, mitgation of hallucinations, how to evaluate results, and what affects the quality of the information generated.
- Business Stratigies for sucessful solutions: How to implement organization change, measure success, and the for ethical considerations, and how Google makes those things possible.
Preparation and Learning Resources.
Google provides a learning path at no cost for this certification. It includes interactive content and hands on examples that cover every key topic area. There are also study guides and sample questions to cover all the key topics. There are also good resources over at freecodecamp.com and Udemy. I used a combination of these to study.
My experience was that this is a great overview for somewhat-technical people that need to get up to speed. I use the materials at Free Code Camp and practice tests from Udemy. I feel like I was fully prepared for the test, and with less that 12 hours of study (including videos and tests made me confident of passing (which I did).
Next up, I think I’ll try a similar class but on the AWS side. I appreciate being familiar with both platforms so I can make better decisions on which one works best.