AI Essentials

AI Essentials · Details

Foundations, Agents, and Generative Ecosystems

AI Essentials is an eight-hour introductory course for people who need to understand the central aspects of contemporary Artificial Intelligence and develop practical familiarity with the field’s main tools and forms of use. The course organizes the subject’s foundations, explains how current systems work, and presents the differences among assistants, knowledge bases, agents, generative content, and vibe coding. Its purpose is to make Artificial Intelligence easier to understand without oversimplifying it, enabling participants to leave the course able to operate essential tools and produce meaningful work with them, even without prior technical knowledge.

Module 1 — Foundations of Artificial Intelligence

This module establishes the conceptual foundation of the course. It defines Artificial Intelligence, situates the field’s development historically, and presents the most important concepts for understanding how current systems work. It also introduces the operation of language models and the main limitations involved in their use, creating the basis participants need to use AI tools with greater understanding and less noise.

  • What Artificial Intelligence is
  • A brief history of AI
  • Deterministic and stochastic AI
  • Fundamental concepts: model, token, prompt, and context
  • How language models work
  • Limitations, errors, and hallucinations

Module 2 — Ecosystems, Assistants, Knowledge Bases, and Agents

This module presents the main environments in which AI is used today and distinguishes structures that are often mixed together in public debate and everyday use. Its focus is to show what ecosystems, assistants, knowledge bases, and agents are, and how these forms of organization appear in different tools and work contexts, so that participants can recognize appropriate uses and make better choices about how to operate each type of resource.

  • AI ecosystems: OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic
  • What assistants are
  • What knowledge bases are
  • Introduction to RAG
  • What agents are
  • Practical differences among assistants, knowledge bases, and agents

Module 3 — Generative Content

This module presents different forms of content production supported by AI. It covers the main generative modalities and shows how these technologies are being used for text, voice, music, images, and video, highlighting possibilities, current uses, and differences among formats. The aim is for participants not only to become familiar with these tools, but also to understand how to use them in practice to produce relevant results.

  • Generative text
  • Generative voice and narration
  • Generative music
  • Generative images
  • Generative video
  • Multimodal models and combined uses

Module 4 — Vibe Coding

This module presents vibe coding as a contemporary practice of AI-assisted development. Its focus is to explain what the approach means, why it has gained momentum at this moment, and how it relates to prototyping, code generation, review, and human judgment in the development process. The proposal is to demystify this use of AI and show how the technology can generate concrete value, even for people without technical training.

  • What vibe coding is
  • Why it emerged now
  • AI-assisted prototyping
  • Code generation and technical assistance
  • Limitations, risks, and review
  • The human role in AI-assisted development

Total duration of the complete program: 8 hours.
The program is organized into 4 modules, comprising 4 two-hour classes.