A 30-Day Roadmap to Learn AI From Scratch

Learning AI isn’t memorising model names, which change every month, but understanding how it works and practising until asking for things feels natural. This four-week roadmap, at 30 minutes a day, uses the guides on this site and quality free courses. By the end you will use AI with judgement and understand what people mean when they talk about agents.

Week 1: understand what you’re talking to

• Day 1. Create your account and set up privacy with getting started with ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.
• Days 2 and 3. Read how language models work: tokens, context and why the same question gets different answers.
• Day 4. Hallucinations and privacy: when not to trust it and what not to share.
• Day 5. What AI can and cannot do today.
• Days 6 and 7. Use AI for something real every day with the 12 everyday uses. Note what worked and what didn’t.

To go further: the free Elements of AI course explains AI without maths.

Week 2: learn to ask

• Days 8 to 10. Practise the seven prompting techniques, one a day, on the same task to see the difference.
• Day 11. Learn to write better with AI without losing your voice.
• Day 12. Try the same prompt in two different assistants and compare. It will help you understand the AI model guide.
• Days 13 and 14. Browse the glossary: look up terms you’ve heard and don’t understand.

Week 3: use the tools for real

• Day 15. Create your first project or Gem: projects, instructions and memory.
• Day 16. Analyse a long document: a contract, a report or course notes.
• Day 17. Research a topic with sources using web search and deep research.
• Days 18 and 19. Understand connectors with what is MCP and, if you use Claude, connect an app with how to install an MCP server.
• Day 20. Explore one of the recommended channels and podcasts, for example the “Start here” videos.
• Day 21. Active rest: review what you’ve tried and keep your three favourite uses.

Week 4: agents and automation

• Day 22. What is an AI agent and how it differs from a chatbot.
• Day 23. Agent safety: permissions, prompt injection and supervision.
• Days 24 and 25. Automate a task of your own without code using n8n, Make or Zapier.
• Days 26 and 27. Optional, technical: build your first website with a coding agent or your first agent with the API.
• Day 28. Agent design patterns: how real systems are built.
• Days 29 and 30. Choose a course to continue: Anthropic Academy, the Hugging Face agents course or any from our list of free resources.

After day 30

AI changes every week. To keep up without stress, follow our weekly news or subscribe by RSS, and come back to the model comparison whenever you need to choose a tool.