
follow the five-section course roadmap from installing open source models to building an english tutor assistant and exploring llm fundamentals, tokens, prompts, and mcp integrations.
Meet Iman Surana, a cloud solutions architect with 16+ years delivering enterprise-grade solutions on Azure and AWS, a Microsoft Certified Trainer and Udemy instructor partner guiding this AI fundamentals course.
Learn how large language models, trained on billions of words and billions of parameters, generate human-like text and perform tasks like answering questions, translating, and content creation.
Explain tokens as the building blocks language models use to process text, including words, parts of words, numbers, punctuation, and spaces, and how tokenization influences input and pricing.
Explore how inference drives output from trained models, how the context window limits tokens, and why hallucinations occur, with rag as retrieval augmented generation.
Learn why prompt engineering matters, choosing concise prompts to save tokens and improve accuracy, and discover how to specify output formats in prompts for large language models.
Explore how temperature, top-k, and top-p sampling shape large language model outputs, from deterministic coding tasks to creative brainstorming, by adjusting randomness and probability mass.
Master prompt design by defining a persona, supplying context and input data, detailing instructions, choosing an output format, and using examples to align llm outputs with your goals.
Learn few-shot and one-shot prompting, where models follow examples to control tone, format, and reasoning for structured outputs, rewrites, and data transformations, including polite customer service style and chain-of-thought prompting.
Explore react prompting, a reason-and-action approach where AI agents alternate thinking and acting—reasoning steps, then retrieving facts by searching the web or calling tools and API calls to produce answers.
Master system, contextual, and role prompting to design prompts that govern AI behavior, supply background context, and define persona, shaping accurate, safe, and helpful responses in AI applications.
Explore how AI agents use LLM reasoning and tools to perceive data, break prompts into steps, and autonomously execute tasks like weather checks and flight bookings.
Explore the AWS Bedrock agent, a fully managed, serverless service that hosts agents without code. Attach functions via Lambda, integrate with RDS, S3, Salesforce, and use Rag for data access.
Explore the architecture of an ai ops agent built on AWS Bedrock, with two Lambda tools for CloudTrail and EC2 management, and learn the required AWS CLI and IAM permissions.
Set up AWS CLI credentials by creating an IAM user in the IAM Identity Center with MFA, configure AWS SSO, verify with sts get-caller-identity, and prepare CloudFormation deployment.
Deploy and test an AI ops agent on AWS Bedrock, wiring CloudTrail, EC2, and Lambda via CloudFormation templates, with API schemas, guardrails, and orchestration to monitor and manage EC2 instances.
Explore responsible AI principles—fairness, privacy and security, accountability, reliability, and transparency—and learn how guardrails, human in the loop oversight, and AWS Bedrock tools enable safe AI.
Understand retrieval augmented generation (rag): an ai framework that improves llm accuracy by retrieving data from external trusted sources and grounding responses using vector stores, embeddings, and semantic search.
Demonstrate a restaurant chatbot using a rag pipeline with vector search in astradb and olama embeddings, configured in langflow; compare with a non rag version to show context vs hallucination.
Compare traditional RAG with agentic RAG, showing how a retrieval agent enables planning, reasoning, and tool use with LLMs across vector stores, web search, and APIs for multi-agent scenarios.
Discover how MCP, the model context protocol, unifies access to services like YouTube, AWS, and Google Calendar, letting a client talk to MCP servers and run tasks without writing code.
Discover the basic MCP architecture that connects ai applications to external sources via the model context protocol, including hosts, clients, servers, and data and transport layers.
Build and run your own MCP server to manage Google Calendar, including OAuth authentication, API access, and client-server communication, enabling calendar events to be listed, scheduled, and deleted.
Wraps up by revisiting open-source models you can install locally, highlights prompt engineering, agentic AI with AWS bedrock, and MCP (model context protocol) for connecting external sources like Google Calendar.
Artificial Intelligence is no longer just for researchers and data scientists. Tools powered by Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly becoming part of everyday work—from writing and research to automation and intelligent agents.
This course is a beginner-friendly, hands-on introduction to modern AI, designed to help you understand how today’s AI systems work and how to use them effectively—even if you have no prior AI or machine learning background.
You’ll start with the core foundations of Generative AI, learn how LLMs think and respond, master prompt engineering, and then move into practical, real-world concepts like Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), AI agents, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP)—the emerging standard for connecting models with tools and systems.
By the end of the course, you won’t just know about AI—you’ll know how to work with it.
**Note: Built especially for beginners, this course delivers a solid foundation without overwhelming you with advanced concepts — keeping your learning simple, practical, and to the point.
How This Course Will Help You:
After completing this course, you will be able to:
Clearly explain how modern AI and LLM-based systems work
Write effective prompts and interact confidently with AI tools
Understand RAG and Agentic RAG, and what problem they solve
Understand how AI agents and MCP-powered systems are built
Make informed decisions when using or building AI-powered products
Build a strong foundation that will help you to move into advanced AI, agents, or application development
Whether your goal is learning, building, teaching, or leading AI initiatives, this course gives you the mental model you need.