I’ve spent years leveling up my AI skills as a sustainability professional.
If you want to learn AI without spending a cent, these are the 5 places I’d start today.
How to Learn AI for Free as a Sustainability Professional
Choose the learning path that fits your goals, time and ambition.
You don’t need a big budget to build strong AI skills.
But you do need a bit of clarity on where to start and what to focus on.
Everyone learns differently, so I’ve structured this newsletter in a way that allows you to jump freely to the parts that matter most to you.
Some paths are more advanced and require commitment.
Others are simple, practical and can be done in very short sessions.
Pick the path that fits your current goals:
If your goal is to create real tools, workflows and AI-powered solutions, this path is for you.
It requires commitment, but the reward is huge.
Tool: Google Skills
This path focuses on how you think, ask and collaborate with AI.
Perfect for improving your daily work with GPT and other LLMs.
Tool: OpenAI Academy
If you prefer a traditional learning experience, with structured courses and optional certificates, these are solid choices.
Tools: Coursera and LinkedIn Learning
For those who want to see practical examples and real workflows.
Simple, visual, and immediately applicable.
Tool: YouTube
Google Skills
Your gateway to building real AI solutions, not just learning concepts.
This pathway is more complex than the others in this list — but that complexity comes with something powerful: flexibility, scale and the ability to actually build with the Google ecosystem.
It’s not just about learning AI concepts. It’s about applying them through hands-on labs and real project scenarios.
You don’t only watch a video.
You do the work.
Why This Tool
Google Skills offers complete learning paths designed around real tasks: building workflows, deploying automations, integrating AI features, understanding core cloud concepts and experimenting with LLMs directly in your browser.
You won’t just “learn AI.”
You’ll learn how AI works inside actual systems — the way companies use it.
If your ambition is to use AI to create value, solve problems, or build internal tools… Google Skills is miles ahead of most learning platforms.
Who Should Consider Using It
This pathway is for architects and builders — not in a coding-heavy sense, but in a solution-design sense.
It’s perfect if you want to:
Turn your sustainability know-how into workflows
Automate repetitive tasks
Build small internal tools
Prototype AI-driven solutions
Move beyond “chatting with AI” and actually creating with AI
This is for ambitious professionals who want skills that set them apart.
Difficulty
Intermediate to hard
This is not a simple plug-and-play learning experience.
You will need:
Patience
Curiosity
Willingness to try, fail, and try again
Basic understanding of workflows and problem solving
But the reward is big:
You come out with real capabilities — not just theoretical confidence.
Pro Tip
Join the Google Innovator program. You get free monthly learning credits that directly reduce the cost of taking labs and learning paths.
These credits alone make your entire learning journey significantly easier and more affordable.
OpenAI Academy
Your everyday AI companion — perfect for improving prompting, workflows and daily productivity.
If Google Skills is the place to build complex solutions, OpenAI Academy is the place to strengthen your everyday use of AI.
This pathway focuses on developing the foundational skill most professionals still underestimate: prompting and applied reasoning with LLMs.
While everyone talks about prompting, very few people actually learn it intentionally.
OpenAI Academy fills that gap with a clean, simple learning experience built around practical examples.
What OpenAI Academy Actually Offers
OpenAI Academy gives you a complete toolkit to understand, practice and improve your daily AI skills. Here is what you get inside:
• Webinars
Live and recorded sessions where you see real examples, real workflows and practical ways to use AI beyond simple chatting.
• Courses
Short courses that explain prompting fundamentals, applied use cases, and how to collaborate with AI more effectively.
• Prompt Library
A library of ready-to-use prompts created by OpenAI experts.
This is especially useful if you want to improve your reasoning prompts, analytical tasks, report writing or data interpretation.
Everything is simple, clean and aimed at people who want to use AI better, not necessarily build AI systems.
Who Should Consider Using It
If you are a sustainability professional who uses ChatGPT on a daily basis (like most people working with AI today), this path is one of the easiest and most impactful.
Difficulty
Beginner to Intermediate.
This is the most accessible pathway in this newsletter.
You don’t need technical skills.
You only need curiosity and consistency.
Pro Tip
Try to push yourself from passive usage (asking questions) to active execution (using GPT to perform tasks end-to-end).
Explore the OpenAI API, even if you’re not technical.
There are low-code and no-code examples that show how AI can run workflows for you, not just answer questions.
This article is kindly sponsored by Muuvment IQ — one of the very few AI tools built specifically for sustainability professionals.
Most AI platforms are general-purpose. Great for essays, marketing, or coding… but not for the reality of sustainability work.
Muuvment IQ is different.
It’s designed around our workflows, from materiality to benchmarking to governance, reporting, impact analysis, and day-to-day sustainability tasks.
And because they want this community to actually benefit from the tool, they’ve given me a 30% discount for the yearly subscription.
👉 Use code: 30IQOFF
Coursera
Structured learning from world-class universities — and you can access most of it for free.
Coursera is where you go when you want structured, academic-style learning with real depth behind it.
The strength of Coursera is simple:
you learn from universities, institutions and industry leaders who have been teaching AI long before it became mainstream.
And the best part?
You can audit almost any course for free, which means you get the learning without paying for the certificate.
Difficulty
Beginner to Advanced (depending on the course).
Pro Tip
Start by auditing the course for free.
If you find it valuable and want the certificate, you can upgrade later.
But the learning itself is already accessible at zero cost.
LinkedIn Learning
Practical, fast, credibility-boosting AI learning for busy sustainability professionals.
LinkedIn Learning is the most practical path in this list — short lessons, real workplace scenarios, and topics that directly support your productivity, reporting, communication, data skills and everyday AI use.
It’s not overly technical.
It’s not overwhelming.
It’s simple, actionable and directly tied to the skills you use at work.
And if you already have LinkedIn Premium, you get full access at no extra cost.
Difficulty
Beginner to Intermediate.
Most lessons are simple and can be completed in short sessions.
You can go deeper with curated learning paths, but you don’t have to.
Pro Tip
Use the library to build your own AI learning path.
Start with AI basics, add prompting, then move into topics like automation, data skills and workplace execution.
You can also share your custom learning path with your team.
YouTube
Probably the most underrated AI learning platform — and the home of my Sustainability x AI channel.
YouTube is probably the most underrated AI learning platform.
No logins. No paywalls. No sign-ups. No applications.
You search, you watch, you pause, you copy, you experiment.
That’s the purest way to learn.
And if you haven’t been following closely over the past two months…
we’ve built a small but strong community of 196 people on YouTube.
I’ve been uploading practical, real-world AI use cases for sustainability professionals —
tools like NotebookLM, Replit, Gamma, ChatGPT, n8n, and more.
These are the exact tools I use in my 9–5, my consulting work, and my own experiments.
Why am I doing this?
Because there is no real place on the internet that teaches AI for sustainability, not in a practical and accessible way.
And since I’m already learning, testing and applying these tools daily, I decided to share the journey online — so you can learn with me, not behind me.
Who Should Consider Using It
If you’re a sustainability professional who wants:
engaging, simple, practical learning
use cases that actually reflect your work
tools you can copy and apply the same day
inspiration to build your own workflows and experiments
Then yes, I’m biased, but this is exactly the place you should explore.
The content is short, targeted and built around your reality as a sustainability manager, consultant or freelancer.
Difficulty
Beginner friendly.
Most videos walk you through step-by-step, and you can build along with me.
Pro Tip
Don’t just watch the videos — try the workflows on your own data, your own reports, your own processes.
That’s how you learn fast.