There’s a small industry now of blog posts ranking AI courses for small business owners — free versus paid, this platform versus that one, which certificate looks best on a CV. It’s noise. If you’re an SME owner wondering where to start with AI, the honest answer is: pick any decent free course, do it this week, and stop researching.
The free options are genuinely fine. Google’s AI Essentials, the IOE’s new AI for SMEs course (built with Microsoft, launched this year specifically for non-technical business owners), Barclays Eagle Labs’ sessions — none of them will make you an expert, but none of them need to. What they actually give you is basic literacy: how to write a decent prompt, what these tools are good and bad at, and enough confidence to try AI on something real in your business — a first-draft email, a set of FAQs, a supplier letter. That’s the whole point. The course isn’t the outcome; using the thing afterwards is.
Paid courses exist and some are well put together, but they’re solving a problem most SME owners don’t have yet. They’re built for structure, certification, staff training programmes — useful once you already know AI helps you and you’re formalising it across a team. Spending money to find that out in the first place is backwards.
The one caveat worth a sentence: if you’re in the UK, check whether a free course is actually built for UK rules and context before you trust it wholesale — a lot of what ranks well online is written for a US audience, with US-specific schemes and assumptions baked in.
So don’t wait for the “right” course to surface. Free, UK-relevant, and started today beats premium, perfect, and still on your to-do list in March.
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