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For a first look, you may not need to. AI Skills Boost is free to everyone in the UK and comes with a badge, and the big AI companies teach their own tools for nothing. We would rather say so than pretend otherwise. What free courses rarely give you is one route from your first question to leading AI at work, placed by a check of what you already know, with every price, limit and date checked and dated so you know it still holds. Try it free for 7 days, and if you pay and it isn't what you wanted, our 30-day guarantee refunds you in full.

Yes, by design. Every tool in the Tool Atlas is described against the same five points: who makes it, what the free plan gives you, what it's best at, what to watch out for and who it suits. Each gets a fair strength and a fair limitation, including the best-known names. The Lab's coach runs on Claude, which is exactly why Claude gets no special treatment in the lessons. Where a lesson shows how to do something, it gives parallel steps for each of the main tools and puts the ones you use first.

Everything that can go out of date (prices, plan limits, data-training settings, product names, regulatory deadlines) is held as a separate fact, with its source and the date it was last checked. The Hallmark shows that date, and when a fact changes, every lesson that cites it changes with it. It matters: the EU's Digital Omnibus moved the AI Act's high-risk deadline for Annex III systems from 2 August 2026 to 2 December 2027, and any course recorded before then still teaches the old date.

Yes. Foundations assumes nothing: no maths, no code, and every term explained the first time it appears. The free placement check starts you where you are rather than at the beginning of everything. The technical material sits in the Builder level, and even that is written to be read by people who don't code for a living.

No, it's education. The regulation lessons say what each rule is, give the date it applies from and link to the primary source, so you can read the law or the regulator's own words for yourself. For a decision with real consequences, such as whether a system is high-risk under the EU AI Act or needs a data protection impact assessment, take advice from your data protection officer or a qualified lawyer.

That's what the Tool Atlas is for: 32 tools, from general assistants to coding agents, each described the same way, with free plans and prices checked and dated. Tell us which tools you use and the lessons put those first. Module 11 also gives you five questions for judging any new tool yourself, because there will always be a new one.