Free AI training for every adult in the UK: what the AI Skills Boost actually gives you
On 28 January 2026 the government announced that free AI training is being made available to every adult in the UK, with a target of giving 10 million workers foundational AI skills by 2030. It is worth understanding what is on offer, because the headline is better than the detail in some places and better than people assume in others.
What you actually get
The programme runs with eleven founding industry partners, including Google, Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, Barclays, BT, Sage and Salesforce. The training is free, online, and built around short courses of under 20 minutes each. Complete the set and you get an AI foundations badge.
Alongside it, Skills England published an AI foundation skills for work benchmark on the same day. That is the more useful document if you want to know what "AI literate at work" is supposed to mean. It covers understanding the risks of AI, writing prompts for generative AI tools, interpreting data from dashboards, and automating routine tasks.
Why the government is doing this
Two numbers from the announcement explain it. Only 21 per cent of UK workers said they were confident using AI. And around one in six UK businesses had adopted AI by the middle of 2025.
That is a very large gap between the technology being available and anyone being able to use it well. Free short courses are a sensible way to close the bottom of it quickly.
Where short courses stop being enough
We would rather be straight with you than sell you something. Twenty minute courses build awareness. They will help someone stop being frightened of an AI tool and start using it for the obvious things. That is genuinely worth having, and if that is what you need, take it, it costs nothing.
What they do not do is make anyone responsible for a decision. Choosing between vendors, writing a policy that will survive an audit, working out what happens when a system gets something wrong in front of a customer, deciding which jobs change and how you tell people: none of that comes from a badge.
That is the gap our AI Units are built for. They are Level 5, funded, and assessed on work you do for your own employer rather than on a quiz. If you are earlier in your journey, our AI and Automation Practitioner apprenticeship takes someone from capable user to practitioner over a longer period.
Start with the free courses. Come to us when the decisions get real.
Sources
GOV.UK, free AI training for all
Skills England, AI foundation skills for work benchmark