Kairos Decisions

Course 1: AI, LLM & Prompt Engineering

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Kairos Decisions

Course 1: AI, LLM & Prompt Engineering

Vidya Subramanian

Instructor: Vidya Subramanian

Included with Coursera PlusLearn more

Gain insight into a topic and learn the fundamentals.
Intermediate level

Recommended experience

1 hour to complete
Flexible schedule
Learn at your own pace
Gain insight into a topic and learn the fundamentals.
Intermediate level

Recommended experience

1 hour to complete
Flexible schedule
Learn at your own pace

Details to know

Shareable certificate

Add to your LinkedIn profile

Recently updated!

September 2026

Assessments

1 assignment

Taught in English

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This course is part of the Agentic AI From Fundamentals to Production Specialization
When you enroll in this course, you'll also be enrolled in this Specialization.
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  • Gain a foundational understanding of a subject or tool
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There are 3 modules in this course

Build a clear mental model of how AI, generative AI, and large language models relate. You’ll learn the four core AI abilities (perception, reasoning, action, and learning), how AI is classified by capability and approach, and how LLMs differ by openness (proprietary vs. open weights) and focus (enterprise vs. reasoning models). You’ll also learn the five levels of AI autonomy, from chatbot to super-agent, and weigh LLM capabilities against limitations like hallucination, inconsistent outputs, and knowledge cutoffs. In the lab, you’ll send the same prompt to Gemini, OpenAI, and Anthropic models and compare quality, cost, and recency.

What's included

1 video1 reading

Learn why the output gap isn’t always the model; sometimes it’s the prompt. You’ll design prompts using six components (persona, context, instructions, few-shot examples, guardrails, and output format), and apply techniques such as chain-of-thought, self-consistency, and chain-of-verification. You’ll follow the LLM inference process step by step, then control it with API settings: temperature, top-P, top-K, max tokens, stop sequences, penalties, seed, and reasoning effort. You’ll also learn context window limits, context rot, inference costs, and why LLMs are non-deterministic.

What's included

1 video1 reading

Check your understanding of LLM types, autonomy levels, prompt engineering techniques, and inference settings before moving on to agentic AI in Course 2.

What's included

1 assignment

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Instructor

Vidya Subramanian
Kairos Decisions
6 Courses415 learners

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