Peter Bittner is a lecturer at UC Berkeley in the new media program of the Graduate School of Journalism.
He started The Upgrade, an online training company focused on bridging the AI and digital skills gap by empowering professionals to use AI tools effectively and ethically. While looking for new platforms, he discovered MindStudio and was enthralled by the possibilities. He immediately started teaching it to his students as a high-powered alternative to the limited chatbots they were using.
MindStudio’s practical and endless use cases became students' main point of interest. “It’s all they wanted to talk about,” Bittner said. As a result, the MindStudio Academy was born to provide training exclusively on MindStudio capabilities.
Bittner partnered with MindStudio to find more people interested in learning AI and help spread the word about MindStudio Academy — a curriculum that trains individuals in AI-building skills that they can use for their own companies or paying clients. The certification program launched its first cohort in January 2024 and has had 120 graduates thus far. Students are professionals that come from various industries, including SMBs, government organizations, and enterprises, like Apple, NASA, and Salesforce. Their shared motivation is to learn to use custom AI for digital transformation and automation — a skill that is highly in demand in today’s job market.
Bittner recommends starting with MindStudio’s YouTube tutorials to introduce using MindStudio and get a sense of what you can build. Then, try building an AI and getting familiar with the platform—no technical skills or extensive AI knowledge are necessary.
Bittner’s work demonstrates the transformative power of embracing AI in educational environments — to give students and professionals the real-world skills they need to succeed in today's AI-driven world.
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