New OpenAI Academy courses for the next era of work
Key Points
- Three courses: AI Foundations, Applied AI Foundations, Agents and Workflows
- Hands-on curriculum to build repeatable workflows and agent-assisted processes
- Certificates and enterprise support for onboarding and scaled adoption
Summary
OpenAI launched three new OpenAI Academy courses (June 12, 2026): AI Foundations, Applied AI Foundations, and Agents and Workflows. The courses are hands-on and built by product, research, safety, and deployment teams to help organizations move from basic AI use to repeatable, agent-assisted workflows. They’re designed for practical application across everyday tasks and enterprise learning programs.
Key Points
- AI Foundations: core concepts and habits for effective use — prompting, providing context, output review, and responsible use. Practical outcomes include improved drafting, summarizing, planning, and meeting prep.
- Applied AI Foundations: convert prompts into structured, repeatable workflows. Emphasizes defining inputs, choosing models/tools, checkpoints, human review, and balancing quality/speed/cost.
- Agents and Workflows: direct and refine agent-assisted processes by defining context, outputs, boundaries, and review steps; identify where human judgment is required.
- Adoption & enterprise fit: courses are suited for onboarding, enterprise L&D, and scaling AI fluency; OpenAI works with partners (e.g., BCG, Accenture, BBVA) and supports organizational reporting and rollout.
- Certification & recognition: course completion certificates help recognize participants, identify champions, and standardize learning across teams.
- Roadmap: content will be updated as products evolve; organizations can contact their OpenAI account team or sales to provision courses.
Practical next steps for engineers
- Start by applying AI Foundations to one routine task, then design a workflow in Applied AI Foundations, and iterate with Agents and Workflows. Focus on clear inputs, checkpoints, and human review to maintain quality and safety.