Foundations of AI is one of six short AI courses I bought from ISC2 in May 2026, and at $128 it is the most expensive of the bundle. It is also the most dated – and that is not the criticism it sounds like. This is a history course. It walks the lineage of AI and its core branches, most of which have been around far longer than the current hype suggests: expert systems , fuzzy logic , computer vision , robotics , machine learning , natural language processing . As a backgrounder on each of those, it is genuinely good. As a survey of where the excitement is right now, it is a step behind.

What It Covers

The history of artificial intelligence and a tour of its core technologies. Each gets enough grounding to understand what it is, where it came from, and what it does well. The framing is foundational rather than topical: it treats these as the building blocks the field is made of, which they are, and which most people underestimate the age of.

The gap is timing. The course appears to have been written before the recent acceleration in natural language processing – the jump that turned NLP into the engine behind agentic AI. That topic, the one driving most of today’s attention, is almost entirely absent. What you get instead is solid footing in the core technologies that are only now crossing from experimental research into real applications.

The differences between the core components of what we think of as AI matter, both technically and from a governance and compliance perspective, even and perhaps especially as the boundaries begin to merge. The limitations are almost more important than the capabilities. A failure in computer vision might mistake your cat for a dog. A failure in robotics might run over the cat. That’s the wrong kind of fuzzy logic, and a very real risk.

Verdict

Four stars, with one condition: go in knowing it is a history course, not a current field survey. If you want to understand the technologies AI is actually built from – and to stop treating “AI” as a synonym for whatever shipped last month – it delivers that, and delivers it well. If you want the state of the art, especially anything agentic, look elsewhere; this predates that wave. The $128 buys a foundation, not a frontier. Taken for what it is, it is the most worthwhile course in the bundle for someone new to the field.

Part of The ISC2 AI Course Bundle . More from the bundle: AI for Cybersecurity · The Evolving Cybersecurity Workforce · Aligning with Global AI Regulations · AI Security: Managing Overconfidence · Planning for Secure by Design AI