Track A — Functional AI

AI for Marketers

Go from AI-curious to AI-fluent — and walk out with a complete, AI-built marketing portfolio.

UC Santa Cruz ExtensionThree live online classes + a final project. Each class blends short concept blocks, live demos, quick “tastings,” and longer hands-on labs.Starts Jul 18, 2026
Free
Taught by faculty atAlba — The American College of GreeceUC Santa Cruz Extension20+ years teaching · thousands of students trained
What this class is

A hands-on, no-code course that teaches non-technical marketers to use generative AI across the whole job: research, content, agents, and discovery. You invent a product in the first hour and build its marketing around it all course long — surveying a fast-moving landscape, learning just enough of the foundations to be dangerous, and shipping real deliverables in every session. The throughline is a simple, repeatable loop — do the task once, save it as a reusable skill, then run it on demand — culminating in a complete AI-generated marketing portfolio.

Who it's for — Marketers and communicators with no coding background — anyone who wants AI to do their existing job dramatically better.

In class you work on a synthetic company corpus — a fictional business modeled on real-world challenges, so you practice on realistic, messy data, not toy examples.

What you'll be able to do
  • Create marketing content — decks, images, podcasts, and video — with AI tools and assistants
  • Prompt effectively using a repeatable six-principle framework, and direct images like a cinematographer
  • Run competitive and market research with Deep Research agents and RAG
  • Build and schedule marketing automations as reusable AI “skills” you run on demand
  • Deploy an always-on marketing assistant and make your brand findable by AI (GEO)
  • Judge and curate AI output — close the “explainability gap” and apply AI responsibly (disclosure, copyright, bias, data privacy)
The AI agents you'll build

You leave with An always-on marketing agent on your phone that scans competitors, drafts content, and runs your campaigns end to end.

These aren't demos — they're working agents you build hands-on and tailor to your own role, data, and custom spec.

Email Triage Automation

An assistant that triages your inbox and drafts replies — built once, then saved as a reusable, scheduled skill you run on demand.

Outbound Campaign Generator

An assistant that produces a full outbound marketing campaign on demand, saved as a skill you can re-run anytime.

Invoice Processing Automation

An assistant that extracts and totals invoice data accurately — grounded in real calculations, not made-up numbers.

Drafter–Critic Strategy Agent

A self-critiquing agent that drafts campaign strategy and stress-tests it against a skeptical CMO until it's board-ready.

Always-On Marketing Agent

An always-on marketing agent — private and on your phone; runs scheduled competitor and news scans and generates content and images on demand.

The path

How you build them, class by class

1Foundations, prompting, and research tools

AI Fluency for Marketers

  • How models work and why they hallucinate — just enough foundations
  • A repeatable prompting framework, and weak vs. strong prompts
  • The chat-assistant landscape and when to use which
  • Deep Research agents for competitive analysis
2From static workflows to autonomous agents

AI Agents for Marketing

  • The autonomy ladder, with marketing examples — and the safe zone to operate in
  • In-browser agents for competitive intel and data extraction
  • Packaging repeatable marketing work as reusable AI skills
  • The Drafter–Critic pattern: a skeptical CMO critiques and scores your strategy
3The full production stack and being found by AI

AI Content Production & Marketing Assistants

  • The complete content stack — decks, podcasts, images, and video
  • Creative direction for images: emotion, scene, era, lighting, and scale — and the bias and hallucination traps to avoid
  • Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): getting your brand into AI answers
  • Build an always-on marketing agent, then assemble everything into your final portfolio
The tools that matter

The names the whole industry runs on.

01

ChatGPT

The app that put generative AI in front of the world — and became the fastest consumer application ever to reach 100 million users.

02

Claude

The assistant marketers reach for when the work has to be right — and the engine behind the Cowork automations and in-browser research you build in this class.

03

Gamma

One of the most widely adopted AI design tools — turns a prompt into a finished, on-brand deck in minutes, no slide-wrangling required. In class you build an 8-slide investor pitch with it.

Plus the rest of the working stack — Claude · ChatGPT · Gemini · Perplexity · NotebookLM · Gamma · Canva · ElevenLabs · Claude in Chrome · Claude Cowork · MCP.

Your capstone

Your hands-on capstone: a complete AI-built marketing portfolio for your product — positioning, a campaign strategy, a presentation, product images, an always-on agent, audio or video, and a short write-up of your process. Graded on quality and curation, not volume — iterate, read every slide, ship nothing made up. It's the work your certificate is based on, and a portfolio you can show an employer.

Your certificate is based on what you build — not attendance.

Ready to build your AI agent?

A small, high-quality cohort for professionals — fully online, hands-on from minute one.