AI Mastery for Professionals

Overview

A Vanderbilt specialization aimed squarely at using AI and AI agents to produce better work output, built around prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, and increasingly, agentic workflows — AI systems that carry out multi-step tasks rather than answer single questions.

Who it's for

Despite the "mastery" in the title, it's pitched at a beginner level, meaning it's built for working professionals adding AI to their toolkit rather than AI researchers. It's a newer, smaller program with just over 4,300 students so far.

Key takeaways

• Writing effective prompts and multimodal prompt patterns
• Retrieval-augmented generation and context engineering basics
• Tool calling and agentic systems for real work tasks

Useful if your goal is applied AI fluency rather than a technical AI degree.