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AI and Finance

Learn how artificial intelligence is reshaping financial analysis, investment strategies, and decision-making in modern markets.

Course Information

Format: Self-Paced
Estimated: 1 week, 7-10 hours per week
Start: Anytime

Certificate Track

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$100
Access to this course & course materials
Graded assignments & exams
MIT certificate on completion
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About this Course

Discover how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the world of finance, from the broader relationship between fintech and AI to the cutting-edge paradigms shaping the field today. In this course, you'll explore how AI is changing financial decision-making across narratives, market learning, investment analysis, trading, and language-based tasks. You'll gain a conceptual map of the two major paradigms driving change in the industry—reinforcement learning and large language models—and learn how each is applied to real financial problems.

You'll also examine why these tools matter beyond the opportunities they create, tackling important questions about bias, interpretability, accountability, and responsible deployment that every practitioner needs to understand.

AI and Finance is one of the vertical courses in Universal AI, a self-paced program designed to help you go from beginner to AI authority—no coding or technical skills required.

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What you'll learn

  • Explain how artificial intelligence, including large language models, is reshaping financial analysis, investment processes, and decision-making across the industry
  • Understand the core concepts of reinforcement learning in finance, including states, actions, rewards, and exploration–exploitation trade-offs
  • Evaluate the usefulness of reinforcement learning for developing trading strategies and studying market dynamics in noisy, adaptive financial environments
  • Assess the opportunities and limitations of large language models in finance, including practical applications and the challenges of bias, interpretability, and responsible deployment

How you'll learn

  • Real-World Learning

    Learn from MIT faculty and experts who ground their teaching in real-world cases rather than mathematical models, making the material approachable for all.

  • Learn On Demand

    Access all course content online with complete flexibility to study at your own pace.

  • AI-Enabled Support

    Deepen your understanding of the course material and get help on assignments from AskTIM, the AI assistant built by MIT researchers.

  • Stackable Credentials

    Earn an MIT Open Learning certificate at each milestone—module, course, and program—demonstrating your AI expertise. Available in paid courses only.

Meet your instructors

Andrew W. Lo

Professor

Andrew W. Lo is the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, director of the MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering, a principal investigator at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and an affiliated faculty member of the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He has published extensively in academic journals (see https://alo.mit.edu) and was named one of TIME’s “100 most influential people in the world.” He has received awards for teaching from both MIT and Wharton.

Major Works:

  • Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought
  • The Econometrics of Financial Markets
  • A Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street

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