AI Noob where to start?

Hello,

TL;DR: Where do I get started with AI from an ICT engineer POV? I find the subject complex and vague, and I have no idea where to start.

A little bit about myself, I am a telecoms engineer with 7 years of experience in networking, servers (virtualisation and containers), Audio-visual and industrial/home automations and CAD, but I am more specialised in the first 4 layers of the OSI model with a little experience in Python, YAML and Ansible (nowhere near a software engineer, but decent enough to make simple automations work if needed).

I am starting to have clients that ask questions about AI and its use for their business, and I am not confident in answering them. Where should I start?

My only knowledge about AI was gathered from a course I have done “AI Infrastructure and Operations Fundamentals” from Nvidia and the fact that Lamma is an open-source model from Meta (which I absolutely adore the idea of local open-source AI).

I am do not think I want to be an AI developer and pivot, but more like how AI can enhance my current skill set. I want to understand what the technical requirements are, technical terminology, how the different models can be used for different purposes (text, images, etc.).

From a HW perspective, I am long overdue for a workstation upgrade (currently i7 9^(th) Gen, RTX 2060 Super 8Gb VRAM, 16Gb DDR4 RAM) I use my workstation as a homelab and for CAD and gaming. My hope is that by the time intel 15^(th) gen and Nvidia 5000 will be released, I will have some kind of idea of what I want to do with it from an AI perspective.

I have seen a lot of knowledgeable people in this subreddit and wanted to know what it was their journey and how did they get started? What do you recommend (courses, books, HW/SW, etc.)?