I think you can get by taking Andrew Ng's Coursera course on machine learning. It will give you a decent understanding of the technologies out there to the poin

I think you can get by taking Andrew Ng's Coursera course on machine learning. It will give you a decent understanding of the technologies out there to the point where you can converse on the topics, and I think having the flexibility to use a math program to complete the projects will allow you to get through it without requiring too much hands on programming knowledge. In order to actually progress to implementing some of this, you would need garner some python programming skills, and get through a tutorial for a framework like Tensorflow or caffe. From there I think you would have enough skill to start implementing some of your own technologies. But this is all heavily dependent on your existing skill and comfort with programming. So this could be a pretty substantial challenge.