Cultivating students’ key competencies contributes to students’ adaptation to the fast developing intelligent era. Artificial intelligence education is an important way to cultivate students’ key competencies. It is increasingly important to set up appropriate artificial intelligence courses at the fundamental education stage and cultivate students’ key competencies via such courses. This paper describes quantitatively how AI courses cultivate students’ key competencies. First, we analyze the necessity of artificial intelligence education at the fundamental education stage and the status quo of artificial intelligence education in China. Next, we elaborate the students’ key competencies which is composed of knowledge competence, team competence and learning competence, and design the curriculum of artificial intelligence at the fundamental education stage. Finally, through collecting students’ questionnaires, we analyze the relationship between the curriculum of artificial intelligence and the cultivation of students’ key competencies. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that the 7 categories of artificial intelligence courses are beneficial to the cultivation of the six key sub-competencies of students. In addition, the problems in the current artificial intelligence curriculum are identified and suggestions for improvement are put forward.