What's on the AI Practitioner exam
Exam code: AIF-C01
Practice the real format
Do you think you are ready? Put your knowledge to the test with a free, timed practice exam that mirrors the AI Practitioner format — with instant scoring, per-domain breakdowns, and full answer explanations.
Start a practice exam →The AWS Certified AI Practitioner (AIF-C01) is a foundational certification that validates a broad understanding of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and generative AI concepts on AWS. It is designed for people who work with, or make decisions about, AI in a business context — including business analysts, project managers, and early-career technologists — as well as engineers who want a structured introduction to AWS AI services. It does not require you to write code or build models.
Domains covered
The exam is organized into weighted domains. The percentages indicate roughly how much of the exam each domain represents, which is a useful guide for allocating study time.
Fundamentals of AI and ML 20%
Core concepts and terminology of artificial intelligence and machine learning, common use cases, and the stages of an ML development lifecycle.
Fundamentals of Generative AI 24%
Generative AI concepts, foundation models, and the capabilities and limitations of generative AI, along with relevant AWS services such as Amazon Bedrock.
Applications of Foundation Models 28%
Designing applications with foundation models, including prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), fine-tuning approaches, and evaluating model performance.
Guidelines for Responsible AI 14%
Responsible AI practices including fairness, bias detection, transparency, explainability, and the trade-offs involved in deploying AI systems.
Security, Compliance, and Governance for AI 14%
Securing AI systems, data governance, and the compliance and regulatory considerations that apply to AI/ML workloads on AWS.
How to prepare
The exam rewards breadth over depth: you need to understand what AI and generative AI can do, which AWS service fits a given need, and how to apply these technologies responsibly — not the underlying mathematics. Note that of the 65 questions, 50 are scored and 15 are unscored trial questions that do not affect your result. Working through full practice papers is an effective way to find the handful of service-mapping or responsible-AI topics where your understanding is thin.
AI/ML concepts mapped to AWS services
The exam frequently asks you to match a business scenario to the right AWS service. Use this table as a reference — know what each service does and when to reach for it over an alternative.
| AI / ML Concept | AWS Service | How It Links |
|---|---|---|
| Responsible AI & Explainability | ||
| Bias detection & removal | SageMaker Clarify | Detects bias in data and models, explains predictions |
| Model explainability (XAI) | SageMaker Clarify | Feature attribution and SHAP values for interpretability |
| Human-in-the-loop review | Amazon A2I | Routes low-confidence predictions to human reviewers |
| Model Training, Tuning & MLOps | ||
| Automated ML / low-code training | SageMaker AutopilotSageMaker Canvas | Auto-builds, trains, and tunes models with minimal code |
| Model training & tuning | SageMaker TrainingAutomatic Model Tuning | Managed training jobs and hyperparameter optimisation |
| Model monitoring / drift detection | SageMaker Model Monitor | Detects data and concept drift, quality degradation over time |
| MLOps / model lifecycle | SageMaker PipelinesModel Registry | CI/CD for ML, versioning, and deployment workflows |
| Data labelling | SageMaker Ground Truth | Managed and automated data annotation for training sets |
| Feature management | SageMaker Feature Store | Central repository for storing, sharing, and reusing features |
| Generative AI & Foundation Models | ||
| Foundation models / GenAI | Amazon Bedrock | Access to FMs (Claude, Titan, and others) via API |
| GenAI guardrails / responsible AI | Bedrock Guardrails | Content filtering, PII redaction, and denied-topics control |
| RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) | Bedrock Knowledge Bases | Grounds LLM responses in your own data sources |
| AI agents / orchestration | Bedrock Agents | Multi-step task execution with tool and API invocation |
| Managed AI Services | ||
| Natural Language Processing | Amazon Comprehend | Entity extraction, sentiment analysis, key phrases, PII detection |
| Computer vision / image analysis | Amazon Rekognition | Object and face detection, content moderation, text in images |
| Document extraction (OCR+) | Amazon Textract | Extracts text, forms, and tables from documents |
| Speech-to-text | Amazon Transcribe | Audio and video transcription with speaker diarisation |
| Text-to-speech | Amazon Polly | Natural-sounding voice synthesis |
| Language translation | Amazon Translate | Neural machine translation across languages |
| Conversational AI / chatbots | Amazon Lex | Intent recognition and dialogue management |
| Personalisation / recommendations | Amazon Personalize | Real-time recommendation engine |
| Time-series forecasting | Amazon Forecast | Demand and inventory prediction using ML |
| Anomaly detection | Amazon LookoutSageMaker RCF | Detects outliers in metrics, equipment, and data streams |
| Fraud detection | Amazon Fraud Detector | Identifies fraudulent activity via ML |
| AI-Powered Developer & Enterprise Tools | ||
| Code generation / dev assistant | Amazon Q Developer | AI-powered coding suggestions and debugging |
| Enterprise GenAI assistant | Amazon Q Business | RAG over enterprise data sources for internal Q&A |
| Intelligent search | Amazon Kendra | ML-powered semantic enterprise search |
Exam formats and passing scores are updated periodically by AWS. Always confirm the current details on the official AWS certification page before booking your exam.
Ready to test yourself?
Do you think you are ready? Put your knowledge to the test with a free, timed practice exam that mirrors the AI Practitioner format — with instant scoring, per-domain breakdowns, and full answer explanations.
Start a practice exam →