What's on the AI Practitioner 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.

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.