Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Fundamentals

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Exam at a Glance

AI-901 measures whether you understand what AI can do and can start building with it on Azure: recognizing the common AI workloads and the responsible AI principles behind them, knowing how generative models are chosen, deployed and prompted, and putting Microsoft Foundry to work for chat, agents, text, speech, vision and information extraction. It is a fundamentals exam with a developer flavour: more than half of it is about implementing solutions, and it expects you to read Python.

 

What the Exam Covers

The exam has two domains, and the weights are deliberately lopsided: implementing solutions with Microsoft Foundry carries 55 to 60 percent of the marks. Plan your time accordingly: the concepts domain is the easier read, but the Foundry domain is where you need hands-on time.

 

Identify AI concepts and capabilities — 40-45%

The six responsible AI principles (fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, accountability), how generative AI models work, choosing an appropriate model by its capabilities, model deployment options and configuration parameters, and recognizing the common AI workloads: generative and agentic AI, text analysis (keyword extraction, entity detection, sentiment analysis, summarization), speech recognition and speech synthesis, computer vision and image-generation models, and the techniques for extracting information from text, images, audio and video.

 

Implement AI solutions by using Microsoft Foundry — 55-60%

Writing effective system and user prompts, deploying a model and interacting with it in the Foundry portal, building a lightweight chat client with the Foundry SDK, and creating and testing a single-agent solution and a lightweight client for it.

Text analysis and speech applications, including responding to spoken prompts with a multimodal model and using Azure Speech in Foundry Tools; interpreting visual input with a multimodal model, creating new visual outputs with generative models and building a lightweight vision application.

Extracting information from documents and forms, images, audio and video with Azure Content Understanding in Foundry Tools.

 

The full bullet-level list lives in the official study guide. Treat it as your checklist:

The Official AI-901 Study Guide

 

How This Maps to CertiAce Practice Modules

The CertiAce question bank is organized into two practice modules named after the two official learning paths, one per exam domain, so each module maps directly to one skills-measured area:

 

Where AI-901 Fits

AI-901 has no prerequisites: the certification page lists none, and you do not need AZ-900 first. Nor is AI-901 required by anything above it: Azure AI Apps and Agents Developer Associate (AI-103), Azure AI Cloud Developer Associate (AI-200) and Machine Learning Operations Engineer Associate (AI-300) all have no certification prerequisites either, so you can go straight to whichever fits your direction once you are ready. What AI-901 gives you is the shared vocabulary those exams assume: models and deployments, prompts, agents, Foundry Tools, and the responsible AI principles.

Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Fundamentals

 

Before You Start

The audience profile is clear: conceptual knowledge of AI on Azure plus the foundational technical skills to work with it. Check yourself against this table. Anything unfamiliar is where your preparation should start:

 

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Step-by-Step Study Plan

How long you need depends on where you start. Treat these estimates as planning guidance and adjust them to your starting knowledge and weekly study hours:

 

Step 1: Read the Official Study Guide

Skim the full skills-measured list once, and mark every bullet you could not explain to a colleague. That marked-up list is your personal syllabus: everything else in this plan exists to clear it. Note the naming: the current skills list (April 15, 2026) says Microsoft Foundry, and calls the individual services Azure Speech, Azure Language and Azure Content Understanding "in Foundry Tools". Older materials use the previous names (Azure AI Foundry, Azure AI services), so cross-check older product names and objectives against the current study guide.

The Official Study Guide

 

Step 2: Schedule Your Exam

Choose a realistic target date after reviewing the skills list and your available study time. A date on the calendar turns studying into a countdown, so pick one using the prep-time table above and plan backwards from it.

Certification and Exam Details Page

 

Step 3: Work Through the Official Learning Path

Complete the two official learning paths on Microsoft Learn: the first covers the concepts domain, the second the Foundry domain, and they are the same two modules you will find in CertiAce practice. Take notes on concepts you cannot explain in simple terms, and flag anything that needs hands-on practice. You will come back to those in Step 5.

AI Concepts for Developers and Technology Professionals

Get Started with AI Applications and Agents on Azure

 

Step 4: Watch a Full Video Course

Microsoft Learn publishes its own AI-901 course series on YouTube: 14 episodes that mirror the two learning paths, pairing a concepts episode with a get-started-in-Azure episode for each workload. Watch it end to end, pausing to replicate the Foundry actions in your own environment. Treat it as both learning and revision: a second pass over your weak topics later is much faster and surprisingly effective. For a compressed final refresher, John Savill's one-hour AI-901 Study Cram (in the resources below) covers the whole syllabus on a whiteboard.

AI-901: Introduction to AI in Azure

 

Step 5: Get Hands-On Practice

More than half of AI-901 is about implementing AI solutions with Microsoft Foundry, so time in the Foundry portal is the highest-value preparation you can do. Microsoft's official exercises are free and self-paced: seven Foundry labs of 20 to 35 minutes each that need an Azure subscription (a free account is enough), plus browser-based concept exercises that run a model locally and need no subscription at all. Make sure you personally:

• Deploy a model in the Foundry portal and chat with it, then refine your system and user prompts
• Build a lightweight chat client with the Foundry SDK
• Create and test a single agent in the portal, then call it from a lightweight client
• Run text analysis and speech recognition or synthesis with Azure Language and Azure Speech in Foundry Tools
• Send an image to a multimodal model, and generate a new image with a generative model
• Extract fields from a document, an image and an audio or video file with Azure Content Understanding

Get started with AI apps and agents in Azure

 

Step 6: Benchmark Your Knowledge

Use CertiAce to benchmark your readiness module by module. The practice modules map to the exam domains as shown above, so use the module mapping and the topics behind your missed questions to identify the skills-measured areas to revisit. Microsoft also offers a free official practice assessment for AI-901 on AI Skills Navigator (sign in to launch it). Aim for consistent performance across every module, not one lucky high score; pay particular attention to questions that separate similar workloads (image analysis versus image generation, speech recognition versus speech synthesis), and if a topic is unstable, go back to learning plus hands-on practice.

CertiAce AI-901 Exam Practice

Official Practice Assessment on AI Skills Navigator

 

Step 7: Take the Exam

The day before, review only your weak topics (no brand-new material). On exam day, read each question for what it is truly asking and eliminate wrong options first. Many AI-901 questions come down to matching a one-line scenario to a workload or a service: creating new content points to generative AI, interpreting existing content points to analysis, and structured fields out of a document point to Content Understanding.

Worth knowing before you sit down:

• This is a closed-book exam: unlike the role-based exams, Microsoft Learn is NOT available during fundamentals exams.
• You can take unscheduled breaks, but the clock keeps running and you cannot return to questions you already saw.
• Watch the naming: the exam uses current product names (Microsoft Foundry, the Foundry SDK, and Foundry Tools), so cross-check older product names and objectives against the current study guide.
• Try the exam sandbox beforehand so the question formats and interface hold no surprises: Exam Sandbox

 

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Additional Learning Resources