Last month, I passed the AWS Certified AI Practitioner exam as my 6th AWS certification at the time (I also added Cloud Practitioner later.). I have held active AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional and AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional certifications since 2018, renewing each twice and passing 6 Pro-level exams. I’ve also held 3 AWS Associate certifications (Solutions Architect, SysOps Administrator, Developer) since 2017.
After each AWS exam, I write a blog post to share my experience. It’s been a tradition and a log of AWS exams over the years. So, here are my experiences with the AWS Certified AI Practitioner exam in 2026.
Is the AWS Certified AI Practitioner certification for you?
The AWS Certified AI Practitioner is a valuable certification to validate your skills in AI and ML foundations and related AWS services. If you’re new to AI, have been practicing AWS AI services for some time, or want to follow AWS-recommended AI-related certification paths, this is the certificate I recommend beginning with.
But this certification is for those who start building ML and Gen AI applications, training models, and fine-tuning them- in other words, with real hands-on experience. If you’re responsible for deciding and approving AI use cases and projects in your company without hands-on experience, AWS announced a new certification for business professionals last week: AWS Certified AI Business Strategist. It would be a better fit for you.
How did I prepare for AWS Certified AI Practitioner?
As an AWS instructor on Udemy, I only use AWS Skill Builder, AWS documentation, and other reference books and YouTube videos to prepare for my certification exams. That way, I can build genuine courses based on my own experience.
Of course, I use AWS content as the basis, since these are AWS certifications. I build my courses as additional learning content that will help you pass the exams, not as a replacement.
Because I’ve been busy building my AWS Essentials courses and maintaining others, I could only prepare for this exam for a month while I was free of my other responsibilities. Since I’d been exposed to some AI and ML concepts from books like Stuart Russell’s Introduction to AI: A Modern Approach, I could understand them easily. But you don’t have to read this book page by page because it is dense on classical AI.
Solving practice exams in AWS Skill Builder was really helpful. I am planning to build practice tests, too. So, stay tuned.
Which topics were included in AWS Certified AI Practitioner exam in 2026?
The exam mostly tests your foundational ML and Gen AI lifecycle knowledge, as well as what each related AWS service does.
Some topics appeared in the exam:
- The
ML and Gen AI lifecycle, and when to use SageMaker AI vs. Bedrock to train an ML model. Fine-tuningvscontinuous learning- Which ML method you should use for different use cases: Autoencoders, linear regression, classification, decision trees, k-nearest neighbors, k-means, ARIMA (Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average), etc. You don’t have to know the algorithms, but you must know when to use them.
- The
Transformerarchitecture and what it provides for Gen AI at a high level. - Model evaluation methods for classical ML (precision vs. recall, F1-score, accuracy, etc.), or Gen AI (BLEU, ROUGE, etc.)
Prompt engineeringmethods, like zero-shot, few-shot, prompt chaining, tree of thoughts, chain of thoughts, etc.Retrieval Augmented Generation(RAG) concepts and process in general and when used with Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases. You should not only know the AWS services that support vector storage for RAG applications but also know why they are suitable for RAG.Amazon Bedrockecosystem: FMs, Evaluations, Guardrails andAgentCore(at a high-level)SageMakerecosystem: Unified Studio, Clarify, Augmented AI, Model Cards, Ground Truth- When to use AWS Managed AI Services:
Textract,Polly,Rekognition,Personalize,Transcribe, etc. - When to choose which inference mode: real-time, batch, and serverless
Responsible AI: Interpretability, explainability, bias, toxicity, the risks of Gen AI (hallucinations, plagiarism, etc.)Amazon Nova(high level): Amazon’s latest multimodal foundation model, the new generation replacing Amazon Titan- Best practices to monitor compliance of your AI applications and AWS resources,
AWS Gen AI Scoping Matrix, AWS Artifact, Audit Manager, Config
These are the topics I can remember now. Of course, your question set may differ from mine. In addition, some services were being deprecated. AWS no longer accepts new customers for them, such as SageMaker Clarify, Ground Truth, and Audit Manager. They were still in the exam.
Exam Taking Experience
I took the exam via online proctoring with Pearson VUE. The exam onboarding process was smooth, and I didn’t encounter any technical issues.
Of course, I detached any SSDs and removed everything from my desk except my Mac Studio, monitor, mouse, keyboard, speakers, and desk lamp. I think it made it easier for the proctor to release the exam. So, I highly recommend taking time to clean up your desk beforehand.
Conclusion
Even though I couldn’t study much, I was happy to pass with an 858/1000 score. The minimum passing score is 700/1000.
I highly recommend studying for and taking the AWS Certified AI Practitioner exam. Certifications don’t make you an expert if you don’t support them with real hands-on experience, but they provide you with a structure to learn and validate your knowledge to your managers, recruiters, and yourself. They help you build confidence.
My next goals are:
- Launching my new YouTube channel on teaching cloud and AI
- Passing the newly released AWS Certified AI Business Strategist exam next month, and producing a course for it.
- Producing real hands-on work to pass and build content for the
AWS Certified Gen AI Developer – Professionalexam, which will be my third Pro-level certification, and theAssociate-level ML Engineerexam afterward.
On our new YouTube channel and brand, I’ll share cloud- and AI-related lectures. I haven’t decided on building a new AI Practitioner certification course on Udemy yet because there are already lots of courses. But I may build a new course eventually to offer an alternative learning experience. For now, I’ll focus on the new AWS Certified AI Business Strategist, since my MS in Financial Engineering and closeness to business concepts will add value to my prospective students.
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Thanks for reading so far! I wish you success in your next AWS certification exam.
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