What Is the AWS Certified AI Practitioner Exam (AIF-C01)?
AWS Certified AI Practitioner (exam code AIF-C01) is Amazon's foundational-level certification for AI and machine learning concepts on AWS. It launched in August 2024 and is designed for candidates who work with AI or ML solutions—or evaluate AI for business use—but do not necessarily build or deploy models themselves. Product managers, business analysts, solutions architects, and non-technical professionals evaluating AI tools are all target candidates.
The certification has no formal prerequisites. AWS recommends having at least six months of exposure to AI and ML concepts on AWS, but this is a guideline, not a gate. The exam is available online proctored through Pearson VUE or at testing centers worldwide. Full details are on the official exam page at aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-ai-practitioner.
What Are the AIF-C01 Exam Details?
The core exam facts every candidate needs before booking:
- Exam fee: $100 USD
- Total questions: 65 (50 scored + 15 unscored pilot questions that do not affect your result)
- Time limit: 90 minutes
- Passing score: 700 on a scale of 100–1,000
- Question types: Multiple choice (one correct answer from four options) and multiple response (two or more correct answers from five or more options)
- Certification validity: 3 years from the date of passing
- Retake policy: 14-day waiting period after a failed attempt; full $100 fee applies to each retake
The 15 unscored questions appear throughout the exam, indistinguishable from scored questions. They are used to gather data for future exam versions. Answer all 65—there is no way to identify which questions count and which do not.
What Are the Five AIF-C01 Exam Domains?
The exam is organized into five domains, each weighted by percentage of the scored questions:
- Domain 1: Fundamentals of AI and ML — 20% — Core concepts: types of AI problems, supervised vs. unsupervised vs. reinforcement learning, model training and evaluation, inference, and the difference between AI, ML, and deep learning.
- Domain 2: Fundamentals of Generative AI — 24% — Foundation models, large language models (LLMs), how generative AI works, prompt engineering, fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and model evaluation.
- Domain 3: Applications of Foundation Models — 28% — The largest domain. AWS-specific services (Amazon Bedrock, Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Kendra), choosing the right foundation model for a use case, cost/performance trade-offs, and evaluating outputs from foundation models.
- Domain 4: Guidelines for Responsible AI — 14% — Bias and fairness, transparency and explainability, privacy, human oversight, and AWS's responsible AI framework and tools.
- Domain 5: Security, Compliance, and Governance for AI Solutions — 14% — Data governance, model governance, AWS security services relevant to AI (IAM, AWS Config, CloudTrail), and compliance frameworks that apply to AI deployments.
What Question Types Appear on AIF-C01?
Multiple-choice questions present four answer options—one correct, three distractors. The distractors are frequently plausible-sounding AWS service names or partially correct descriptions of real services. Reading all four options before selecting is important; many candidates select the first AWS service that sounds right without checking whether a more accurate answer appears later in the list.
Multiple-response questions specify "Select TWO" or "Select THREE" and present five or more options. Partial credit is not awarded—you must select all correct answers and no incorrect ones to receive credit. These are the question type most candidates find hardest, because eliminating clearly wrong options is not sufficient if the remaining options are all plausible.