3 years. Passing the latest ML Engineer Associate or Generative AI Developer Professional exam also renews it.
Study time, our estimate
15 to 30 hours
AIF-C01Entry
A foundational exam aimed at people who use AI on AWS rather than build it. If you already ship on Bedrock, skip it and go to AIP-C01. It is useful for architects and team leads who want the AWS vocabulary quickly.
Take it if
You are new to AI on AWS, or you lead people who build it.
Skip it if
You already write code against Bedrock or SageMaker.
Before you start
Check yourself against this list first. If something is missing, close that gap before you pay for an exam.
Basic AWS familiarityEC2, S3, Lambda, IAM and how pricing works.
No coding requiredAWS lists coding and tuning as out of scope.
65 questions, 50 scored. Includes ordering and matching.
Length
90 minutes
Pass mark
700 out of 1,000
Price
$100
Valid for
3 years. Passing the latest ML Engineer Associate or Generative AI Developer Professional exam also renews it.
Delivery
Pearson VUE, test center or online
Experience
Up to 6 months of exposure to AI/ML on AWS
If you fail
Wait 14 days
What the exam covers
Fundamentals of AI and ML20%
Fundamentals of GenAI24%
Applications of Foundation Models28%
Guidelines for Responsible AI14%
Security, Compliance, and Governance for AI Solutions14%
What to focus on
Basic ML vocabulary: supervised and unsupervised learning, overfitting, inference.
How GenAI works: tokens, embeddings, chunking, temperature.
Applications of foundation models is the largest domain: RAG against fine-tuning, and prompt techniques.
Which AWS service does what: Bedrock, SageMaker AI, and the shared responsibility model.
Responsible AI and governance, at a recognition level.
Everything on one mapEvery topic and key idea in this certification.
mindmap
root((AIF-C01))
AI and ML basics
Learning types
Overfitting
Inference
Generative AI basics
Tokens
Embeddings
Temperature
Using foundation models
RAG or fine-tuning
Bedrock or SageMaker AI
Prompting
Responsibility and security
Guardrails
Clarify
Shared responsibility
Lesson 1 of 4, 20% of the exam
AI and ML basics
A fifth of the exam is vocabulary.
Learning types
Supervised uses labels, unsupervised finds structure, reinforcement learns from rewards.
Overfitting
Great on training data, poor on new data.
Inference
Using a trained model to get answers.
Types of machine learningStart from whether you have labels.
flowchart TD
A{"What do you have?"} -->|"Labeled examples"| B["Supervised"]
A -->|"Unlabeled data"| C["Unsupervised"]
A -->|"Rewards from actions"| D["Reinforcement"]
B --> E["Classification and regression"]
C --> F["Clustering"]
Common trap
Confusing classification with clustering. Clustering needs no labels.
Try it yourself
Write one business example for each learning type.
The units a model reads and writes, and usually what you pay for.
Embeddings
Numbers that place similar meanings close together.
Temperature
Higher gives more varied output.
From text to similar resultsEmbeddings make meaning searchable.
flowchart LR
A["Text"] --> B["Tokens"]
B --> C["Embedding vector"]
C --> D["Vector store"]
E["Question"] --> F["Question vector"]
F --> D
D --> G["Nearest meanings"]
RAG adds current knowledge. Fine-tuning changes behavior.
Bedrock or SageMaker AI
Bedrock gives API access to models. SageMaker AI is for building and training your own.
Prompting
Zero-shot, few-shot and chain-of-thought.
RAG or fine-tuning?The question appears on nearly every AI exam.
flowchart TD
A{"What is missing?"} -->|"Facts that change"| B["RAG"]
A -->|"A style or behavior"| C["Fine-tuning"]
A -->|"Better instructions"| D["Prompt engineering first"]
AWS secures the service, and you secure your data and access.
Who is responsible for whatThe shared responsibility model for AI.
flowchart LR
subgraph AWS["AWS"]
A1["Service security"]
A2["Infrastructure"]
end
subgraph You["You"]
B1["Your data"]
B2["Access control"]
B3["How you use the model"]
end
Common trap
Assuming AWS is responsible for what you send to a model.
Exam facts checked on October 31, 2026 against AIF-C01 official exam guide. Lessons are our own explanations, so use the official docs as the final word, and confirm price and dates before booking.
