A quick confidence check, and more hands-on than it used to be. Over half the exam is building small things in Foundry, so it is no longer a pure vocabulary test. A senior engineer can skip it and go straight to AI-103.
Take it if
You are new to AI on Azure, or your employer pays for fundamentals across a whole team.
Skip it if
You already build on Azure. It adds nothing to a senior profile.
Before you start
Check yourself against this list first. If something is missing, close that gap before you pay for an exam.
You can read PythonMicrosoft lists this even at fundamentals level.
You know what an Azure resource isCreate a free account and deploy one resource.
Implement AI solutions by using Microsoft Foundry55–60%
What to focus on
The responsible AI principles by name: fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, accountability.
Matching a workload to a capability: generative, agentic, text analysis, speech, vision, information extraction.
Deploying a model in the Foundry portal and calling it from a small client with the Foundry SDK.
Pulling data out of documents, images, audio and video with Content Understanding.
Everything on one mapEvery topic and key idea in this certification.
mindmap
root((AI-901))
AI concepts
Responsible AI
Workloads
Parameters
Building in Foundry
Deploy and test
Single agent
Content Understanding
Lesson 1 of 2, 40–45% of the exam
AI concepts
Around 40 to 45% of the exam is matching ideas to situations.
Responsible AI
Six principles: fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, accountability.
Workloads
Generative and agentic AI, text analysis, speech, computer vision, and information extraction.
Parameters
Temperature changes randomness. Max tokens limits length. They solve different problems.
AI workloads at a glanceMatch the problem to the workload.
mindmap
root((AI workloads))
Generative and agentic
Create content
Act with tools
Text analysis
Entities
Sentiment
Speech
Speech to text
Text to speech
Vision
Understand images
Generate images
Information extraction
Forms
Audio and video
Common trap
Mixing up transparency and accountability. Transparency is understanding how it decided. Accountability is who answers for it.
Try it yourself
Write one real example for each of the six principles.
Over half the exam, and it expects you to have clicked through it.
Deploy and test
Deploy a model and try it in the portal before writing code.
Single agent
Instructions plus a tool or knowledge source, created in the portal and called from a small client.
Content Understanding
Pulls structured information from documents, images, audio and video.
A small Foundry appThe pieces you build in this domain.
sequenceDiagram
participant U as User
participant A as Your client
participant F as Foundry project
participant M as Deployed model
U->>A: Prompt
A->>F: Foundry SDK call
F->>M: Run the deployment
M-->>A: Response
A-->>U: Show the answer
Common trap
Studying only theory from old AI-900 notes. This exam is hands-on.
Try it yourself
Deploy a model, build a small chat client with the Foundry SDK, and extract fields from a PDF.
Exam facts checked on October 31, 2026 against AI-901 study guide, skills as of April 15, 2026. Lessons are our own explanations, so use the official docs as the final word, and confirm price and dates before booking.
