AWS Certified AI Practitioner Guide: How to Pass in 3 Days
- Ankur Jain
- Aug 1
- 6 min read
The AWS Certified AI Practitioner (AIF-C01) is a foundational-level certification for professionals looking to demonstrate their understanding of Artificial Intelligence (AI) / Machine Learning (ML) concepts and AWS’s AI/ML service offerings. It's ideal for technical and non-technical stakeholders who want to explore AI’s business applications in the AWS ecosystem.
This guide outlines a fast-track strategy to prepare and pass the exam, based on a 3-day focused learning plan or a week-long effort with part-time study hours.
Exam Overview
Here’s what you need to know before registering:
Official Info: aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-ai-practitioner
Number of Questions: 65
Exam Length: 90 minutes
Cost: USD $100
Delivery: Pearson VUE or online proctoring
My 3-Day Study Plan
If you're short on time, here's a quick and focused approach:
Days 1 & 2 – Complete the main course (Udemy). Spend time understanding core concepts, services, and use cases.
Day 3 – Spend 1 to 1.5 days doing mock tests, reviewing answers, and revising key topics (use the notes for quick recap)
If you're studying part-time (e.g., after work), spread it over a week with 2–3 hours per day.
Learning Resources
The main course I used was Stephane Maarek’s AWS Certified AI Practitioner (AIF-C01) on Udemy. This course is designed for beginners and covers all the foundational knowledge required for the certification. It starts with the basics of AI and ML, helping you understand the difference between AI, ML, and deep learning. It then moves into key AWS services like SageMaker, Comprehend, Rekognition, Lex, and Polly.
The explanations are very clear and business-oriented, which is perfect for this exam’s focus. I found the pace comfortable and the examples relevant, especially for someone without a data science background. The course also includes a few hands-on demonstrations, but overall it’s more conceptual than technical, making it ideal for understanding AWS AI/ML services in context.
To prepare for the actual exam format, I used Stephane’s separate course for Practice Exams. It includes four full-length mock tests with 65 questions each, covering all the exam domains with a good balance of scenario-based and knowledge-based questions. I found the level of difficulty to be very similar to the real exam.
What helped most were the detailed explanations provided after each question. These helped reinforce my understanding of key concepts and clarified areas where I was unsure. I spent my last 1 to 1.5 days focused entirely on these practice tests, and it significantly improved my confidence and accuracy. If you can score consistently well here, you’re in a good place to pass the actual exam.
Quick Notes & Flashcards – Courtesy of the Community
A special shoutout to Christian Greciano for creating and sharing an excellent Notion-based resource for the AWS Certified AI Practitioner (AIF-C01) exam. His notes and flashcards are incredibly well-organised, concise, and designed for fast recall, making them ideal for last-day revision or even quick refreshers during your study period.
The content is structured around the core exam domains, covering foundational AI/ML concepts, AWS services, use cases, and Responsible AI. Each flashcard distills complex ideas into simple, digestible explanations, making it much easier to remember key terms like supervised learning, SageMaker, or bias mitigation. Christian also includes service-specific breakdowns and real-world usage examples that align closely with the style of questions you'll encounter in the actual exam.
I personally used this as a final-day revision tool after completing the course and practice exams, and found it incredibly effective for reinforcing core topics. It’s especially useful if you’re studying over multiple days and need a lightweight way to keep concepts fresh.
Highly recommended, whether you’re starting from scratch or just want to brush up before the test.
Exam Domains and Key Topics
The AWS Certified AI Practitioner exam tests foundational knowledge of AI, ML, and generative AI (GenAI), emphasising AWS services and responsible AI practices. The exam is divided into five main domains with specific weightings and key focus areas.
Fundamentals of AI and ML (20%)
Focuses on the basic concepts and terminologies of AI and ML:
Definitions of AI, ML, deep learning, neural networks, and foundational AI terms like bias, fairness, and large language models (LLMs)
Differences between AI, ML, and deep learning
Types of inferencing (batch vs. real-time)
Types of data used in AI (labeled/unlabelled, structured/unstructured)
Learning techniques: supervised, unsupervised, reinforcement learning
Practical AI use cases and when AI/ML is appropriate or not
AWS AI/ML services overview (e.g., Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Transcribe)
ML development lifecycle: data collection, preprocessing, feature engineering, training, evaluation, deployment, monitoring
Introduction to ML operations (MLOps) for scalable and repeatable model deployment
Evaluation metrics: accuracy, AUC, F1, business impact metrics
Fundamentals of Generative AI (24%)
Explains core generative AI technologies and their business applications:
Foundational concepts: tokens, embeddings, vector representations, prompt engineering, transformer-based LLMs, diffusion models
Use cases: image, video, audio generation, chatbots, summarization, code generation, and translation
Foundation model lifecycle: data selection, pre-training, fine-tuning, deployment, and feedback
Benefits and limitations of generative AI, including hallucinations and nondeterminism
AWS services for generative AI like Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, Amazon Bedrock, and Amazon Q
AWS infrastructure advantages: security, compliance, performance, and cost considerations
Applications of Foundation Models (28%)
Covers working with pre-trained foundation models and customising them:
Criteria for selecting pre-trained models: cost, latency, language, model complexity
Effects of inference parameters like temperature on model behavior
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and its business applications
Storage of embeddings in vector databases (e.g., Amazon OpenSearch, Amazon Neptune)
Cost tradeoffs between fine-tuning, transfer learning, and in-context learning
Role of agents for multi-step AI tasks
Prompt engineering strategies: zero-shot, few-shot, chain-of-thought prompting
Risks of prompt engineering: prompt injection, poisoning, jailbreaking
Fine-tuning foundation models with curated, labeled data and reinforcement learning techniques
Methods to evaluate foundation models (human evaluation, benchmarks) and relevant metrics (ROUGE, BLEU)
Guidelines for Responsible AI (14%)
Emphasises ethical, transparent, and fair AI system development:
Features of responsible AI: fairness, inclusivity, robustness, safety
Tools for identifying bias and fairness issues (e.g., Amazon SageMaker Clarify)
Legal and ethical risks of generative AI, including intellectual property and hallucinations
Dataset characteristics ensuring diversity and representativeness
Importance of transparent and explainable AI models
Tradeoffs between model performance and explainability
Principles of human centre explainable AI design
Security, Compliance, and Governance for AI Solutions (14%)
Focuses on securing AI systems and adhering to governance standards:
AWS security services applicable to AI (IAM, encryption, Macie, PrivateLink)
Source citation and data lineage documentation best practices
Secure data engineering: privacy-enhancing technologies, data access control, prompt security
Compliance frameworks and regulatory standards pertinent to AI (ISO, SOC, algorithm accountability)
AWS services facilitating governance and compliance (AWS Config, CloudTrail, Audit Manager)
Data governance strategies: logging, data lifecycle management, retention policies
Governance processes: policy reviews, training, frameworks like Generative AI Security Scoping Matrix
My Key Takeaways from the Exam and Study Process
The Exam is Conceptual, Not Technical
The AIF-C01 exam does not involve coding or math. There’s no Python, Jupyter, or algorithmic problem solving. Instead, it focuses on conceptual understanding, service usage, and business context.
Service-to-Use Case Mapping is Critical
Many questions test your ability to choose the most appropriate AWS AI/ML service for a given business scenario. Understanding the differences and overlaps between services like Comprehend vs Translate, or Lex vs Polly, is essential.
Know the Core ML Algorithms and Their Use Cases
While the exam doesn’t dive deep into algorithms, it’s important to know which ones apply to which problems. For example:
Use K-Means for unsupervised clustering (e.g. customer segmentation)
Use K-Nearest Neighbour (KNN) for supervised classification tasks
Practice Exams are a Game Changer
Doing timed practice exams helped me adjust to AWS’s questioning style, particularly multi-response questions with subtle differences between options. Reviewing explanations after each test was key to closing knowledge gaps.
Flashcards Helped Cement the Learning
Christian Greciano’s Notion-based notes and flashcards were excellent for revision. I used them on the last day to reinforce core concepts, definitions, and service use cases, quickly and effectively.
Think Like a Consultant, Not a Developer
Many questions are business-focused. Think about customer goals, cost-efficiency, and responsible AI practices. The right answer isn’t always the most technical—it’s the one that fits the customer context best.
Wish everyone all the best for your exam. Hope this guide helps you feel confident and well-prepared!
This certification bridges the gap between AI concepts and real-world AWS implementations. Whether you're in consulting, architecture, or product, it's a solid credential that elevates your profile.
At Innablr, we regularly work with clients to bring data and ML platforms to life on AWS. If you’re looking for guidance in that space, feel free to reach out.
