2026 Exam Guide
Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals Study Guide
Current exam coverage, candidate guidance, important topics, and practical preparation advice for the AI-900 exam.
What Is Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals?
Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals is an entry-level AI certification earned through AI-900. It validates conceptual knowledge of artificial intelligence workloads and Azure AI services rather than deep model training expertise. Candidates should understand machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, generative AI, responsible AI, and common Azure AI service categories.
The 2026 AI-900 scope reflects the importance of generative AI and responsible AI. Candidates should know when to use Azure AI services, Azure AI Foundry concepts, Azure AI Search, language and vision capabilities, speech services, and safety controls. The exam is foundational, but it still expects candidates to match real business requirements to the right AI capability.
Who Should Take This Exam?
AI-900 is useful for students, business analysts, product managers, developers, cloud beginners, data beginners, and technical stakeholders who need AI vocabulary on Azure.
No advanced machine learning background is required. Basic familiarity with cloud services and data concepts helps, and light Python or API awareness can make AI workflows easier to understand.
Exam Domains
AI Workloads and Responsible AI
Guide areaAI workload types, risks, responsible AI principles, and governance concerns.
Machine Learning
Guide areaTraining, evaluation, features, supervised learning, and Azure ML concepts.
Vision, Language, and Speech
Guide areaComputer vision, OCR, NLP, translation, sentiment, and speech services.
Generative AI
Guide areaPrompts, grounding, retrieval, content safety, and agentic AI concepts.
Common Topics Covered
- Responsible AI
- Machine learning
- Computer vision
- OCR
- NLP
- Speech-to-text
- Azure AI Search
- Generative AI
- Prompt grounding
- Content safety
Study Tips
Focus on service selection. For each scenario, ask whether the requirement is prediction, classification, document extraction, text analysis, translation, speech, search, or generative AI.
Review responsible AI carefully. Safety, privacy, fairness, reliability, transparency, and accountability appear in many conceptual questions.
Practice Questions Overview
Certoga's AI-900 starter bank uses short, original scenarios to reinforce AI service selection and responsible AI reasoning. Use it with Microsoft Learn modules and basic Azure AI demos.