Azure AI Engineer Associate – AI-102 Exam tips

It’s the time for AI!!

Ever since the start of FY24 at Microsoft, I have been trying to ramp up on Azure’s AI offerings. After completing the AI foundations certification, I started preparing for the AI-102 and found it to be quite a fun experience. Below are some of my tips around how to prepare for this exam.

What was in the Exam and how I prepared for it?

This Study guide is where you will find the latest updates to the exam and what is covered in it.
The MS Learn learning path shown in this page was exclusively what I used to prepare for the exam. I went through all the modules and also went through the Labs. If you are planning to spend an hour every day on studying for this certification and are already familiar with Azure, I would say you will need around 2 – 3 weeks to be prepared for the exam.
You will notice that the last module in the learning path includes Generative AI with Open AI, but I did not come across any of these questions on the exam.

The Exam itself

I chose to take the exam virtually, a lot more convenient to me than driving to an exam location. I checked-in 15 minutes before the exam began to show my ID, my workspace and all that. Once the exam started, I was quite excited to see that you now have the option to launch the Microsoft Learn homepage within the exam experience. When you click on it, a browser tab opens up showing the Learn homepage and you can search for any topic that resides within the Microsoft Learn realm. But unfortunately I was running into this strange issue where when I tried to close that browser window to return to the exam, my whole exam would crash and it would take 10 – 15 minutes for the proctor to come back and restart my exam. I faced the issue twice and then I stopped launching the Learn page and did the exam without it. I am sure that this was just my experience and it is great to see that you can now access Microsoft documentation from within the Exam.

Without going into too much detail, I was able to finish the exam in about 40 minutes (The exam is 1 hour and 40 minutes). There were two case studies if I remember correctly and the rest were the typical Microsoft Certification questions. You are asked at the beginning if you want to see the code questions in C# or Python.

Summary

AI-102 is a very fun exam to study for and definitely a must in this era. The Microsoft exam experience keeps improving and the addition of Microsoft Learn documentation is a great step.

Do not worry if you have no background in data science or even if you are not a developer, this exam and its learning path can set you up to see how simple it has become to leverage AI in any solution you are building or designing.

Wishing you the best of luck for this exam.