AWS AI & ML Services Cheat Sheet – AIF-C01 & AIP-C01

AWS AI & Generative AI Services – Cheat Sheet

This is the definitive cheat sheet covering AI, Machine Learning, and Generative AI services on AWS — designed as the anchor page for both the AWS Certified AI Practitioner (AIF-C01) and AWS Certified Generative AI Developer – Professional (AIP-C01) exams.

Related Posts:

AI/ML/Generative AI Fundamentals

AI vs ML vs Deep Learning vs Generative AI

Concept Definition Examples
Artificial Intelligence (AI) Broad field of computer science focused on creating systems that can perform tasks requiring human intelligence Rule-based systems, expert systems, robotics
Machine Learning (ML) Subset of AI where systems learn from data without being explicitly programmed Fraud detection, recommendations, forecasting
Deep Learning (DL) Subset of ML using neural networks with multiple layers (deep neural networks) to learn complex patterns Image recognition, NLP, speech recognition
Generative AI (GenAI) Subset of DL that creates new content (text, images, code, video, audio) by learning patterns from training data ChatGPT, DALL-E, Amazon Nova, Claude

Learning Paradigms

  • Supervised Learning — model learns from labeled data (input-output pairs). Used for classification (spam/not spam) and regression (price prediction).
  • Unsupervised Learning — model finds patterns in unlabeled data. Used for clustering (customer segmentation), anomaly detection, and dimensionality reduction.
  • Semi-supervised Learning — combines small amount of labeled data with large amounts of unlabeled data.
  • Reinforcement Learning (RL) — agent learns by interacting with an environment, receiving rewards/penalties. Used for game playing, robotics, and RLHF in LLMs.
  • Self-supervised Learning — model generates its own labels from input data (e.g., predicting masked tokens). Used for pre-training foundation models.

Neural Networks Basics

  • Neurons/Nodes — basic computation units that receive inputs, apply weights, add bias, and pass through an activation function.
  • Layers — Input layer (receives data), Hidden layers (process data), Output layer (produces result).
  • Weights & Biases — parameters learned during training that determine the model’s behavior.
  • Activation Functions — introduce non-linearity (ReLU, Sigmoid, Softmax, Tanh).
  • Backpropagation — algorithm to compute gradients and update weights by propagating errors backward.
  • Loss Function — measures how far the model’s predictions are from actual values.
  • Transformer Architecture — foundation of modern LLMs; uses self-attention mechanism to process entire sequences in parallel (introduced in “Attention is All You Need” paper, 2017).
  • CNNs (Convolutional Neural Networks) — specialized for image/spatial data.
  • RNNs/LSTMs — sequential data processing (largely superseded by Transformers for NLP).
  • GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks) — generator + discriminator for image generation.
  • Diffusion Models — generate images/video by learning to denoise (e.g., Stable Diffusion, Nova Canvas).

📖 Deep Dive Guides: Bedrock vs SageMaker | RAG Architecture | Prompt Engineering | Responsible AI | AI Services Decision Guide

Foundation Model Concepts

Pre-training

  • Training a model on massive datasets (trillions of tokens) to learn general language/world knowledge.
  • Extremely expensive and resource-intensive (millions of GPU hours).
  • Results in a base model with broad capabilities but no specific task alignment.
  • Common objectives: next-token prediction (GPT-style), masked language modeling (BERT-style).

Fine-tuning Techniques

  • Instruction Tuning — fine-tuning on instruction-response pairs to make the model follow instructions better.
  • RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback) — trains a reward model from human preferences, then uses RL (PPO) to optimize the language model against that reward. Used to align models with human values.
  • DPO (Direct Preference Optimization) — simpler alternative to RLHF that directly optimizes on preference pairs without a separate reward model. More stable training.
  • LoRA / QLoRA — Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) that freezes base model and trains small adapter layers. Reduces compute by 90%+.
  • Continued Pre-training — further pre-training on domain-specific data to teach the model new knowledge (e.g., medical, legal, financial).
  • Distillation — training a smaller “student” model to mimic a larger “teacher” model’s outputs. Reduces inference cost while retaining most capability.

RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation)

  • Combines information retrieval with text generation to ground LLM responses in external knowledge.
  • How it works: Query → Retrieve relevant documents from knowledge base → Augment prompt with retrieved context → Generate response.
  • Benefits: Reduces hallucinations, enables up-to-date responses, no model retraining needed, source attribution.
  • Components: Document ingestion, chunking strategy, embedding model, vector database, retrieval algorithm, re-ranking.
  • AWS Implementation: Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases, Amazon Kendra (GenAI Index), OpenSearch vector search.

Prompt Engineering

  • Zero-shot — asking the model to perform a task without any examples. Relies on pre-trained knowledge.
  • Few-shot (In-Context Learning) — providing a few examples in the prompt to guide the model’s output format and behavior.
  • Chain-of-Thought (CoT) — asking the model to “think step by step” to improve reasoning on complex tasks.
  • System Prompts — instructions that define the model’s role, behavior, and constraints.
  • Prompt Templates — reusable prompt structures with placeholders for dynamic content.
  • Prompt Chaining — breaking complex tasks into sequential prompts where output of one feeds input of next.

Key Parameters & Concepts

  • Tokenization — splitting text into tokens (subwords/words). Models process tokens, not characters. Affects context limits and pricing.
  • Embeddings — dense vector representations of text/images in high-dimensional space. Semantically similar items have similar embeddings. Used for search, RAG, and clustering.
  • Temperature — controls randomness of output. Low (0-0.3) = deterministic/focused, High (0.7-1.0) = creative/diverse. 0 = greedy decoding.
  • Top-p (Nucleus Sampling) — considers only tokens whose cumulative probability exceeds p. Top-p 0.9 = considers top 90% probability mass.
  • Top-k — limits token selection to the k most likely next tokens.
  • Context Window — maximum number of tokens (input + output) the model can process at once. Ranges from 4K to 1M+ tokens in modern models.
  • Max Tokens — limits the length of generated output.
  • Stop Sequences — tokens that signal the model to stop generating.
  • Hallucination — when a model generates plausible-sounding but factually incorrect information.
  • Grounding — techniques to anchor model responses in factual data (RAG, tool use, citations).

Responsible AI

Core Principles

  • Fairness & Bias — ensuring models don’t discriminate based on protected attributes (race, gender, age). Types: selection bias, measurement bias, representation bias, confirmation bias.
  • Explainability — ability to understand and explain how/why a model made a specific prediction. Techniques: SHAP, LIME, attention visualization, feature importance.
  • Transparency — openly communicating model capabilities, limitations, and intended use cases to users.
  • Robustness — model performs reliably across different inputs, including adversarial examples and edge cases.
  • Privacy & Security — protecting training data, user inputs, and model outputs. Preventing data leakage and prompt injection.
  • Governance — organizational policies, processes, and controls for responsible AI development and deployment.
  • Safety — preventing harmful outputs including toxic content, misinformation, and dangerous instructions.

AWS Responsible AI Tools

  • AWS AI Service Cards — transparency documentation for AWS AI services covering intended use cases, limitations, responsible AI design choices, and deployment best practices.
  • Amazon Bedrock Guardrails — configurable safeguards for GenAI applications:
    • Content filters (hate, insults, sexual, violence, misconduct)
    • Denied topics (topic avoidance policies)
    • Word/phrase filters
    • Sensitive information filters (PII redaction)
    • Contextual grounding checks (hallucination detection)
    • Automated Reasoning Checks (logical verification)
  • SageMaker Clarify — detects bias in data and models, provides feature attributions for explainability (note: moving to maintenance July 2026 for new customers).
  • Model Cards — documentation that describes a model’s intended use, performance metrics, limitations, and ethical considerations. Supported in SageMaker Model Registry.
  • Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) — keeping humans involved in AI decision-making for high-stakes scenarios. AWS A2I (Augmented AI) provided review workflows (note: moving to maintenance July 2026 for new customers).
  • Amazon Bedrock Model Evaluation — automatic evaluation (accuracy, robustness, toxicity), human evaluation, and LLM-as-a-judge for quality assessment.

Bias Mitigation Strategies

  • Pre-processing: Balance training data, remove sensitive attributes, data augmentation.
  • In-processing: Regularization techniques, adversarial debiasing, fairness constraints during training.
  • Post-processing: Calibrate outputs, threshold adjustment, reject option classification.
  • Monitoring: Continuously track model performance across demographic groups in production.

Agentic AI

What are AI Agents?

  • AI systems that can autonomously plan, reason, and execute multi-step tasks to achieve goals.
  • Go beyond simple prompt-response by taking actions, using tools, and adapting based on outcomes.
  • Can operate for extended periods, making decisions and course-correcting without human intervention.

Key Concepts

  • Tool Use (Function Calling) — agents invoke external tools (APIs, databases, code execution) to gather information or perform actions.
  • Multi-step Reasoning — breaking complex problems into steps, executing sequentially with intermediate evaluations.
  • Orchestration — coordinating multiple agents or components to complete complex workflows. Patterns: sequential, parallel, routing, supervisor.
  • Memory — maintaining context across interactions:
    • Short-term memory (conversation context within a session)
    • Long-term memory (persistent knowledge across sessions)
    • Episodic memory (past experiences and outcomes)
  • Planning — decomposing goals into actionable sub-tasks, determining execution order, handling dependencies.
  • Reflection — agents evaluate their own outputs and self-correct errors before responding.
  • Model Context Protocol (MCP) — open standard for connecting AI agents with external tools and data sources.
  • Agent2Agent (A2A) — protocol for inter-agent communication and collaboration.

AWS Agentic AI Services

  • Amazon Bedrock Agents — create agents that can break down tasks, call APIs, and access knowledge bases (transitioning to Bedrock Agents Classic, July 2026).
  • Amazon Bedrock AgentCore (GA 2025/2026) — enterprise-grade infrastructure for deploying and operating AI agents at scale:
    • AgentCore Runtime — serverless, scalable environment to host agents
    • AgentCore Gateway — MCP-compatible tool connectivity
    • AgentCore Identity — per-agent identity and least-privilege access
    • AgentCore Observability — monitoring, tracing, and debugging
    • AgentCore Code Interpreter — secure sandboxed code execution
    • AgentCore Optimization — continuous quality evaluation and improvement
  • Amazon Nova Act — browser automation agent for web-based tasks.
  • AWS Step Functions — orchestrate multi-step agent workflows with state management.

AWS AI Service Stack

AWS organizes AI/ML services into three layers:

Layer 1: AI Infrastructure (Compute & Silicon)

Service/Chip Purpose Key Details
AWS Trainium Custom chip for ML training Trainium2 (4x perf vs gen1), Trainium3 (3nm, 4.4x vs Trn2, GA Dec 2025)
AWS Inferentia Custom chip for ML inference Inferentia2 (4x throughput, 10x lower latency vs gen1), Inf2 instances
EC2 UltraServers Multi-instance AI clusters Trn2 UltraServers (64 Trainium2 chips, NeuronLink interconnect), Trn3 UltraServers
AWS AI Factories On-premises AI infrastructure Deploy AI training/inference infrastructure in customer data centers
AWS Neuron SDK Software for Trainium/Inferentia Integrates with PyTorch, JAX, TensorFlow. Compiler, runtime, profiler
EC2 P5/P5e/P5en GPU instances (NVIDIA) H100/H200 GPUs for training and inference
EC2 G6/G6e GPU instances (NVIDIA) L4/L40S GPUs for inference and graphics
AWS Graviton Arm-based general compute Best price-performance for inference serving and general ML workloads
Amazon EFA Elastic Fabric Adapter Low-latency networking for distributed training across instances

Layer 2: ML Platform (SageMaker AI)

  • Amazon SageMaker AI (rebranded from SageMaker, late 2024) — end-to-end ML platform for building, training, and deploying models.
Component Purpose
SageMaker Unified Studio Single IDE for data, analytics, and ML/AI development (integrates Bedrock)
SageMaker Canvas No-code ML for business analysts — point-and-click model building
SageMaker HyperPod Managed clusters for large-scale distributed training with auto-recovery
SageMaker Pipelines CI/CD for ML — define, automate, and manage ML workflows
SageMaker Feature Store Centralized repository for ML features (online + offline store)
SageMaker MLflow Managed MLflow for experiment tracking, model versioning, deployment
SageMaker Model Registry Central catalog to version, manage, and deploy models with approval workflows
SageMaker JumpStart Model hub with 400+ pre-trained models, one-click deploy, fine-tuning
SageMaker Endpoints Real-time inference hosting (single model or multi-model endpoints)
SageMaker Training Managed training with built-in algorithms, distributed training, spot instances
SageMaker Processing Run data processing and evaluation jobs at scale
SageMaker Lakehouse Unified access to data lakes and warehouses for ML

Layer 3: AI Applications & Services

Amazon Bedrock (Generative AI Platform)

  • Amazon Bedrock — fully managed service for building GenAI applications with foundation models.
  • Model Providers: Amazon (Nova), Anthropic (Claude), Meta (Llama), Mistral, Cohere, AI21 Labs, OpenAI, Stability AI.
  • Key Capabilities:
    • Model Inference — Converse API, InvokeModel, streaming, batch inference, cross-region inference
    • Knowledge Bases — managed RAG with vector stores (OpenSearch, Aurora, Pinecone, etc.)
    • Managed Knowledge Base (2026) — fully managed RAG primitive (storage + retrieval + embeddings + re-ranking)
    • Agents — multi-step task execution with tool use (transitioning to AgentCore)
    • Guardrails — content filtering, topic avoidance, PII protection, grounding checks
    • Model Customization — fine-tuning, continued pre-training, distillation
    • Model Evaluation — automatic metrics, human evaluation, LLM-as-judge
    • Flows — visual workflow builder for chaining prompts, agents, and knowledge bases

Amazon Nova Models

  • Nova Micro — text-only, fastest, lowest cost (128K context). Ideal for classification, summarization.
  • Nova Lite — multimodal (text + image + video input), cost-effective (300K context).
  • Nova Pro — balanced multimodal, strong accuracy/speed/cost trade-off (300K context).
  • Nova Premier — most capable, complex reasoning, agentic workflows, teacher model (1M context).
  • Nova Canvas — image generation with editing controls and watermarking.
  • Nova Reel — video generation (1280×720, 24fps, up to 6 seconds).
  • Nova Sonic — speech-to-speech for real-time conversational AI.
  • Nova 2 (Dec 2025) — next generation with extended thinking (adjustable levels), 1M token context, built-in tools:
    • Nova 2 Lite — fast, cost-effective reasoning model
    • Nova 2 Pro — most intelligent, complex agentic tasks
    • Nova 2 Sonic — next-gen speech with async tool calling
    • Nova 2 Omni — unified multimodal I/O (text + image generation)
  • Nova Act — browser automation agent for web tasks.
  • Nova Forge — custom model building program (open training).

Amazon Q Developer & Q Business

  • Amazon Q Developer — AI-powered coding assistant (evolved from CodeWhisperer):
    • Code generation, completion, and inline suggestions (15+ languages)
    • Agentic coding (autonomous multi-step development)
    • Security vulnerability scanning
    • Code transformation and modernization (Java, .NET upgrades)
    • CLI integration (natural language → commands)
    • Debugging and troubleshooting with CloudWatch integration
  • Amazon Q Business — AI assistant for enterprise knowledge (connects to 40+ data sources):
    • Natural language answers from company data
    • Document summarization and content creation
    • Task automation with plugins
    • Access control respecting existing permissions (ACL-aware)
  • Amazon Q in Console — chat assistant in AWS Management Console for troubleshooting and guidance.
⚠️ Note (July 2026): Amazon Q Developer IDE plugins reaching end-of-support April 2027. Successor is Kiro — AWS’s agentic development environment. Amazon Q Business and Amazon Kendra entering maintenance mode for new customers July 30, 2026.

AWS AI/ML Application Services

Service Category Purpose
Amazon Comprehend NLP Sentiment analysis, entity recognition, key phrase extraction, language detection, topic modeling
Amazon Rekognition Computer Vision Object/face detection, content moderation, celebrity recognition, text in images, custom labels
Amazon Polly Speech Text-to-speech with neural voices (60+ voices, 30+ languages), SSML support
Amazon Transcribe Speech Speech-to-text (ASR), real-time and batch, custom vocabularies, speaker identification
Amazon Translate Language Neural machine translation (75+ languages), real-time and batch, custom terminology
Amazon Textract Document AI OCR + intelligent document processing, extracts text, tables, forms, and queries from documents
Amazon Lex Conversational AI Build chatbots and voice bots with automatic speech recognition and NLU
Amazon Kendra Search Enterprise search with NLP, semantic understanding, GenAI index for RAG ⚠️ Maintenance mode July 2026
Amazon Personalize Recommendations Real-time personalization and recommendations (same tech as Amazon.com)
Amazon Forecast Time Series Time series forecasting using ML (closed to new customers since 2024)
Amazon HealthScribe Healthcare Generate clinical documentation from patient-clinician conversations
Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Agentic AI Deploy, manage, and optimize AI agents at scale (GA 2025/2026)

Decision Matrix: Use Case → Recommended Service

Use Case Recommended Service Why
Build GenAI apps with FMs (no ML expertise) Amazon Bedrock Serverless, multi-model, fully managed
Custom model training from scratch SageMaker AI + Trainium Full control over training, data, and infrastructure
Enterprise Q&A over company documents Amazon Q Business / Bedrock Knowledge Bases Connects to 40+ data sources, ACL-aware
AI coding assistant Amazon Q Developer / Kiro Inline completions, security scanning, agentic coding
Build and deploy AI agents Bedrock AgentCore Serverless runtime, MCP tools, identity, observability
Chatbot / virtual assistant Amazon Lex + Bedrock Lex for structure, Bedrock for natural responses
Document processing (forms, invoices) Amazon Textract Extracts structured data from documents at scale
Content moderation (images/video) Amazon Rekognition Pre-built moderation labels, custom labels for specifics
Sentiment analysis on customer feedback Amazon Comprehend Pre-built NLP models, no training needed
Real-time product recommendations Amazon Personalize Same ML tech as Amazon.com, real-time updates
Transcribe meetings/calls Amazon Transcribe Real-time ASR, speaker diarization, custom vocab
Generate speech from text Amazon Polly Neural TTS, SSML support, multiple voices
Translate content at scale Amazon Translate 75+ languages, real-time, custom terminology
No-code ML for business users SageMaker Canvas Point-and-click, AutoML, visual interface
Fine-tune FMs on proprietary data Bedrock Custom Models / SageMaker JumpStart Bedrock for serverless; SageMaker for full control
Prevent harmful GenAI outputs Amazon Bedrock Guardrails Content filters, PII, grounding checks, topic avoidance
Cost-effective GenAI inference at scale Bedrock + Nova models (or Inferentia2/Trainium) Nova = lowest cost in class; custom silicon for self-hosted
Clinical documentation from conversations Amazon HealthScribe Purpose-built for healthcare, HIPAA eligible

Quick Reference: All AWS AI/ML Services

Service One-Liner
Amazon Bedrock Fully managed GenAI platform with multi-provider foundation models
Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Enterprise infrastructure for deploying and operating AI agents at scale
Amazon Nova Amazon’s family of foundation models (text, multimodal, speech, image, video)
Amazon Q Developer AI coding assistant with code generation, security scanning, and transformation
Amazon Q Business Enterprise AI assistant for Q&A and task automation over company data
Amazon SageMaker AI End-to-end ML platform for building, training, and deploying custom models
Amazon Comprehend NLP service for sentiment, entities, key phrases, language detection
Amazon Rekognition Computer vision for object/face detection, moderation, and custom labels
Amazon Polly Text-to-speech with neural and standard voices
Amazon Transcribe Automatic speech recognition (speech-to-text)
Amazon Translate Neural machine translation for 75+ languages
Amazon Textract Extract text, tables, and forms from documents (OCR+)
Amazon Lex Build conversational chatbots and voice bots
Amazon Kendra Intelligent enterprise search with NLP and GenAI index
Amazon Personalize Real-time ML-powered personalization and recommendations
Amazon HealthScribe Generate clinical notes from patient-clinician conversations
AWS Trainium Custom AI chip optimized for training (Trn2, Trn3 instances)
AWS Inferentia Custom AI chip optimized for inference (Inf2 instances)
AWS Neuron SDK SDK for running ML workloads on Trainium and Inferentia chips
Amazon SageMaker Canvas No-code ML model building for business analysts
Amazon SageMaker HyperPod Managed clusters for distributed training with auto fault recovery

Exam Tips

AIF-C01 — AWS Certified AI Practitioner

  • Format: 65 questions, 90 minutes, 700/1000 passing score.
  • Domains:
    • Domain 1: Fundamentals of AI and ML (20%)
    • Domain 2: Fundamentals of Generative AI (24%)
    • Domain 3: Applications of Foundation Models (28%) — largest domain, most technical
    • Domain 4: Guidelines for Responsible AI (14%)
    • Domain 5: Security, Compliance, and Governance for AI Solutions (14%)
  • Key Focus Areas:
    • Domains 2+3 = 52% of exam — master Bedrock, RAG, prompt engineering, fine-tuning
    • Know the difference between AI vs ML vs DL vs GenAI
    • Understand when to use Bedrock vs SageMaker
    • RAG architecture and when to use it vs fine-tuning
    • Responsible AI principles and Bedrock Guardrails
    • Temperature, top-p effects on output
    • Know all AWS AI services at a high level (what each does)

AIP-C01 — AWS Certified Generative AI Developer – Professional

  • Format: 85 questions, 180 minutes, 750/1000 passing score.
  • Domains:
    • Domain 1: FM Selection and Integration (26%)
    • Domain 2: Data Management and Optimization (22%)
    • Domain 3: Model Performance and Compliance (31%) — largest domain
    • Domain 4: Security and Governance (21%)
  • Key Focus Areas:
    • Deep hands-on knowledge of Bedrock APIs, agents, knowledge bases, guardrails
    • RAG implementation details (chunking strategies, embedding models, vector stores)
    • Model customization (when fine-tuning vs RAG vs prompt engineering)
    • Agentic AI patterns (tool use, multi-step, AgentCore)
    • SageMaker for custom training and deployment
    • Model evaluation and monitoring in production
    • Security: data encryption, VPC endpoints, IAM for Bedrock, prompt injection mitigation
    • Cost optimization (model selection, batch inference, provisioned throughput)

Common Exam Scenarios

  • “Least operational overhead” → Bedrock (serverless) over SageMaker (managed infrastructure)
  • “Custom model with proprietary data” → Fine-tuning on Bedrock or SageMaker depending on control needed
  • “Reduce hallucinations” → RAG with Knowledge Bases + Guardrails grounding checks
  • “Enterprise search over internal docs” → Amazon Q Business or Bedrock Knowledge Bases
  • “Control AI outputs for safety” → Bedrock Guardrails
  • “Lowest cost inference” → Nova Micro (text) or Nova Lite (multimodal) on Bedrock
  • “Deploy agents in production” → Bedrock AgentCore (serverless, scalable, observable)
  • “Train trillion-parameter model” → Trainium3 UltraServers + SageMaker HyperPod

Practice Questions

Question 1 (AIF-C01)

A company wants to reduce hallucinations in their generative AI application that answers customer questions about company policies. The application uses Amazon Bedrock. What is the MOST effective approach?

  1. Increase the model temperature to generate more diverse responses
  2. Implement Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) with Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases
  3. Fine-tune the foundation model on company documents
  4. Switch to a larger foundation model
Show Answer

Answer: B – RAG grounds responses in actual company documents, directly reducing hallucinations. Fine-tuning (C) teaches style/format but doesn’t guarantee factual accuracy for specific documents. Higher temperature (A) increases randomness. Larger models (D) don’t inherently reduce hallucinations.

Question 2 (AIF-C01)

Which combination of techniques helps ensure responsible AI in a generative AI application? (Select TWO)

  1. Increase the context window size
  2. Configure Amazon Bedrock Guardrails with content filters and denied topics
  3. Use the lowest-cost foundation model available
  4. Implement human review workflows for high-stakes decisions
  5. Maximize the temperature parameter for creative outputs
Show Answer

Answer: B, D – Bedrock Guardrails (B) provides configurable safety controls to filter harmful content. Human-in-the-loop (D) ensures human oversight for critical decisions. Context window size (A), model cost (C), and temperature (E) are not responsible AI techniques.

Question 3 (AIP-C01)

A developer is building an AI agent that needs to autonomously execute multi-step workflows, call external APIs, and maintain state across interactions. The solution must be production-grade with monitoring and minimal infrastructure management. Which AWS service should they use?

  1. Amazon Lex with Lambda fulfillment functions
  2. Amazon Bedrock AgentCore with AgentCore Runtime and Observability
  3. AWS Step Functions with SageMaker endpoints
  4. Amazon Q Business with custom plugins
Show Answer

Answer: B – Bedrock AgentCore provides serverless runtime for agents, MCP-compatible tool connectivity (Gateway), built-in observability, and identity management — purpose-built for production AI agents. Lex (A) is for chatbots, not autonomous agents. Step Functions (C) requires more infrastructure management. Q Business (D) is for enterprise knowledge, not custom agent workflows.

Question 4 (AIP-C01)

A team needs to fine-tune a foundation model on their proprietary dataset with minimal compute cost. The dataset contains 10,000 instruction-response pairs. Which approach provides the BEST balance of performance improvement and cost?

  1. Full fine-tuning of the entire model on Amazon SageMaker with P5 GPU instances
  2. Continued pre-training on Amazon Bedrock with the full dataset
  3. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (LoRA) through Amazon Bedrock custom models
  4. Distilling the model into a smaller variant using Nova Premier as teacher
Show Answer

Answer: C – LoRA fine-tuning on Bedrock trains only small adapter layers (reduces compute by 90%+) while the base model stays frozen. It’s ideal for instruction-tuning with limited data. Full fine-tuning (A) is expensive. Continued pre-training (B) is for teaching new knowledge, not task alignment. Distillation (D) creates a smaller model but doesn’t directly fine-tune on task data.

Question 5 (AIF-C01 / AIP-C01)

A company wants to deploy a generative AI solution with the following requirements: lowest possible latency for text summarization, minimal cost, and no infrastructure management. Which combination should they choose?

  1. Amazon Nova Premier on Bedrock with provisioned throughput
  2. Amazon Nova Micro on Bedrock with on-demand pricing
  3. Claude 3 Opus on Bedrock with batch inference
  4. Self-hosted Llama model on SageMaker with Inferentia2 instances
Show Answer

Answer: B – Nova Micro is the fastest text-only model (200+ tokens/sec), lowest cost, and Bedrock provides serverless (no infrastructure). Premier (A) is more capable but slower and costlier. Batch (C) has high latency. Self-hosted (D) requires infrastructure management.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between AI, ML, and Generative AI?

AI is the broadest category — machines performing tasks that typically require human intelligence. ML is a subset that learns from data without explicit programming. Generative AI is a subset of ML that creates new content (text, images, code) using foundation models trained on vast datasets.

What is the difference between Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker?

Bedrock provides access to pre-built foundation models for generative AI applications without ML expertise. SageMaker is a full ML platform for building, training, and deploying custom models from scratch. Use Bedrock for gen AI apps; SageMaker when you need complete control over model training.

What AWS certifications cover AI and Generative AI?

AWS offers two AI-focused certifications: AIF-C01 (AI Practitioner) for foundational knowledge of AI/ML/Gen AI concepts and AWS services, and AIP-C01 (AI Professional) for practitioners building and deploying Gen AI solutions. Both require knowledge of Bedrock, SageMaker, and responsible AI.

Detailed Guides

Exam Prep: AWS AI Professional (AIP-C01) Exam Learning Path

References

AWS Certified AI Practitioner AIF-C01 Exam Learning Path

AWS Certified AI Practitioner

AWS Certified AI Practitioner AIF-C01 Exam Learning Path

  • Started the AI journey by clearing the AWS Certified AI Practitioner AIF-C01 exam with a perfect score.
  • AWS Certified AI Practitioner AIF-C01 exam is the latest AWS exam released on October 8, 2024, following its beta period.
  • AI Practitioner exam validates knowledge of AI/ML, generative AI technologies, and associated AWS services and tools, independent of a specific job role.
  • The AIF-C01 exam has been refreshed in 2026 to reflect changes in AWS services, including the addition of Amazon Bedrock AgentCore.
  • Exam also validates a candidate’s ability to complete the following tasks:
    • Understand AI, ML, and generative AI concepts, methods, and strategies in general and on AWS.
    • Understand the appropriate use of AI/ML and generative AI technologies to ask relevant questions within the candidate’s organization.
    • Determine the correct types of AI/ML technologies to apply to specific use cases.
    • Use AI, ML, and generative AI technologies responsibly

🎯 AWS AI/ML Certification Path Update (2026)

  • AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty retired on March 31, 2026. Certification holders retain active status through their original expiration date.
  • AWS Certified Generative AI Developer – Professional (AIP-C01) is now generally available (beta ended March 31, 2026). It validates advanced skills in building production-ready AI solutions using Bedrock, RAG architectures, and agentic AI.
  • AWS Agentic AI Demonstrated microcredential — a free, hands-on credential for implementing AI solutions in a provisioned AWS environment.
  • Current AI/ML certification path:
    • Foundational: AWS Certified AI Practitioner (AIF-C01)
    • Associate: AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer – Associate (MLA-C01)
    • Professional: AWS Certified Generative AI Developer – Professional (AIP-C01)

Refer AWS Certified AI Practitioner AIF-C01 Exam Guide

See also: AWS AI & Generative AI Services – Cheat Sheet

AWS Certified AI Practitioner AIF-C01 Exam Summary

  • AIF-C01 exam consists of 65 questions (50 scored and 15 unscored) in 90 minutes, and the time is more than sufficient if you are well-prepared.
  • In addition to the usual types of multiple-choice and multiple-response questions, the AIF exams have introduced the following new types
    • Ordering: Has a list of 3-5 responses which you need to select and place in the correct order to complete a specified task.
    • Matching: Has a list of responses to match with a list of 3-7 prompts. You must match all the pairs correctly to receive credit for the question.
    • Case study: A case study presents a single scenario with multiple questions. Each question is evaluated independently, and credit is given for each correct answer.
  • AIF-C01 has a scaled score between 100 and 1,000. The scaled score needed to pass the exam is 700.
  • Associate exams currently cost $ 100 + tax.
  • You can get an additional 30 minutes if English is your second language by requesting Exam Accommodations. It might not be needed for Associate exams but is helpful for Professional and Specialty ones.
  • AWS exams can be taken either remotely or online, I prefer to take them online as it provides a lot of flexibility. Just make sure you have a proper place to take the exam with no disturbance and nothing around you.
  • Also, if you are taking the AWS Online exam for the first time try to join at least 30 minutes before the actual time as I have had issues with both PSI and Pearson with long wait times.

📖 Deep Dive Guides: Bedrock vs SageMaker | RAG Architecture | Prompt Engineering | Responsible AI | AI Services Decision Guide

AWS Certified AI Practitioner AIF-C01 Exam Resources

AWS Certified AI Practitioner AIF-C01 Exam Topics

AIF-C01 Exam covers the AI and ML aspects in terms of AI & ML fundamentals, ML lifecycle, Generative AI, AI use cases and applications and building secure, responsible AI.

Machine Learning Concepts

  • Exploratory Data Analysis
    • Feature selection and Engineering
      • remove features that are not related to training
      • remove features that have the same values, very low correlation, very little variance, or a lot of missing values
      • Apply techniques like Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for dimensionality reduction i.e. reduce the number of features.
      • Apply techniques such as One-hot encoding and label encoding to help convert strings to numeric values, which are easier to process.
      • Apply Normalization i.e. values between 0 and 1 to handle data with large variance.
      • Apply feature engineering for feature reduction e.g. using a single height/weight feature instead of both features.
    • Handle Missing data
      • remove the feature or rows with missing data
      • impute using Mean/Median values – valid only for Numeric values and not categorical features also does not factor correlation between features
      • impute using k-NN, Multivariate Imputation by Chained Equation (MICE), Deep Learning – more accurate and helps factors correlation between features
    • Handle unbalanced data
      • Source more data
      • Oversample minority or Undersample majority
      • Data augmentation using techniques like Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE).
  • Modeling
    • Transfer learning (TL) is a machine learning (ML) technique where a model pre-trained on one task is fine-tuned for a new, related task.
    • Know about Algorithms – Supervised, Unsupervised and Reinforcement and which algorithm is best suitable based on the available data either labelled or unlabelled.
      • Supervised learning trains on labeled data e.g. Linear regression. Logistic regression, Decision trees, Random Forests
      • Unsupervised learning trains on unlabelled data e.g. PCA, SVD, K-means
      • Reinforcement learning trained based on actions and rewards e.g. Q-Learning
    • Hyperparameters
      • are parameters exposed by machine learning algorithms that control how the underlying algorithm operates and their values affect the quality of the trained models
      • some of the common hyperparameters are learning rate, batch, epoch (hint: If the learning rate is too large, the minimum slope might be missed and the graph would oscillate If the learning rate is too small, it requires too many steps which would take the process longer and is less efficient)
  • Evaluation
    • Know difference in evaluating model accuracy
      • Use Area Under the (Receiver Operating Characteristic) Curve (AUC) for Binary classification
      • Use root mean square error (RMSE) metric for regression
    • Understand Confusion matrix
      • A true positive is an outcome where the model correctly predicts the positive class. Similarly, a true negative is an outcome where the model correctly predicts the negative class.
      • A false positive is an outcome where the model incorrectly predicts the positive class. A false negative is an outcome where the model incorrectly predicts the negative class.
      • Recall or Sensitivity or TPR (True Positive Rate): Number of items correctly identified as positive out of total true positives- TP/(TP+FN) (hint: use this for cases like fraud detection, cost of marking non fraud as frauds is lower than marking fraud as non-frauds)
      • Specificity or TNR (True Negative Rate): Number of items correctly identified as negative out of total negatives- TN/(TN+FP) (hint: use this for cases like videos for kids, the cost of dropping few valid videos is lower than showing few bad ones)
    • Training Problems
      • Overfitting occurs when the machine learning model gives accurate predictions for training data but not for new data.
      • Underfitting occurs when the model cannot determine a meaningful relationship between the input and output data. You get underfit models if they have not trained for the appropriate length of time on a large number of data points.
      • Underfit models experience high bias—they give inaccurate results for both the training data and test set. On the other hand, overfit models experience high variance—they give accurate results for the training set but not for the test set. More model training results in less bias but variance can increase. Data scientists aim to find the sweet spot between underfitting and overfitting when fitting a model. A well-fitted model can quickly establish the dominant trend for seen and unseen data sets.
    • Handle Overfitting problems
      • Simplify the model, by reducing the number of layers
      • Early Stopping – form of regularization while training a model with an iterative method, such as gradient descent
      • Data Augmentation
      • Regularization – technique to reduce the complexity of the model
      • Dropout is a regularization technique that prevents overfitting
      • Never train on test data

Generative AI

  • Foundation Models:
    • Large, pre-trained models built on diverse data that can be fine-tuned for specific tasks like text, image, and speech generation. for e.g. GPT, BERT, and DALL·E.
  • Large Language Models (LLMs):
    • A subset of foundation models designed to understand and generate human-like text. Capable of answering questions, summarizing, translating, and more.
    • LLM Components
      • Tokens:
        • Basic units of text (words, subwords, or characters) that LLMs process.
      • Vectors
        • Numerical representations of tokens in high-dimensional space, enabling the model to perform mathematical operations on text.
        • Each token is converted into a vector for processing in the neural network.
      • Embeddings:
        • Pre-trained numerical vector representations of tokens that capture their semantic meaning.
  • Prompt Engineering:
    • Crafting effective input instructions to guide generative AI toward desired outputs. Key for improving performance without fine-tuning the model.
    • Techniques
      • Zero-Shot Prompting: Instructs the model to perform a task without providing examples.
      • Few-Shot Prompting: Provides a few examples of the task in the prompt to guide the model’s output.
      • Chain-of-Thought Prompting: Encourages the model to explain its reasoning step-by-step before giving the final answer.
      • Instruction Prompting: Provides explicit instructions to guide the model’s behavior.
      • Contextual Prompting: Includes additional context or background information in the prompt for better responses.
      • Iterative Refinement: Refines the prompt in multiple iterations based on model responses to improve accuracy.
      • Role-based Prompting: Assigns a role to the model to influence its tone or expertise.
  • Agentic AI:
    • AI systems that can autonomously plan, reason, and execute multi-step tasks with minimal human intervention.
    • Agents use tools, make decisions, and adapt based on intermediate results.
    • Key patterns include ReAct (Reasoning + Acting), tool use, and multi-agent orchestration.
    • AWS provides Amazon Bedrock AgentCore for building and deploying production-grade agents.
  • Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG):
    • Combines LLMs with external knowledge bases to retrieve accurate and up-to-date information during text generation. Useful for chatbots and domain-specific tasks.
  • Fine-Tuning:
    • Adjusting pre-trained models using domain-specific data to optimize performance for specific applications.
    • Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT): Uses reward signals to align model outputs with desired behaviors, now supported on Amazon Bedrock for open-weight models.
  • Responsible AI Features:
    • Incorporates fairness, transparency, and bias mitigation techniques to ensure ethical AI outputs.
  • Multi-Modal Capabilities:
    • Models that process and generate outputs across multiple data types, such as text, images, and audio.
  • Vector database
    • provides the ability to store and retrieve vectors as high-dimensional points.
    • add additional capabilities for efficient and fast lookup of nearest-neighbors in the N-dimensional space.
    • Amazon natively supports vector search through OpenSearch, Aurora PostgreSQL with pgvector and Partner solutions like Pinecone, Weaviate, and Milvus.
  • Controls
    • Temperature: Adjusts randomness in the output; lower values (e.g., 0.2) produce focused and deterministic results, while higher values (e.g., 1.0 or above) generate creative and diverse outputs.
    • Top P (Nucleus Sampling): Determines the probability threshold for token selection. With Top P = 0.9, the model considers only the smallest set of tokens whose cumulative probability is 90%.
    • Top K: Limits the token selection to the top K most probable tokens. With Top K = 10, the model randomly chooses from the 10 most likely options.
    • Token Length (Max Tokens): Sets the maximum number of tokens the model can generate in a response.
  • Model Evaluation Metrics:
    • Techniques like BLEU, ROUGE, perplexity, and embeddings measure generative AI performance across different use cases.
    • ROUGE (Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation): Commonly used for text summarization; compares overlap between generated and reference text.
    • BERTScore: Evaluates text generation by comparing contextual embeddings, capturing semantic similarity beyond n-gram overlap.
    • Perplexity: Used for language models to evaluate prediction quality. Lower perplexity indicates a better model.
    • BLEU (Bilingual Evaluation Understudy): Evaluates machine translation by comparing generated text against reference translations.
  • Limitations
    • Security: can be exploited to create malicious content, phishing attacks, or deepfakes.
    • Cost: Training and deploying large models require substantial computational resources.
    • Explainability: Decision-making process is often a “black box,” making models hard to interpret.
    • Hallucination: Models may confidently generate false or nonsensical outputs that appear accurate.
    • Toxicity: Without proper safeguards, AI can produce harmful, biased, or offensive content.
    • Creativity: AI-generated content often lacks true originality and may rely on existing patterns.
    • Data Dependency: Quality of outputs depends heavily on training data quality and diversity.
    • Regulation: Legal and ethical concerns surrounding misuse and intellectual property.
    • Latency: Real-time applications may experience delays due to high computational demands.

AI Services

Amazon Bedrock

  • is a fully managed service that offers a choice of industry leading foundation models (FMs) along with a broad set of capabilities needed to build generative AI applications, simplifying development with security, privacy, and responsible AI without the need to manage underlying infrastructure.
  • supports foundation models from Amazon (Nova), Anthropic (Claude), OpenAI (GPT-5.5, GPT-5.4), Meta (Llama), Mistral AI, Cohere, Stability AI, and others.
  • supports custom fine-tuning of FMs using tagged data or by using continued pre-train feature to customize the model using non-tagged data.
  • supports Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) for open-weight models using OpenAI-compatible APIs (February 2026).
  • supports Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to enhance model responses with real-time, context-specific data retrieval from external knowledge bases.
  • Knowledge Bases
    • Integrate custom datasets to tailor models for specific use cases and improve accuracy.
    • provides access to additional data that helps the model generate more relevant, context-specific, and accurate responses without continually retraining the FM.
    • Managed Knowledge Base (GA June 2026) — a fully managed RAG service that abstracts storage, retrieval, embeddings, re-ranking, and FM selection into a single managed primitive. Includes six native data source connectors (S3, SharePoint, Confluence, Google Drive, OneDrive, Web Crawler), Smart Parsing for automatic multi-format data preparation, and an Agentic Retriever for complex multi-step queries.
    • Supports multimodal retrieval across text, images, audio, and video content.
  • Agents
    • are fully managed capabilities that can help build and deploy intelligent agents to automate workflows and enhance user interactions.
    • can complete complex tasks for a wide range of use cases and deliver up-to-date answers based on proprietary knowledge sources.
  • Amazon Bedrock AgentCore (GA June 2026)
    • Enterprise-grade infrastructure and operations layer for deploying and managing AI agents at scale.
    • Provides a managed harness — orchestration loop, tool execution, context window management, state persistence, failure recovery, and session isolation — all with just two API calls (CreateHarness and InvokeHarness).
    • Works with any framework: LangGraph, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, Strands Agents, and more.
    • Includes AgentCore Gateway for connecting agents to tools, other agents, and models.
    • Supports optimization capabilities that turn production traces into continuous improvement.
    • Integrates with Bedrock Guardrails for real-time evaluation of agent actions and tool calls.
    • Note: AgentCore is now included in the refreshed AIF-C01 exam content.
  • Guardrails
    • help implement safeguards for generative AI applications based on use cases and responsible AI policies.
    • Provides six safeguard types:
      • Content Filters — filter undesirable and harmful content
      • Denied Topics — block conversations on specified topics
      • Word Filters — block specific words and phrases
      • Sensitive Information Filters (PII Redaction) — redacts PII using predefined types or custom regex patterns, masking with placeholders (e.g., {NAME}, {EMAIL})
      • Contextual Grounding Checks — validates responses are grounded in provided context
      • Automated Reasoning Checks (GA August 2025) — uses formal verification methods (mathematical logic) to validate AI outputs against rules and constraints. Provides provably correct, auditable assessment for every request. Delivers up to 99% verification accuracy for hallucination prevention.
    • Prompt Attack Detection — detects prompt injection and jailbreak attempts.
    • InvokeGuardrailChecks API (June 2026) — a new resourceless API that lets you apply individual safeguards at any point in agentic AI applications without creating guardrail resources. Operates in detect-only mode and returns numeric scores.
    • Supports cross-account safeguards with centralized control via AWS Organizations.
  • Model Evaluation
    • Test and evaluate foundation models for performance and accuracy (GA April 2024).
    • Automatic evaluation with predefined metrics (accuracy, robustness, toxicity).
    • Human evaluation workflows for subjective quality assessment.
    • LLM-as-a-judge capability for scalable, human-like evaluation.
    • RAG evaluation capabilities.
    • Compare multiple foundation models side by side.
  • Pricing modes
    • On-Demand Throughput Mode: Automatically scales based on request traffic. Ideal for variable workloads.
    • Provisioned Throughput Mode: Pre-allocate capacity for consistent high-volume workloads. Required for customized fine-tuned models.
  • Responsible AI Support: Tools and guidance to monitor, mitigate, and reduce biases while ensuring fairness and ethical AI use.
  • Security
    • S3 allows storing and managing data securely with fine-grained access controls and encryption.
    • VPC PrivateLink allows operating Bedrock entirely within the VPC, ensuring secure communication without an internet gateway, NAT device, VPN connection, or AWS Direct Connect connection.
  • Scalability and Cost Efficiency: Automatically scales to meet workload demands with a pay-as-you-go pricing model.
  • Model Invocation Logging
    • helps collect invocation logs, model input data, and model output data for all invocations.
    • includes full request data, response data, and metadata associated with all calls.
    • supported destinations include CloudWatch Logs and S3.
  • Redesigned Console (June 2026) — browse the full model catalog (Claude, GPT, open-weight models), compare side by side on capabilities, modality, context window, and quotas in a single view.

Amazon SageMaker

  • SageMaker Unified Studio (GA March 2025)
    • Next-generation unified development environment for data engineers, data scientists, ML developers, and analysts.
    • Breaks down silos by providing a single experience to discover data and AI assets, build analytics and AI artifacts, and collaborate in projects.
    • Includes serverless notebooks with a built-in AI agent and one-click onboarding.
    • Supports notebook scheduling, parameterization, and orchestration directly from the interface.
  • supports Model tracking capability to manage up to thousands of machine learning model experiments
  • supports automatic scaling for production variants dynamically adjusting instances in response to workload changes
  • provides pre-built Docker images for its built-in algorithms and the supported deep learning frameworks used for training & inference
  • SageMaker Inference options:
    • Real-time inference is ideal for online inferences with low latency or high throughput requirements.
    • Serverless Inference is ideal for intermittent or unpredictable traffic patterns.
    • Batch Transform is suitable for offline processing when large amounts of data are available upfront.
    • Asynchronous Inference is ideal for large payloads with long processing times.
  • SageMaker Model deployment allows deploying multiple variants of a model to the same endpoint to test new models.
  • SageMaker Managed Spot training can use spot instances to save cost; Checkpointing saves the state of ML models during training.
  • SageMaker Feature Store — centralized store for features and associated metadata for easy discovery and reuse.
  • SageMaker Debugger provides tools to debug training jobs and resolve problems such as overfitting, saturated activation functions, and vanishing gradients.
  • SageMaker Model Monitor monitors model quality in production and alerts when there are deviations.
  • SageMaker Automatic Model Tuning helps find optimal hyperparameters for an algorithm.
  • SageMaker Data Wrangler reduces time to aggregate and prepare tabular and image data for ML from weeks to minutes.
  • SageMaker Clarify helps detect potential bias and explain model predictions using SHAP analysis.
  • SageMaker Model Governance provides systematic visibility into ML model development, validation, and usage.
  • SageMaker Model Cards — document critical details about ML models for streamlined governance and reporting.
  • SageMaker Autopilot automates the end-to-end process of building, training, tuning, and deploying ML models.
  • SageMaker Neo enables ML models to train once and run anywhere in the cloud and at the edge.
  • SageMaker JumpStart — pre-trained foundation models hub with one-click deployment, fine-tuning, and support for both proprietary and open-source models.
  • SageMaker supports VPC interface endpoints powered by AWS PrivateLink for secure private connectivity.

SageMaker Ground Truth

  • provides automated data labeling using machine learning
  • helps build highly accurate training datasets quickly using Amazon Mechanical Turk
  • provides annotation consolidation to improve the accuracy of data labels by combining multiple workers’ results.
  • automated data labeling uses machine learning to label portions of the data automatically without sending them to human workers

AI Managed Services

  • Amazon Q Business
    • is a fully managed, generative-AI powered assistant that can answer questions, provide summaries, generate content, and complete tasks based on enterprise data.
    • connects to enterprise data sources with existing security and access controls.
  • AWS PartyRock
    • Amazon Bedrock Playground for learning generative AI.
    • No-code app building interface for hands-on experimentation with foundation models.
    • Build apps in minutes with natural language prompts.
    • Free to use for learning and prompt engineering practice.
  • Comprehend — natural language processing (NLP) service to find insights and relationships in text. Identifies language, extracts key phrases, people, brands, events; understands sentiment; organizes text by topic.
  • Lex — provides conversational interfaces using voice and text for building chatbots.
  • Polly — text-to-speech; supports SSML tags and pronunciation lexicons.
  • Rekognition — analyze images and video; identifies objects, people, text, scenes, activities, and inappropriate content.
  • Translate — natural and fluent language translation.
  • Transcribe — automatic speech recognition (ASR) speech-to-text.
  • Kendra — intelligent search service using NLP and ML to return specific answers from your data.
  • Panorama — brings computer vision to on-premises camera networks.
  • Augmented AI (Amazon A2I) — builds workflows for human review of ML predictions.
  • Forecast — highly accurate time-series forecasts.

Security, Identity & Compliance

  • AWS Artifact is a self-service portal for on-demand access to AWS compliance documentation and agreements.
  • SageMaker can read data from KMS-encrypted S3. Make sure KMS key policies include the role attached to SageMaker.
  • AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) helps securely control access to AWS resources.
  • Amazon Inspector — vulnerability management service that continuously scans workloads for software vulnerabilities and unintended network exposure.

Management & Governance Tools

  • Understand AWS CloudWatch for Logs and Metrics. (hint: SageMaker & Bedrock are integrated with CloudWatch for logs and metrics)
  • CloudTrail records API events, the user who made the call, and the time of the call for monitoring and logging.

Whitepapers and articles

On the Exam Day

  • Make sure you are relaxed and get some good night’s sleep. The exam is not tough if you are well-prepared.
  • If you are taking the AWS Online exam
    • Try to join at least 30 minutes before the actual time as I have had issues with both PSI and Pearson with long wait times.
    • The online verification process does take some time and usually, there are glitches.
    • Remember, you would not be allowed to take the exam if you are late by more than 30 minutes.
    • Make sure you have your desk clear, no hand-watches, or external monitors, keep your phones away, and nobody can enter the room.

AWS AI Architecture & Deep Dives for AIF-C01

Practice Questions

  1. A company needs to deploy AI agents that can autonomously plan multi-step workflows, execute tools, and recover from failures at production scale. Which AWS service provides the infrastructure layer for this?
    1. Amazon Bedrock Agents
    2. Amazon Bedrock AgentCore
    3. Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio
    4. AWS Step Functions
    Show Answer

    Answer: B – Amazon Bedrock AgentCore provides enterprise-grade infrastructure for deploying and managing AI agents at scale, including orchestration, state persistence, and failure recovery.

  2. A financial services company needs mathematically verifiable accuracy for AI-generated compliance reports to prevent hallucinations. Which Amazon Bedrock Guardrails capability should they use?
    1. Content Filters
    2. Contextual Grounding Checks
    3. Automated Reasoning Checks
    4. Sensitive Information Filters
    Show Answer

    Answer: C – Automated Reasoning Checks use formal verification methods (mathematical logic) to validate AI outputs, delivering provably correct and auditable assessments with up to 99% verification accuracy.

  3. An organization wants to apply Bedrock Guardrails safety checks at individual steps in their agentic AI workflow without creating dedicated guardrail resources. Which API should they use?
    1. ApplyGuardrail
    2. InvokeGuardrailChecks
    3. CreateGuardrail
    4. InvokeModel
    Show Answer

    Answer: B – InvokeGuardrailChecks is a resourceless API (June 2026) that lets you apply individual safeguards at any point in agentic AI applications without creating guardrail resources.

  4. A development team wants to build a RAG application with enterprise data from SharePoint, Confluence, and S3 without managing vector storage or retrieval infrastructure. Which service should they use?
    1. Amazon OpenSearch with custom embeddings
    2. Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases with custom vector store
    3. Amazon Bedrock Managed Knowledge Base
    4. Amazon Kendra
    Show Answer

    Answer: C – Amazon Bedrock Managed Knowledge Base (GA June 2026) is a fully managed RAG service with native data connectors, managed vector storage, Smart Parsing, and an Agentic Retriever.

  5. Which of the following certifications has AWS retired as of March 31, 2026?
    1. AWS Certified AI Practitioner
    2. AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer – Associate
    3. AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty
    4. AWS Certified Generative AI Developer – Professional
    Show Answer

    Answer: C – AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty was retired on March 31, 2026. It has been replaced by the expanded AI/ML certification portfolio including the Generative AI Developer – Professional.

  6. A beginner wants to learn generative AI through hands-on experimentation without writing code or managing infrastructure. Which AWS service should they use?
    1. SageMaker Unified Studio
    2. SageMaker Canvas
    3. AWS PartyRock
    4. Bedrock Console Playground
    Show Answer

    Answer: C – AWS PartyRock is a free, no-code platform for learning generative AI through hands-on experimentation with foundation models and prompt engineering.

Finally, All the Best 🙂