AI-100 : Designing and Implementing Azure AI Solution - Certification experience

This time am here to share with you all about my recent certification experience on Azure AI solutions

Background : After landing in Microsoft as a  Data and AI solution expert , I have been assigned to help a customer with their multi-million dollar Azure consumption revenue contract for anything and everything in Data and AI.

Different Line Of  Businesses within the customer side wants to migrate their on-prem applications onto Azure , with their tight deadlines

Often customer brings challenges around Databricks ,Data engineering, Databases and related topics and were easily been answerable based on my prior experience working on Data engineering in Azure

But when Cognitive services such as  Computer vision , Text Analytics,Bot development and video indexing were brought to the conversation , I needed more in-depth  knowledge on them. Hence I wanted to give this certification a shot moreover for Microsoft employees , Azure certifications comes free of cost 😃

Azure AI: Azure's off the shelf AI solutions are awesome. Customers can focus on solving the business challenges, leaving all model management ,hardship of building a bot framework etc to Microsoft.


Link for more details about the list of topics this exam covers

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/exams/ai-100

Preparation :

 Seriously it took only 1 week of preparation for me to complete this exam, as i'm pretty familiar with the whole ecosystem but was just lacking the nitty gritties of Azure AI. Below guide will help someone who is relatively new to Azure AI  . If you are familiar with Azure you can directly jump to step 3 below.  Microsoft is on a mission to train everyone and promoting certifications a bigtime, so if your company is already using Azure, Talk to your Microsoft account executives, who can get these training and certifications for free if not at a highly discounted rates.


Step 1:  Use the free tier 

 Microsoft gives $200 credit valid for 12 months for every new trial accounts. Create your personal one and try exploring the azure basics ( VNET, VMs,blobstore,ADLS,functions and Azure Data Factory and Azure Databricks)

Step 2: Azure Fundamentals

This covers all the basics that you need to know
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/paths/azure-fundamentals/

Step 3: 

 Follow along the course/modules detailed in this link, they are very useful

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/exams/ai-100

Step 4: Model exam

  I would highly recommend this ,  especially this one below, I was shocked to see almost 70% of the exam questions were from here. They have 110+ model questions , just get the question from there and find answers yourself for the 10% model questions .

https://www.examtopics.com/exams/microsoft/ai-100/


Finally, sleep well the day before your exam.Run the system test before exam day and choose a quiet room with good sunlight if you are giving a proctored online exam at the comfort of sitting at home  . Exam pattern will have 44 questions with 1 or 2 case studies ,the answers for the case studies can not be reviewed once submitted but other objective questions can be reviewed before final submit. You also get an opportunity to give feedback on questions which you can mark during the exam