Introduction

I recently sat for AI-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals. This post documents my experience with the hopes of helping others who are decided whether or not to take the exam.

Background

In order to understand my experience and compare it to one taking the exam you need to understand my background and view point. I am a former Microsoft MVP and currently hold over a dozen Microsoft certifications. In my career I have spent time as a Systems Analyst, Full Stack Developer, ETL Developer, Cloud Engineer, Cloud Architect, and DevOps Engineer. One can check out my posts on certifications here.

This specific exam has seen a lot of momentum towards as Open AI has quickly grown in popularity. Plus if I am being honest, work offered a free YETI for those that passed it.

Prepping

For this specific exam I only took the free Microsoft practice assessment once. If I am being honest I actually did not pass the assessment but came very close with a score in the 600s. Based on this and the fact that Microsoft employees are able to take exams for free I decided to take the exam and see what the outcome was.

To be honest I did review the questions I got incorrect and better understand the rational as to why. This really was beneficial and helped me “study” for the exam.

Exam

The exam was pretty straightforward. It followed closely with the practice assessment so the studying of questions I got incorrect proved to be valuable. One this I will say is that you do not have to have a technical background in order to pass the exam. This exam really is focused on the basic principals of AI.

This means understanding the definitions of what is and is not vision, what is contained in sentiment analysis, and what are Microsoft’s principals around responsible and trusted AI.

In the end I successfully passed this exam and received my YETI!

Conclusion

The takeaway for those looking at taking this exam is to please take it! It really was not that bad of an experience. To prep for it I’d advise taking the practice assessment and review some basic principals around concepts such as What is Microsoft Vision AI and What is Optimal Character Recognition (OCR)