The Microsoft AI-102 Designing and Implementing a Microsoft Azure AI Solution exam covers building, managing, and deploying AI solutions that leverage Azure Cognitive Services, Azure Cognitive Search, and Microsoft Bot Framework. If you want to become a Microsoft Certified Azure AI Engineer Associate, then this is the exam to take!
It is quite a broad spectrum to cover, and as I took the exam myself, I wanted to share some of my preparation tips & tricks.
What does the Microsoft AI-102 exam ask you to know?
As mentioned above, this exam about designing and implementing a Microsoft Azure AI solution covers building, managing, and deploying AI solutions that leverage Azure Cognitive Services, Azure Cognitive Search, and Microsoft Bot Framework. It covers all phases of AI solutions development—from requirements definition and design to development, deployment, maintenance, performance tuning, and monitoring.
This Microsoft AI-102 exam helps you to work with solution architects to translate their vision and with data scientists, data engineers, IoT specialists, and AI developers to build complete end-to-end AI solutions. So you don’t have to do everything yourself, but you do need basic knowledge about it.
You need to be proficient in C# or Python and should be able to use REST-based APIs and SDKs to build computer vision, natural language processing, knowledge mining, and conversational AI solutions on Azure. I can tell you: you will need this during the exam!
You are also asked to understand the components that make up the Azure AI portfolio and the available data storage options. Plus, you would need to understand and be able to apply responsible AI principles.
What can you do to get prepare yourself for the Microsoft AI-102 exam?
Take the recommended Microsoft Learn courses
I created a Microsoft Learn Course Collection for the Microsoft AI-102 exam, which contains 10 learning paths. My takeaway during these courses is that you really have to do the labs.
That means that you have to make sure that you really understand what you do.
- Own it. If possible, make the labs in your own environment. It i great that Microsoft Learn offers you a fully prepped VM, but it might be nice to check your labs later on when you are preparing for your exam.
- Make it your own. It might be sometimes easier to “just click”, especially when you are offered to click to get the right code. It takes more time, but when possible, I would recommend you to write the required code yourself.
- Go one step further. There are a lot of links to the Microsoft documentation during your path. Take that opportunity and click on them.
If you want to review the labs, the easy way is to go to the corresponding GitHub AI-102 AI Engineer repo. Clone this repo, and in the folder “Instructions” you will find all the labs.
Take an instructor-led training
If you have the opportunity and resources, I would recommend you to take an instructor-led training. In case you struggle with the labs or are facing other challenges, they are there for you to help. And it is wonderful to focus on just your training for a few days. I know, that’s not an option for everyone, but in case you get such an opportunity: take it!
The other benefit of an instructor-led training, is that in many cases, the option to practice your exam is included. This brings me to the final point.
Practice your Microsoft AI-102 exam
I used an external party to practice this exam with. Although the questions on the real exam are not the same as those from the practice test, it helps you to get a good idea of what you need to know. Besides, you get a lot of information from the answer section, providing you with very usefull links.
If you want to practice a little more, check out the hands-on labs section.
I hope this short blog will help you to prepare your Microsoft AI-102 exam!
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