I recently obtained the Azure AI Engineer Associate certification by passing the Exam AI-102 Designing and Implementing a Microsoft Azure AI Solution.
My hands-on experience making a few simple PoCs using the text and vision APIs was great background. Also, I passed the AI-900 Azure AI Fundamentals exam earlier in the year and had reviewed most of the material as part of a Data Science London group event back in March. The Microsoft Learn path takes you through the required material and I was able to make sure I was up to date with the changes. There were quite a few since I last looked at the material. Last week I passed the exam and became a certified Azure AI Engineer!
The main topics are Computer Vision, Knowledge Mining, Natural Language Processing & Conversational AI
Thoughts
There were a couple of things that struck me during the learning phase.
Firstly, I had my own internal hype cycle when it came to bots. I had a lot of ideas where bots could potentially be used in and outside of work. These probably aren’t quick fixes though and would need the time to prepare and set expectations. A dummy project here will help identify the potential pitfalls in taking a bot to production.
Secondly, the paths on MS Learn have improved a lot over the year. There are a lot more lab activities and they are good way of getting hands on with the features. Many of the capabilities have there own site to interactive with outside of the Azure portal.
For the vision and text areas, these are dependent on knowing the APIs and when to use them. I think this is interesting, as knowing what APIs exist and what is possible to do with them is a useful skill. Knowing the APIs can help with creating automated workflows or creating solutions. The Azure AI APIs are very generic so there are plenty of opportunities to find interesting use cases.
The features that impressed me the most incuded the knowledge mining capabilities and the QnA Maker. For knowledge mining solutions you can use the AI APIs to add skills to the Cognitive search index. I’m not sure how good the results are in practice but the promise is very interesting.
Practice exams
The AI Azure Engineer exam was recently updated to AI-102 which replaced the AI-100 exam. There was not much material online to support learning outside of the Microsoft Learn path. Most of the resources related to AI-100 and included a lot of material that is not relevant for AI-102. I suspect this will change over time though as revision providers update their material.