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Microsoft · AI-901 · Beginner

Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals (AI-901) — Practice Questions and Mock Exam

Exam AI-901, Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals, validates foundational knowledge of AI and machine learning concepts and the ability to implement basic AI solutions using Microsoft Foundry (formerly Azure AI Foundry).

50Questions per Pass-IT mock exam
45minPass-IT mock exam time limit

Official AI-901 exam: 700 out of 1000 points to pass.

Checked against Microsoft · September 2026 · Current exam version

Reviewed by David Braun, Founder · August 27, 2026

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Identify AI concepts and capabilities1 / 5

A company wants the model's answers to reflect private documents and recent information that was not in the model's training data, without retraining the model. Which approach directly addresses this and helps reduce hallucinations?

AlexFull explanation from Alex

A language model only knows what was in its training data at the time it was trained, so it cannot know your private documents or anything that changed since. Retrieval-augmented generation, usually shortened to RAG, fixes that without touching the model's weights: at question time the application searches an index over your own source content, pulls back the passages that look relevant, and inserts them into the prompt alongside the user's question. The model then answers from material it can actually see, which is why the same technique that solves the stale-and-private-data problem also cuts down on invented answers.

The other options each turn a knob without adding knowledge. Raising the temperature makes sampling more random, which produces more invention rather than less. Shrinking the context window would shorten answers and, worse, leave less room for the retrieved passages. Disabling the tokenizer is not a supported operation and says nothing about which facts the model can reach.

Exam tip: when a scenario pairs our own documents or recent information with the phrase without retraining, the intended answer is retrieval, not fine-tuning and not a decoding parameter.

Sourcelearn.microsoft.com

Implement AI solutions by using Microsoft Foundry2 / 5

A retail app lets users upload a photo and then asks the model follow-up questions about it across several turns (for example, 'What color is the jacket?' then 'Is it suitable for rain?'). Which Foundry capability supports this multi-turn, conversational image reasoning?

AlexFull explanation from Alex

Two facts combine into the answer. First, image understanding is delivered by vision-enabled chat models, large multimodal models that analyze images and answer questions about them in text. Second, you use them by calling the chat completions interface, which is designed for multi-turn conversations. So the image arrives in a user message, follow-up questions arrive as later turns, and the model reasons over the picture together with everything said so far. Asking about the jacket's color and then whether it suits rain is simply two turns of one conversation.

The distractors each do something real, but not this. An image generation model produces pictures from text, which is the opposite direction of travel. The tagging feature of the image analysis service returns labels and confidence scores for a single image and holds no conversation, so a follow-up question has nowhere to go. The embeddings interface turns content into vectors for similarity search, which is useful for finding a similar product and useless for answering a question in words.

Exam tip: when a scenario mentions follow-up questions or context carried across turns, the answer lives on the chat surface. Feature-style vision services return a fixed result set per call and cannot hold a dialogue.

Sourcelearn.microsoft.com

Identify AI concepts and capabilities3 / 5

A global news site wants to convert article text from English into French and German in real time so readers can choose their preferred language. Which Azure AI service is the best fit for this text-only workload?

AlexFull explanation from Alex

Start by classifying the input, because that is what separates these four services. The article text is written text, and the job is turning written text in one language into written text in another. That is neural machine translation, which is the Translator service: it runs in real time as well as in batch, covers a long list of languages, and also handles transliteration and language detection.

The near-miss is the Speech service. It does translate, but it translates spoken audio, through speech-to-text and speech translation pipelines. Nothing in this scenario involves audio, so reaching for it would mean paying for machinery the workload never uses. Content Safety inspects text and images for harmful material and returns severity scores; it never produces a translation. Vision extracts information from images, which is the wrong modality entirely.

Exam tip: on the workload-identification questions, match the input modality first, whether that is text, audio, image or video, and only then choose among the services that accept it. That single habit resolves most service-selection items on this exam.

Sourcelearn.microsoft.com

Identify AI concepts and capabilities4 / 5

In Microsoft Foundry, what does a Provisioned Throughput Unit (PTU) represent?

AlexFull explanation from Alex

A provisioned throughput unit is a unit of capacity, not a unit of money, of text, or of configuration. When you choose a provisioned deployment instead of paying per token you are reserving a fixed slice of model processing capacity and holding it for your workload, and the number of units you allocate is how you size that slice. Capacity is granted as quota, and the same quota can be spent on any supported model, which is why the unit is deliberately generic rather than tied to one model.

The distractors each borrow a word from somewhere else on the platform. A fixed charge per API call describes a billing model, and provisioned deployments bill per unit per hour rather than per call. The number of tokens allowed in a single prompt is the context window, a property of the model. The maximum number of stop sequences is a request parameter and has nothing to do with capacity.

Exam tip: reserved-capacity questions turn on predictable throughput and consistent latency. A scenario with steady, high-volume traffic and a need for stable latency points at provisioned throughput, while bursty or experimental workloads point back to paying per token.

Sourcelearn.microsoft.com

Identify AI concepts and capabilities5 / 5

An organization wants to build an application that autonomously plans multi-step tasks, calls external tools and APIs to fetch real-time data, and makes decisions to complete a goal with minimal human intervention. Which type of AI workload best describes this?

AlexFull explanation from Alex

Three properties in the scenario point at the same workload type: the application plans a task over multiple steps, it calls external tools and APIs to fetch live data, and it decides what to do next with little human intervention. That combination is agentic AI. A managed agent runtime is built around exactly those pieces, managing the conversation, the tool calls and the agent lifecycle, while tools reach outside through a catalog, the model context protocol and OpenAPI definitions.

The distractors are all narrower, single-purpose workloads that produce one output from one input. Anomaly detection scores data points against expected behavior and raises a flag; it neither plans nor acts. Optical character recognition extracts text from an image. Image classification assigns a label to a picture. None of them calls a tool, carries state across steps, or decides what to do next.

Exam tip: the giveaway words for agentic workloads are autonomous, multi-step, tool or API calling, and goal. When a scenario has all four, no single-task perception or prediction workload can be the answer.

Sourcelearn.microsoft.com

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Conversation preview · AI-901

Retrieval-augmented generation

  1. You

    How can an answer use new private documents without retraining?

  2. Alex · AI tutor

    Retrieve relevant passages and include them in the prompt. That is retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG.

    Read the Microsoft documentation ↗
  3. You

    Does this change the model’s training data?

  4. Alex · AI tutor

    No. It supplies context for the request rather than retraining the model.

    Read the Microsoft documentation ↗

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AI-901 · Question excerpt

Retrieval-augmented generation

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A company wants the model's answers to reflect private documents and recent information that was not in the model's training data, without retraining the model. Which approach directly addresses this and helps reduce hallucinations?

Understand the correct answer.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), inserting retrieved source content into the prompt

RAG adds retrieved source content to the prompt so the answer can use it.

Read the Microsoft documentation ↗

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What you practice for AI-901.

Exam topics, relevant practice and sources you can check.

AI concepts and responsible use40–45% of the exam183 QuestionsPass-IT questions

Recognize common AI workloads and the choices behind a responsible solution.

  • Explain fairness, reliability, safety, privacy, security, inclusion, transparency and accountability in AI solutions.
  • Explain how generative models work and choose models, deployment options and configuration parameters for their capabilities.
  • Match tasks to generative AI, agents, text analysis, speech, vision or extraction; distinguish keyword and entity detection, sentiment, summaries, speech recognition and synthesis, and image generation.
Building basic Foundry applications55–60% of the exam246 QuestionsPass-IT questions

Build small applications that use Foundry models, agents and tools.

  • Write system and user prompts, deploy and test models and a single agent in the portal, and build lightweight chat and agent clients with the Foundry SDK.
  • Build text-analysis and Azure Speech applications and use a multimodal model to respond to spoken prompts.
  • Interpret images in prompts, generate visual content and build a small application with computer vision capabilities.
  • Use Content Understanding to extract information from documents, forms, images, audio and video, and integrate extraction into an application.
Question formats you can practice
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Select one answer.
Multiple Response
Select multiple applicable answers.
True / False
Decide whether statements are true or false.
Drag & Drop
Match items to the appropriate targets.
Dropdown
Choose the appropriate entry from a dropdown list.

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For planning, Pass-IT estimates roughly 10–25 hours. Relevant experience may put you toward the lower end; starting from scratch may put you toward the higher end. Your needs may fall outside this range. This is not a time requirement from Microsoft or a promise that you will be exam-ready within that time.

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Questions in the app are currently in English. Translations of the sample questions on this page apply only to this preview. Check with Microsoft for the languages available for the official exam.

How long does my AI-901 access last?

Access covers this certification for 12 months. You pay once, with no automatic renewal.

When does the money-back guarantee apply?

The guarantee refunds the Pass-IT purchase price for this certification. You need eligible paid access and a Readiness Score of at least 80% from your practice results when you take the exam. This score can only reach 80% after at least 50 answered questions and is not a validated probability of passing. Take the exam during your access period and submit official proof of failing within 14 days. Guarantee terms

About the AI-901 exam

Where can I take the AI-901 exam?

Online proctored or Pearson VUE test center.

How long is the Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals exam?

The AI-901 exam has 50 questions and a 45-minute time limit.

What does it mean that AI-901 is in beta?

AI-901 is currently offered as a beta exam, which is Microsoft's live trial phase for new exams. The certification you earn is the real one, but results take longer to arrive than for an established exam because scoring is finalised after the beta period.

Do you need to know Python for AI-901?

Some, yes, and this is the biggest change from AI-900. Microsoft expects conceptual knowledge of Azure AI solutions plus Python syntax and basic programming technique, so it is no longer a purely descriptive fundamentals exam despite the name.

What happens if you fail AI-901?

You can retake after 24 hours. Each later attempt needs a 14-day wait, with a maximum of five attempts in any 12-month period.

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Guarantee terms

The guarantee refunds the Pass-IT purchase price for this certification. You need eligible paid access and a Readiness Score of at least 80% from your practice results when you take the exam. This score can only reach 80% after at least 50 answered questions and is not a validated probability of passing. Take the exam during your access period and submit official proof of failing within 14 days.

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