Guides · Generative AI

AWS Certified AI Practitioner (AIF-C01): Exam Cost in India, Syllabus and a 4-Week Study Plan

By Ravindra Bagale, trainer · LinkedIn · Published: 19 October 2026 · Last updated: 19 October 2026 · 9 min read

The AWS Certified AI Practitioner (AIF-C01) is AWS's foundational AI exam. AWS lists the fee as 100 USD; the Pearson VUE AWS Store for India lists the Foundational exam voucher at ₹8,553 (checked 19 October 2026, taxes shown at checkout). The exam has 65 questions (50 scored, 15 unscored) in 90 minutes, the pass mark is 700 out of 1,000, and the certificate is valid for 3 years. You can take it at a Pearson VUE centre or online from home. No coding is tested.

1. Suppose we are a support engineer at an IT company

Suppose we are Akash, a 26-year-old support engineer at a services company like TCS in Pune. Our project is moving a client's chatbot to Amazon Bedrock. Our manager says, "Get the AI Practitioner certificate this quarter, the company will reimburse it."

We have three questions:

1. How much will it cost in rupees?
2. What exactly will they ask?
3. How do I prepare in one month with a full-time job?

This guide answers all three, in that order.

2. Exam cost in India (October 2026)

Three things to know about the price:

• AWS updates local-currency prices at least once a year (in May), and can change them more often with 30 days' notice. Always check the price on the day you book.
• Vouchers bought from the India store are non-refundable, expire after 12 months, and must be used in the country you chose.
• If your company pays, ask HR or your manager whether they buy vouchers in bulk. Many companies do.

Total cost if you prepare with free material: only the exam fee. All the study resources in section 6 are free.

3. Exam format

Non-native English speakers: you can request the ESL +30 MINUTES accommodation in your AWS Certification account before you register. It is a one-time request and applies to your future AWS exams in English.

Scoring is "compensatory": you do not need to pass every section. A strong score in one domain can balance a weaker one.

4. The syllabus: 5 domains and their weights

These come straight from the AWS exam guide:

Domain 3 is the biggest. If you have read our chapters on how ChatGPT works, prompt engineering and the guide on RAG chatbots, you already know many of the ideas.

What is NOT tested (AWS says these are out of scope): writing code for models, data or feature engineering, hyperparameter tuning, building ML pipelines, and maths or statistics of models.

5. The AWS services to know

The exam guide lists many in-scope services. You do not need deep knowledge of each. You need to know what problem each one solves. Start with the machine learning group:

The guide also lists core services you met in the AWS course: Amazon S3, EC2, Lambda, IAM, KMS, CloudTrail, CloudWatch, Macie and others, plus the developer tools Kiro and Strands Agents. Know their one-line purpose, especially the security ones for Domain 5.

6. Free study resources (official)

1. The official exam guide (AWS docs, AIF-C01): read the domains and task statements once in week 1 and again in week 4.
2. AWS Skill Builder: the free Official Practice Question Set for AIF-C01 has 20 exam-style questions with explanations.
3. AWS Certification "exam prep" page: links to free courses and digital training for this exam.
4. The AWS Free Tier and the Amazon Bedrock console: try one prompt in the Bedrock playground so the words "model", "inference" and "tokens" become real. Watch your bill; set an AWS Budgets alert first.

7. A 4-week study plan (1 hour a day)

Week 1: AI and ML basics (Domain 1)

1. First session: read the full exam guide once. Make a list of words you do not know.
2. Next three sessions: AI vs ML vs deep learning; supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning, with one Indian example each (spam filter, customer groups, a game bot).
3. Last three sessions: training vs inference, overfitting, common metrics in simple words (accuracy, precision, recall).

Week 2: GenAI basics (Domain 2)

1. Tokens, prompts, context window, hallucination, temperature.
2. Foundation models: what they are, what they cost (pay per token), when GenAI is the wrong tool.
3. Do 10 prompts in any AI chat tool and write down one strength and one weakness you saw.

Week 3: using foundation models (Domain 3, the biggest)

1. Prompt engineering techniques: zero-shot, few-shot, chain-of-thought (in simple words).
2. RAG vs fine-tuning vs pre-training: which to use when (RAG for changing documents, fine-tuning for a style or task).
3. Amazon Bedrock: models, knowledge bases, agents, guardrails. Make a one-page table of these.
4. How to evaluate a model's answers (human review, automatic metrics, A/B testing).

Week 4: responsible AI, security and practice (Domains 4 and 5)

1. Bias, fairness, explainability, human-in-the-loop.
2. Security: IAM least privilege, KMS encryption, Macie for sensitive data, CloudTrail for logs, the shared responsibility model.
3. Two sessions: the Official Practice Question Set. For every wrong answer, write why the right answer is right.
4. Final session: revise your service nickname table and your list of words from the first session.

8. How to book the exam (step by step)

1. Sign in at aws.amazon.com/certification and open your AWS Certification account.
2. If you need extra time as a non-native English speaker, request ESL +30 MINUTES first.
3. Choose to schedule a new exam, find AWS Certified AI Practitioner, and continue to Pearson VUE.
4. Choose a test centre near you, or online proctored (you need a quiet room, a webcam and a stable internet connection).
5. Pay by card, or enter your voucher code if you bought one.
6. Check the confirmation email for the time (in IST) and the ID you must show.

9. Exam-day tips

• Online: run the system test the day before, clear your desk, and keep your phone out of reach.
• Read the last line of the question first. It tells you what they want: "MOST cost-effective", "LEAST operational effort", "which service".
• For multiple response, the question tells you how many to select. Select exactly that many.
• Flag and move on. 90 minutes for 65 questions is about 80 seconds each. Do not spend 5 minutes on one question.
• Answer everything. There is no negative marking.

10. Is it worth it?

It is worth it if:

• you work, or want to work, with AWS, and your team is starting GenAI projects;
• you are in sales, support, testing or management and need to talk about AI clearly;
• you want a structured first step before the associate-level AWS exams.

It is not a coding certificate. It will not prove you can build an AI app. Pair it with one real project, like the RAG chatbot from a PDF, and show both on your resume.

11. Try at home

Recap

Book the exam date first, 4 weeks from today. A fixed date turns "I will study" into a plan.

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Ravindra Bagale, trainer: linkedin.com/in/ravindra-bagale. Akash and his project are made up for learning; TCS is named only to make the situation real. Exam fee, format, domains, in-scope services, voucher terms, ESL accommodation and benefits were checked on aws.amazon.com, docs.aws.amazon.com and india-awsstore.pearsonvue.com on 19 October 2026. AWS can change prices, questions and services; always check the official pages before you book.

Related: AWS AI Practitioner (AIF-C01): 20 Practice Questions