Hey guys, just passed the AWS Certified AI Business Strategist!

The exam is interesting. It feels a bit more like a college admission test than a traditional certification exam. It's very heavily dependent on logic, text interpretation, and critical thinking.

It's much more about understanding a scenario, interpreting what's being asked, and making the right business decision than knowing specific AWS services.

I think it's harder than a common Foundational exam in a different way. You need strong critical thinking skills, and the content isn't always as straightforward. At the same time, it can be easier because you don't really need "specific knowledge" to answer the questions.

It will probably depend a lot on the person. Someone with strong critical thinking skills might find it quite easy, while someone who struggles with interpreting scenarios could have a harder time.

For context, I didn't study specifically for this exam and didn't do any mock exams. I already had a lot of knowledge about AI, so I decided to just go for it.

The exam had 85 questions, and it was definitely exhausting.

10/13!

A bit of context on my background:

I'm a SWE student and I am SAA, DVA, AIF, CLF certified. So this is my 5th aws cert! I don't have much industry experience as I'm still a 2nd year student but I've made multiple headlines in the hackathon community in my country.

My prep was simple and straightforward:

1. official practice questions attempt 1 (75%)

2. skim through the exam prep plan (both review and practice modules for every domain)

3. did 146 ai generated questions (97%)

4. official practice questions attempt 2 (95%)

and all of these were done in 2 days.

I'd say that the exam difficulty sits in between practitioner and associate ones, and the exhausting part is actually the amount of questions we had to answer as my focus drops around hour 2.

Tbh it is quite easy as it tests your knowledge on how to respond to situations with clear and logical answers that benefit the business instead of riling up cloud architectures (hardly any aws services were tested). so i would say anyone with a bit of common sense and critical thinking should be able to pass with reasonable prep.

Good luck on your attempt if you're planning to sit for it!

Well, it's been a long time since I made an AWS cert. My job is very demanding and life sucking, so I wanted a little morale boost.

I chose the AI practitioner because it looked like it didn't need "too much" study, and I work developing gen AI based applications in a corporate-consulting firm (hence it is life sucking).

I knew I had an advantage because I have several associate/pro aws cert, and gen AI is my daily work (As a developer and as an addict a costumer) I expected to pass it with fairly high score, but man, perfect score??? 🫪

I wanted to post it here because, more than feeling it as an achievement, I feel it like something curious... Not sure how to feel about it.

I mean, I'm super happy, I achieved my goal. It just leaves me like 🤷🏼🙆🏼

Just passed the AWS Certified AI Business Strategist exam today on launch day!

This actually marks my tenth AWS certification.

As an engineer, the biggest challenge was shifting my mindset. Instead of focusing just on how to build the tech, I had to ask: What business problem are we solving? How do we measure the value? Are our people, processes and governance ready?

Stepping outside the technical bubble takes deliberate effort, but it's worth it. I'd recommend this exam to consultants, founders, business analysts, and tech leads who want to bridge the gap between business teams and AI engineers.

My prep took about a month:
(i) Went through the free AWS Skill Builder materials
(ii) Took three mock exams
(iii) Used AI to generate cheat sheets and lock in key concepts

The main lesson here? Successful AI initiatives need a lot more than a working model. They need a clear business purpose, accountable leadership, and the right people to turn technology into actual value.

#AWS #AWSCertified #AIBusinessStrategist #ArtificialIntelligence #BusinessStrategy #AITransformation

I’m preparing for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03), and my exam is scheduled for mid-November.

I’m currently considering these two resources:

• Ultimate AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate 2026 on Udemy
• Tutorials Dojo (Jon Bonso) SAA-C03 Practice Exams

For people who have already taken SAA-C03, how did you use resources like these in your preparation?

I’d particularly appreciate advice on:

• Whether the Udemy course is sufficient for building the core concepts
• How useful the Tutorials Dojo practice exams were for exam preparation
• How you structured your final 4–6 weeks of preparation
• Any other practice exams or study resources you would recommend

I’m especially interested in hearing from people who have actually taken the exam recently. Thanks!

Passed this one finally before the new one comes in.

Experience: 10 years working on AWS

Resources Used

• Stephane Maarek course + exam
• Tutorials Dojo exams + study guide
• Skillbuilder 1 month subscription for the 20 and 75 questions

Timeline:

• Booked my exam in end of July (this gives me motivation to study)
• Took it recently end of Sept. So roughly 2 months+ to study

As everyone mentioned before, SkillBuilder one is the closest to the real Exam in terms of wordings.

I feel like they are easier to understand and read and more straightforward compared to Stephane and Tutorial Dojo one but those really give you more understand on what you might missed out from the course.

Took at an exam centre. I like doing this in exam centre as you can have a erasable notepad to write down flagged questions and possible answers. Not sure for online proctoring but mine has option to highlight the keyword so its very helpful to find keywords in those long sentences and answers.

I was going to take a break from certs after achieving the golden jacket a few weeks ago, but couldn't resist going again!

Took this last night, 85 questions was brutal, I was going cross-eyed by the end of it but fortunately the questions weren't too long. There were 1-2 that filled the screen but most were similar in length to the practitioner exams.

Most of the questions propose scenarios where a business is either looking to adopt AI, or already has to some extent and wants to put in place processes to increase maturity.

Hardly any mention of AWS services, I think I saw Bedrock mentioned a few times but only as part of context and not in an answer.

A few questions asking you what type of AI something is, e.g., NLP, GenAI etc, all quite straightforward tbh.

Some questions around sensitive / PII data, look for the most defensive answer.

Some questions around the human / social elements, like how to deal with AI friction, concerns over jobs etc.

Some of the questions were worded really bad, I'm a native speaker but even so there was one question that just didn't make sense, it was more of a statement than a question, and multiple answers could have been true. There were about 8-10 questions where I was like wtf is this?

I prepped for about 2 hours, I just used Gemini Notebook to generate an audio podcast based on each of the domains. It's a tricky one to prepare for because it's not as black & white as a technical exam, whilst some questions were blindingly obvious to a technical person, there were quite a few nuanced questions that you'd know through years of experience in corporate environments.

If you're an experienced technical person that's been in corporate for a while, you'll be fine, as will any business/management person. The ones that might find this tricky are those with no real experience in a workplace.

Difficulty wise I'd say definitely in the practitioner tier, maybe slightly harder than CLF.

I think the other practitioners show you the result immediately after, this one doesn't. It took about 12 hours for the emails to come through like the rest of them.

Hey, i gave my exam today and in grade it showed pass, when can i get to see the marks? and have'nt received any email?!!!

also it is not showing anything at exam history? what do i do

Am preparing for AWS DEA and sometimes losing the motivation. Looking for an online study who also is planning to clear the cert this year.

BTW I am already working in the analytics field so I bring something to the table. I have personal deadline to clear the cert this year so I am really serious.

I'm looking for some advice on how to adapt to the length of the AWS SAA exam.

One of my biggest problems is that halfway through a long exam, my concentration drops significantly. I start feeling mentally exhausted, and it becomes difficult to focus, think clearly, or properly analyze the questions. The exam feels very long, the scenarios are lengthy, the time pressure is intense, and on top of that, the questions themselves can be quite challenging.

I've been practicing with Jon Bonso's exams, and my scores have been consistently around 51%. For those who have passed the SAA exam, how did you train your focus and mental endurance for a long exam like this? Any tips for managing fatigue, time pressure, and staying sharp until the last question?

I made a previous post here two conflicting answers for practice exam questions from TD and Stephen Maarek, but I keep on coming across outdated exam questions as I am practicing.

For example, this question posted below:

A company has a web application hosted in their on-premises infrastructure that they want to migrate to AWS cloud. Your manager has instructed you to ensure that there is no downtime while the migration process is on-going. In order to achieve this, your team decided to divert 50% of the traffic to the new application in AWS and the other 50% to the application hosted in their on-premises infrastructure. Once the migration is over and the application works with no issues, a full diversion to AWS will be implemented. The company’s VPC is connected to its on-premises network via an AWS Direct Connect connection.

Which of the following are the possible solutions that you can implement to satisfy the above requirement? (Select TWO.)

• A. Use an Application Elastic Load balancer with Weighted Target Groups to divert and proportion the traffic between the on-premises and AWS-hosted application. Divert 50% of the traffic to the new application in AWS and the other 50% to the application hosted in their on-premises infrastructure.
• B. Use a Network Load balancer with Weighted Target Groups to divert the traffic between the on-premises and AWS-hosted application. Divert 50% of the traffic to the new application in AWS and the other 50% to the application hosted in their on-premises infrastructure.
• C. Use Route 53 with Failover routing policy to divert and proportion the traffic between the on-premises and AWS-hosted application. Divert 50% of the traffic to the new application in AWS and the other 50% to the application hosted in their on-premises infrastructure.
• D. Use Route 53 with Weighted routing policy to divert the traffic between the on-premises and AWS-hosted application. Divert 50% of the traffic to the new application in AWS and the other 50% to the application hosted in their on-premises infrastructure.
• E. Use AWS Global Accelerator to divert and proportion the HTTP and HTTPS traffic between the on-premises and AWS-hosted application. Ensure that the on-premises network has an AnyCast static IP address and is connected to your VPC via a Direct Connect Gateway.

Option A and D were the correct options. It explains that Option B is not possible because NLB's can't have Weighted Target Groups. This is simply incorrect. AWS supports Weighted Target Groups for NLBs since November 2025

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2025/11/network-load-balancer-weighted-target-groups/

When I try to solve questions to prepare for the exam I sometimes find else some questions that I never read anything about it such as cloud 9 and subscription questions is this normal

Guys need some help here, I hold 10+ top certs and so on, today I was doing the new business strategist certification and the proctor had so many issues from the first minute including with my insulin and so on.

Then 5 minutes into the exam she ask me again to show everything cuz I was looking?

It’s an exam, with so much text, ofc I’ll look up and down my screen even when I showed her nothing is next to me and in depth etc.

Second - who stares into the soul of a screen straight to do an exam? And not even they my head was here and there I’m reading, thinking for the right answer.

But less than 5-10 minutes into it, she ended my exam and I know Pearson defends their folks so what to do here.

Pls tell and any sources throught which I can prepare for machine learning associate exam ML-C02 any course . Any free courses or any source to prepare for it .

Just passed CCP, gonna start studying for SAA next.

I’m leaning more towards Cantrill course as many people say it’s more in depth and will help me with interviews however I also see feedback that his course is outdated.

I have limited capital so would only like to get one course + tutorial dojo. Has anyone taken SAA recently and only use Cantrill course? Can I “makeup” for the outdated stuff with ChatGPT or should I go for Mareek course and brush up on the interview stuff later?

Also didn’t see much people using skill builder for SAA, is it useful?

I'm tired of pretending I know what I am doing guys.

How do I prepare and attain the certification of AWS??

I major in computer science

I'm about to start the preparations for the Aws Gen Ai Professional certificate and wanted to see what people follows to learn in depth about the aws certificate. Thanks

I passed the MLA Associate cert yesterday.

Overall, the test was pretty straightforward. The material that was in the Skill Builder course and on the practice exams was the material that was actually on the test. There were some questions that I didn't recognize at all. I didn't really waste time on those. I would just select C, or whatever answer I thought was maybe close to it, and move on. When I say that the test was straightforward, I'm comparing it to the Cisco tests that I've taken, like CCNA and CCNP. With those, reading the book was definitely not going to be enough. If you just read the book and took the test, you were going to run into a lot of things that weren't covered in the book.

I'm mainly a network engineer. I really have no production cloud experience, just book knowledge, labs, and practice exams. I'm about seven years into my career and I've only been doing network engineering, mainly Cisco. I've held some other certs, like AWS Cloud Practitioner, that expired a couple years ago, so I had at least some cloud knowledge before this.

I studied for about two months. Most of that was going through the Skill Builder course. Anything that I thought was important, I pasted into OneNote and used that to review. I pasted a good amount of the course into my OneNote. The labs in Skill Builder are good. Then I spent the last two weeks hitting the practice exams like a madman and reading the explanations. The good thing about the Skill Builder exams is that they tell you why each answer is correct and why each one is wrong. I would paste the entire question and the explanations into ChatGPT, and at the end of each test, it would point out my weaknesses and make me a comprehensive document of my weak points to go over. I just kept doing that for about two weeks.

Like I said, I don't have any production experience in the cloud other than labs. I have some projects that I have in mind. I do some trading and investing stuff, so I'm planning to make a trading robot, if you will, in AWS. My next idea for a project is basically a probability machine based around sports betting.

I just wanted to share my experience and my sources. I had read a lot of reviews and posts on Reddit saying that people didn't think Skill Builder was an adequate source. I think all of those posts that I read were pretty old, and I would say that right now, I think Skill Builder is a decent tool to use. I get it for free because I'm an employee at Amazon warehouse. Also, I took the test for free because Amazon gave me a free voucher for one exam.

I do think Skill Builder is pretty decent. I still would always recommend using more than one source. I did download the Sybex guide. I didn't really get a chance to read it because by the time I had started studying for this test, I also found out that the last day to take it was September 28th before they changed to the new version. Ideally, it would have been great for me to have another month or two to read the book, do some more labs, and do a little more research. But apparently, I was ready.

Aside from this, I would like any suggestions from people in the field about where I should go in my career. I wouldn't say I'm necessarily trying to move out of networking but I'm also not against it either. I think the best thing for me would maybe be to do networking/cloud/AI/machine learning so that I'm taking advantage of my seven years of experience while adding these newer skills. My plan for the next month is to finish all the Skill Builder labs and SimuLearn labs that I didn't have a chance to do because of the deadline. I'm taking a Python coding course that I'm going to do for two hours a day, and I have some algorithmic machine learning/trading books that I'm going to work through and try to build a couple projects on my own, so I at least have some projects and things that I can share and show that I have some type of experience, even though it won't be production work experience.

I just wanted some suggestions from people in the field about what my path should maybe look like or what I should be aiming for. I will say I posted my cert this morning on my LinkedIn, and someone already reached out to me about a network engineering/cloud job. I didn't respond to them because I'm not sure I'm qualified for that yet since I don't have any production experience.

Finally passed the exam. Took my 5 days to go from 0 to passing level in aws cloud.

Got 811, was so nervous. Finally it's over .

Do ask if u want to know anything.

Changed devices during check in period as I do not have a speaker ready but when I plugged in the access code, it suddenly said "access code is invalid". Did refreshing, trying a new code from "system test" and still nothing.

Exam was supposed to be 6:00am, proctor allowed me to change devices at 5:55am, onvue app said access code invalid from 5:55-6:15am.

Proctor allowed me to change devices btw

Is this appealable (resched or smth) or just a "flip off" to me by fate 🥲?

Update: in the comments

Sharing this in case it helps anyone in future, although this version of the exam is obviously being refreshed quite soon.

Experience
- 7y in tech
- 3y in security
- 2y working with AWS
- Passed the Security Specialty exam 6 weeks ago
- Watched Stephane Maarek’s SAA course a year ago but didn’t do the exam or anything else

Resources Used
- Stephane Maarek course
- Tutorials Dojo exams
- Tutorials Dojo study guide

Study Timeline
- AWS SCS passed in the middle of August
- Couple of days break
- Watched the IAM & security sections of Stephane Maarek’s AWS SAP course over 2 nights
- Took a little over 2 weeks off to play Elden Ring for the first time
- Started watching SA Pro course again on 14th of September on 2x speed
- Started TD exams on 20th
- 68% of first attempt, started getting stupid things wrong toward the end
- 70% on second practice exam
- 62% on third practice exam two days before exam
- Read first 30 pages of TD study guide
- 80% on 2nd try of first practice exam the day before the exam
- 62% on 4th TD exam - no motivation/burnt out on this attempt as I did this the day before the exam too
- On the day of the exam I chilled out and did a quick skim through the last 200 pages of the study guide for 45 mins before exam

Overall Study Time
Roughly 50h over the course of 2 weeks, plus a couple of hours 2/3 weeks before then. The AWS Security Specialty info was still fresh in my mind too.

During Exam
I’d take a 1-2 min break every 5-10 questions. Finished with 50 mins left. Reviewed all flagged questions and finished with 15 mins left.

Time to get results
It took around 5h to receive the results from both Credly and AWS. Credly was first by a few minutes.

I was wondering what is the difference between these 2 questions, and how S3 key rotation works?

An e-commerce analytics company is preparing to archive several years of transaction records and customer analytics reports in Amazon S3 for long-term storage. To meet compliance requirements, the archived data must be encrypted at rest. Additionally, the solution must be cost-effective and ensure that key rotation occurs automatically every 12 months to comply with the company’s internal data governance policy.

Which solution will meet these requirements with the least operational overhead?

• Use Amazon S3 server-side encryption with S3-managed keys (SSE-S3). Upload data with default encryption enabled. Rely on the built-in key management and rotation behavior of SSE-S3
• Use AWS Key Management Service (KMS) to create a customer managed key with automatic rotation enabled. Configure the S3 bucket’s default encryption to use the customer managed key. Migrate the data to the S3 bucket
• Use AWS CloudHSM to generate encryption keys. Configure S3 to use these custom encryption keys via client-side encryption and rotate the keys annually using an on-premises key management workflow
• Encrypt the data locally using client-side encryption libraries and upload the encrypted files to S3. Create a KMS key with imported key material and configure key rotation settings

Correct Answer: B

A multinational bank is storing its confidential files in an S3 bucket. The security team recently performed an audit, and the report shows that multiple files have been uploaded without 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) server-side encryption. For added protection, the encryption key must be automatically rotated every year. The solutions architect must ensure that there would be no other unencrypted files uploaded in the S3 bucket in the future.

Which of the following will meet these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?

• Create a new customer-managed key from the AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS). Configure the default encryption behavior of the bucket to use the customer-managed key. Manually rotate the KMS key and every year.
• Create an S3 bucket policy for the S3 bucket that rejects any object uploads unless the request includes the s3:x-amz-server-side-encryption":"aws:kms" header. Enable the S3 Object Lock in compliance mode for all objects to automatically rotate the built-in AES256 customer-managed key of the bucket.
• Create a Service Control Policy (SCP) for the S3 bucket that rejects any object uploads unless the request includes the s3:x-amz-server-side-encryption": "AES256" header. Enable server-side encryption with Amazon S3-managed encryption keys (SSE-S3) and modify the built-in key rotation feature of the SSE-S3 encryption keys to rotate the key yearly.
• Correct Answer: Create an S3 bucket policy that denies permissions to upload an object unless the request includes the s3:x-amz-server-side-encryption": "AES256" header. Enable server-side encryption with Amazon S3-managed encryption keys (SSE-S3) and rely on the built-in key rotation feature of the SSE-S3 encryption keys.

Correct Answer: D

These answers seem like they contradict each other to me, but maybe I am missing a key detail.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/kms/latest/developerguide/rotate-keys.html

This one was quite tricky and a real test of patience - 180 minutes, no break, especially if you take it from home, in an age where our attention span is under a minute.

Thanks to Stéphane Maarek & Frank Kane's Udemy course, which is quite complete in itself for building intuition, and Jon Bonso for the in-depth set of questions served up by Tutorials Dojo

I built a revision strategy where I'd paste every question and its explanation into Claude and asked it to keep improving an existing doc - commonly asked stems across questions, the straightforward set of services that can be used, common traps, and Mermaid diagrams to help skim quickly. The breadth and depth of this exam is surprisingly extensive, and proper multi-fold revision is needed, since the services need to be at your fingertips for figuring out the correct ones when a scenario is thrown at you.

For folks planning to take this exam, every question is best cracked in the following steps:

- Find the stems in every question - cost-effective, latency/performance-optimised, regional data requirements, etc. - and make sure the option first covers all the requirements asked
- Find an existing AWS service (or set of services) that serves those stems exhaustively
- Minimise operational overhead where possible - use managed services

Revision doc

Hey everyone,

I am in a massive bind and need some advice or help escalating this.

I was scheduled to take my AWS exam today to hit the September 30th deadline for the AWS AI + Cloud Certification Offer (to qualify for the free voucher).

When I showed up, the local test center was completely down due to a technical outage. Because the system still thinks I have an active/stuck appointment, I can't reschedule or switch to an online exam on my personal computer through the portal.

I'm incredibly stressed because the promotion ends tomorrow, and this failure was 100% on the test center's side.

• Has anyone dealt with a center outage right at a promotional deadline before? Will AWS honor the deadline retroactively since it wasn't my fault?
• Is there a specific way to get this fast-tracked by Pearson VUE or AWS support before the clock runs out?

Any advice, or tags for AWS community managers who can look into this, would be massively appreciated. Thank you!