AB-730 arrived just before Ignite in November 2025 as one of Microsoft's first certifications aimed at business users rather than admins or developers. It gets around 600 to 900 searches a month, which tells you how many companies are now pushing Copilot onto staff and looking for a way to measure it. The exam is 45 minutes, proctored, pass mark 700, and priced at $99 or less depending on country. The English version changes on 20 October 2026. After that the split is generative AI fundamentals (25 to 30%), managing prompts and chats in Microsoft 365 Copilot (20 to 25%), managing business content and collaboration (20 to 25%), and a new section on driving outcomes with agents (20 to 25%).
That last section covers choosing prebuilt agents and delegating multi-step tasks to Copilot Cowork, including reviewing its plan and results and knowing its security limits. The fundamentals section is better than I expected. It asks about prompt injection, over-reliance, citation checking and when human review is needed. Those are the habits that actually stop people forwarding a hallucinated figure to a client, and it is good to see them on a business-user exam. The rest is thinner. Several objectives are literally find a previous chat, delete a chat, rename a chat, save a prompt, schedule a prompt.
That is product familiarity, and anyone who has used Copilot for a week can do it. The content and meeting sections are more useful, covering Work IQ context, connectors, Pages and intelligent recap, but it is still a tour of one product rather than a skill that moves with you. The structural issue is that the credential only means something inside companies running Microsoft 365 Copilot. For an individual job hunter, it signals that you have used a tool most office workers will use anyway within a year or two. For an employer, it is a cheap way to check adoption after spending a lot on licences, and I suspect that is who it is really for. The rapid rewrite is worth noting too.
Microsoft removed the custom-agent section and added Cowork less than a year after launch. That is honest about how fast the product is moving, but anything you buy to prepare will date quickly. I give it 3.6. Fair price, decent verification content, but too much button recall and too little transferable value for most people paying themselves.