AI-900 was for years the most popular cheap AI credential going, and it was retired on 30 June 2026. Searches for it have halved since spring while AI-901 went from nothing to around 1,600 a month by mid 2026. The certification keeps the same name, Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Fundamentals, but the exam behind it is a different animal. The skills outline, current as of 15 April 2026, has just two parts. Identifying AI concepts and capabilities is 40 to 45%: responsible AI principles, how generative models work, picking a model and its deployment settings, and recognising workloads like text analysis, speech, vision and information extraction.
Implementing AI solutions with Microsoft Foundry is 55 to 60%, and this is where it gets real. You write system and user prompts, deploy a model and call it from a lightweight chat client using the Foundry SDK, create and test a single agent, build small apps around speech, vision and text analysis, generate images, and pull structured data out of documents, images, audio and video with Content Understanding. The audience profile says plainly that you need Python syntax and should be comfortable with REST APIs, SDKs and CLIs. I think this is the right call. The old AI-900 was mostly a vocabulary test.
You could pass it by memorising which Azure service does OCR and which does sentiment, and many people did, in an afternoon. That made it a nice first badge but a weak signal. AI-901 at least proves you have opened the portal, deployed something and called it from code. For a junior developer that is a more honest credential. The costs are real though.
It is now a harder first step, and the people AI-900 served best, project managers, analysts and curious business staff, are mostly shut out unless they want to learn some Python along the way. Keeping the old certification name makes this worse, because a hiring manager cannot tell from a LinkedIn badge which version you passed. I would write AI-901 explicitly on a CV. It is also very tied to Foundry, which has already been Azure AI Studio and Azure AI Foundry within about two years. Expect objectives and screenshots to drift, and check the study guide change log before you sit it rather than trusting a prep course recorded six months ago.
The free practice assessment now lives on AI Skills Navigator, so sign in there and use it. On price it is still cheap, priced by country with US fundamentals exams around $99, and Microsoft regularly hands out free vouchers through its virtual training days. Fundamentals certifications do not expire. I give it 4.1. A clear improvement on AI-900 for technical learners, a step backwards for everyone else. If you can code a little, it is the sensible on-ramp to AI-103.