The OCI AI Foundations Associate is Oracle's entry-level AI credential. The current exam is 1Z0-1122-26. The 2025 version, 1Z0-1122-25, was scheduled to retire on 29 May 2026. Oracle's 2026 update kept its policy of making every Foundations-level course and certification free, so the MyLearn learning path and the exam cost nothing.
The exam is 60 minutes of multiple-choice questions, taken unproctored inside MyLearn with no separate registration. Oracle's catalogue does not make the question count easy to find; third-party write-ups citing Oracle's Japanese listing say 40 questions with a 65% pass mark. Oracle certifications are valid for 24 months. The topics follow the usual foundations shape: what AI, machine learning and deep learning are and how they relate, common types of machine learning, then generative AI and large language models, including prompt engineering and fine-tuning. The Oracle-specific part covers OCI AI Services, the OCI Generative AI service and AI Vector Search in Oracle Database.
Oracle does not publish domain weights, so any percentages you see online are guesses. What I like: it is free, it is short, and most of what it teaches is not tied to Oracle. For someone who wants a structured walk through AI vocabulary without paying for it, that is a good deal, and better than Google, Microsoft and AWS, who all charge for their foundations exams. What I do not like: an unproctored exam you can sit from your sofa has almost no signalling value, and this one has attracted a large crowd of dump sites and paid practice-test sellers promising the exact questions. Between the free price and the open-book format, the badge tells an employer very little. The disagreement across third-party guides about the number of questions, timing and pass mark, mostly because they mix up the 2023, 2025 and 2026 versions, also makes it harder than it should be to know what you are walking into.
Check the exam entry in MyLearn before you start. Oracle has since added a separate Agentic AI Foundations Associate (1Z0-1157-26), also free, which covers building agents rather than general AI concepts. If you only have time for one, I would pick that one. If you are completely new to AI, do this one first. Either way, treat it as a free course with a certificate attached, not as a credential that will carry a CV.