Proofpoint is best known for email security and security awareness training, and its Cybersecurity Academy has been rebuilt around AI. There are two kinds of credential. The specialist certifications are free. Current ones include Certified AI Agent Security Specialist, Certified AI Data Security Specialist and Certified AI Email Security Specialist, plus an Email Identity Impersonation Protection Specialist. Each one is three course sessions and three exams, and you need 100% on each, with unlimited attempts. That pass rule tells you what these are.
When you can retake until perfect, the exam is a comprehension check, not an assessment. I do not think that is a bad thing for free material, but nobody should treat these as proof of skill. What they are good for is getting a security team talking the same language about AI agents: what happens when an agent has access to your mailbox or file shares, how sensitive data ends up in AI tools, and why AI-generated phishing makes old awareness training advice about spotting bad grammar useless. The technical certifications are the paid side. Each has been renamed for the AI era: Collaboration Security Analyst, Data Security Analyst, the matching Administrator certifications, and an Essentials Administrator exam.
Recommended training is three days, live or on demand, and the exam is 90 minutes and costs $250. Proofpoint says you only need to pass the exam, which I respect; plenty of vendors force you to buy the course first. A Guardian Pass subscription bundles unlimited training, labs and one exam voucher a year, but you have to ask your account manager for the price. My recurring complaint about vendor security training applies here. Every risk in the AI courses is described in a way that a Proofpoint product happens to solve.
The courses are weakest on the controls that cost nothing, such as limiting what an agent can reach in the first place. Search interest in Proofpoint certification is modest, around 110 a month in the US. My take: do the free AI Agent Security Specialist course for the framing, ignore the certificate as a signal, and only pay for technical exams if Proofpoint is part of your day job.