All about the new AWS Generative AI Developer Professional exam

The new AWS certified Generative AI Developer -- Professional (AIP-C01) certification exam is one of the most challenging AWS has to offer. This certification will show that you are on the cutting edge of practical, scalable, ethical, and secure generative AI solutions on AWS. If you already work with generative AI solutions on AWS, or you're a highly experienced AWS engineer that wants to specialize in AI solutions, this certification may be a great fit for you.

In this article, I will go over some of the most frequently asked questions about AIP-C01 so you can be fully prepared to take on this coveted new certification.

What is the AWS Certified Generative AI Developer – Professional Certification?

The AWS Certified Generative AI Developer – Professional (AIP-C01) exam is full of layers. Yes, you'll need to understand how to integrate AWS GenAI services into applications, but you'll also need to know how to integrate them into your development process and AWS ecosystem management. Each question is dense with layered requirements, asking for solutions that are scalable, cost-effective, high-performing, and that handle data responsibly. At times this exam felt as much a test of my reading comprehension as it did my AWS knowledge.

This certification is designed to test deep knowledge of system design and design trade-offs when working with GenAI solutions. This sits along-side the AWS Solutions Architect and AWS DevOps Engineer certifications as a professional-level certification. This means that AWS views these skills as core components of working with AWS in 2026 and beyond.

What experience do you need before taking this exam?

AWS recommends that you have 2 or more years creating production-grade applications on AWS as well as at least 1 year building GenAI solutions on AWS. Even if you meet these recommendations, I suspect the exam will require dedicated preparation time for most people.

In my experience, AWS certifications are not only a great way to display your current skill set, but they are also a tool to explore the breadth of AWS offerings and communicate to the world that you are a leader in these AWS-related skills. While there are no certification requirements to sit this exam, I strongly recommend holding the Data Engineer and Machine Learning Engineer Associate certifications before attempting this one.

What does the AIP-C01 exam cover?

The AIP-C01 is all about integrating Foundation Models (FMs) and AWS GenAI services into workflows of all kinds -- applications, business workflows, development workflows, AI Agents, and AWS management workflows. This means you'll not only need to have deep experience with Amazon Bedrock, but you'll also need to know how to responsibly handle and store data such that GenAI models can leverage them. You'll need to be very familiar with AWS's vector store offerings, and the practice of creating knowledge bases for access by GenAI models. You'll need to know how to evaluate and optimize GenAI applications for cost and performance. You'll also need to understand how to secure and govern your GenAI solutions.

These core GenAI skills will be tested heavily in conjuncture with classic AWS architecture assessment. The solutions in this exam rely heavily on AWS serverless offerings for event orchestration, API development, and scalability. You will need to understand when to lean on the nondeterministic results of an LLM or AI Agent vs. when to create deterministic decision points using Lambda or Step Functions. When it comes to successfully achieving this certification, there really are no short-cuts. Experience and attention to detail will be needed to cut through the densely tangled questions and answers.

How difficult is the AIP-C01 exam?

Aside from the infamous Advanced Networking Specialty certification exam, this is the most difficult AWS exam I have ever experienced (and I have taken almost all of them - pending the new CloudOps Associate). I am a fairly fast test-taker, usually leaving the testing center with at least 30% of my time remaining. The AIP-C01 exam had me down to the wire and exhausted, requiring almost all of the 205 minutes allotted for the beta exam. There are two factors that lead to this level of difficulty:

1. Complexity and compounding requirements. Not only were the questions and answers long, but they were packed full of tricky requirements. Data residency, privacy, scalability, cost-optimization, and performance-related requirements intermingled to create a complex map for each question. I often found myself re-reading questions to make sure I had the full picture, or to find that one detail that could lead me to one answer over another.
   
   

2. Patterns and anti-patterns. Like the other professional-level exams, there were often two or more viable choices to answer each question. Tiny details could make the difference between a good answer and the correct answer. This means that reading every answer on the AIP-C02 is not just recommended, but required; most questions require the careful elimination of less-suitable answers before selecting the best available answer.
   
   

How is the exam structured?

While it's subject to change when the exam comes out of beta, currently it consists of 85 questions over 205 minutes, which are all multiple choice, multiple select, ordering, or matching questions. I would have loved to see some of the new case study questions to cut down on reading time, hopefully they will add some with the full release of the new exam. It's also important to note that of the 85 questions, 10 of them are "unscored content". These questions are being evaluated for potential inclusion on future iterations of the exam, and will not affect your score. So if you see a question that takes you totally off-guard, try not to fret and answer it to the best of your ability.

When does the AIP-C01 exam come out of beta?

The AIP-C01 beta exam is available through March 31, 2026. After that, there may or may not be a period of time where they review and refine the exam before full release. This can take anywhere from days to months, but at the time of this article's writing there has not been an official date declared for the non-beta exam's release.

If you sit the beta exam, you still earn the full certification, plus an "early adopter" badge if you're one of the first 5,000 individuals to achieve the certification. I highly recommend setting this as a personal challenge if you're reading this in early 2026. But if you're interested in the more stable full release, you'll have to wait until later in the year.

How should you prepare for the AIP-C01 exam?

For this exam, I recommend heavy emphasis on hands-on learning and experimentation. Start by carefully reading the exam guide to determine your strengths and weaknesses, and create a study plan focused on addressing your weakest areas. Our Bedrock Deep Dive learning path is a great place to start and find a number of relevant hands-on lab experiences. Once you've shored up some weak points with practical experience, it's time to try some practice questions. AWS offers a free set of practice questions you can use to assess your exam readiness. Once again, use the questions you get wrong to inform a study plan to address your knowledge gaps. Look for a comprehensive learning path on Pluralsight, coming soon in 2026.

It can be difficult to get hands-on experience with large-scale or global solutions. Make sure you've read the documentation on knowledge bases at scale (including storage options, source attribution, OpenSearch capabilities) and multi-region architecture considerations (cross-region inference, data residency, high availability). Hopefully you have ways to implement these through your daily work, but familiarizing yourself with the documentation may be necessary for some of these topics that are covered in depth on AIP-C01.

Common mistakes to avoid with the AIP-C01 exam

When preparing for any certification, it's easy to put things off. You may be of the mindset that you'll schedule your exam when you're ready to pass it. Personally, I find it extremely motivating to have a date on the calendar, effectively limiting the amount of time I have to study and prepare. You can schedule it weeks or months out, depending on your level of comfort. But having a goal date will make your study sessions a more deliberate part of your life, rather than something you'll get around to eventually.

Another big mistake when taking the exam is not reading the questions and answers all the way through. When taking practice questions, I found myself relying on some bad heuristics. I would hone in on a phrase ("...with the LEAST operational overhead."), and start immediately looking through the answers without fully understanding the requirements. It's extremely important to read every question and answer provided.

Finally, when taking the test, it's imperative not to get discouraged, and to give every question your best effort. There are 10 unscored questions that may be difficult, unexpected, or more ambiguous than the 75 graded questions. And even when you don't know the answer, you can probably identify one or two answers that are certainly NOT correct. Even if you can narrow your answer down to a 50/50 guess on HALF of the exam questions, you could theoretically achieve a passing score of 750/1000.

On the day of the exam, you'll need to be comfortable immersing yourself in these complex exam scenarios. Think of each scenario not as a trivia question with one correct answer, but rather a framework through which to analyze the answers provided through a decision-making lens. Understand design trade-offs and how they relate to the stated requirements, and follow your instincts when the answer is not immediately obvious.

Is the AWS Generative AI Developer – Professional Certification worth it?

Whether or not any certification is worth it is entirely up to the person seeking it, and possibly the organization they work for. Will this certification alone land you a dream job working on GenAI applications? Certainly not. But the power of certification is truly unlocked when it is coupled with past experience (the skills you are certifying) and future ambition (clear goals outside of certification). The number one thing that will make you a GenAI Developer is the act of developing GenAI solutions, a certification is just a way to accredit and communicate those skills.

Check with your management and organization to see if this certification would bring value. These certifications can help with AWS Partner status. It's also possible that you or your organization may simply want to bolster their breadth of knowledge around GenAI on AWS, in which case certification can be used as a learning tool.

But there's no doubt that this will be a highly desired and valuable certification for years to come, so if you feel that you are a good candidate to take it, I highly recommend taking it on.

Final thoughts

I didn't know what to expect when I embarked on the goal of achieving this certification. If anything, I considered myself a solutions architect who is skeptical of AI-driven solutions. But now I find myself optimistic about the practical, real-world applications of AI, and the future of human creativity in developing AI-powered systems. AI implementation at scale is full of pitfalls that require human expertise to avoid, and we are needed to make sure AI systems are implemented with privacy, ethics, and security in mind.

For the right candidate, AIP-C01 will challenge you and grow the breadth of your skillset in ways you will not expect. AWS has developed a pragmatic and grounded set of opinionated practices around GenAI that will appeal to even the stodgiest AI-hype-deniers (a crowd I consider myself a part of). So whether you're an experienced cloud practitioner who wants to expand their knowledge of AWS's GenAI offerings, or you're a GenAI developer who wants to shore up your cloud fundamentals, this certification is a great way to accelerate your learning and show off your skills to the world.