Master AI Fundamentals — Hands-On with Microsoft Foundry
Refreshed Azure AI Fundamentals — responsible AI, generative and agentic AI concepts, and hands-on solutions built with Microsoft Foundry for the AI-901 exam.
About This Course
The AI-901 is the refreshed Azure AI Fundamentals exam, and it replaces the long-running AI-900 (which retires on 30 June 2026). It still begins where every AI career should — with the core concepts and the responsible AI principles that underpin every Microsoft AI solution — but it no longer stops at theory. The exam now expects you to get hands-on with Microsoft Foundry, so this course takes you from understanding AI to actually building it.
The exam is split into two parts, and so is this course. First you build the vocabulary: how generative and agentic AI work, the difference between model types, and the six responsible AI principles Microsoft holds every deployment to. Then you move into Microsoft Foundry to put it into practice — deploying models, writing prompts, building a single-agent solution, and working with text, speech, vision, and information-extraction capabilities. Every module maps directly to the official AI-901 skills measured.
If you are starting out in AI, moving across from another technical domain, or you simply need to speak the language confidently and demonstrate it in Foundry, this is the right place to begin. A little Python helps for the SDK demos, but it is not a prerequisite — the course builds your knowledge from the ground up.
What You'll Learn
Describe the six Microsoft responsible AI principles and apply them to real solutions
Explain how generative AI models work and choose the right model for a task
Build and test generative AI apps and agents in the Microsoft Foundry portal
Use Foundry for text analysis, speech, computer vision, and information extraction
Prerequisites
- No prior AI experience required — the course starts from first principles
- Basic familiarity with the Azure portal is helpful but not required
- A little Python helps for the hands-on Foundry SDK demos, but is not mandatory
Who Is This Course For
This course is built for anyone at the start of their AI journey — career changers, IT professionals, students, and business stakeholders who need to understand AI and prove they can work with it. If your team is adopting generative and agentic AI and you want a credible, hands-on foundation rather than a surface-level overview, the AI-901 gives you exactly that.
No prior AI experience is required. A basic comfort with the Azure portal and a little Python will make the Foundry demos smoother, but the course starts from the fundamentals and brings you all the way to building and testing real solutions. It is also the natural on-ramp to associate-level certifications like the AI-103 Azure AI Apps and Agents Developer.
What's Inside
Responsible AI Principles
- Fairness, reliability, and safety considerations
- Privacy, security, and inclusiveness in AI solutions
- Transparency and accountability across the AI lifecycle
- Applying responsible AI to enterprise deployments
AI Concepts and Model Selection
- How generative AI models work
- Choosing an appropriate model based on capabilities
- Model deployment options and configuration parameters
- Common AI workloads — generative, agentic, vision, speech, and language
Generative AI and Agents with Microsoft Foundry
- Writing effective system and user prompts
- Deploying and interacting with a model in the Foundry portal
- Building a lightweight chat client with the Foundry SDK
- Creating and testing a single-agent solution
Text and Speech Solutions
- Text analysis — keyword extraction, entity detection, sentiment, and summarization
- Speech recognition and speech synthesis fundamentals
- Responding to spoken prompts with a multimodal model
- Azure Speech in Foundry Tools
Computer Vision and Image Generation
- Interpreting visual input with multimodal models
- Generating new visual outputs from text prompts
- Building a lightweight vision-enabled application
Information Extraction with Content Understanding
- Extracting information from documents and forms
- Pulling structured data from images, audio, and video
- Building an application with Azure Content Understanding