Microsoft Foundry for Azure AI

In this article I am writing about my experience on renewal of my AI-102 Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Engineer Associate certification. I am also sharing tips to crack this exam and similar ones.

AI-102 Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Engineer Associate

AI-102 Certification Journey

AI-102 is retiring on 30-JUNE-2026, I have cracked this certification in 2024 with multiple hands-on sessions during Microsoft AI Challenges which provides free hands-on capabilities and free vouchers on completion of the challenges. This exam requires programming knowledge of Python or C#.

I have chosen Python for my coding-related questions. During every renewal we are able to keep ourselves updated with latest advancement in the technology.

This year 2026, Microsoft Foundry for Agentic AI was introduced as new addition in the renewal course.

Microsoft Foundry

Microsoft Foundry which is formerly Azure AI studio is an integrated platform for AI development using Azure services.

✅It is introduced as one stop destination for all you need to implement Agentic AI in Microsoft Azure- you can choose Models from OpenAI, Azure AI or Open-Source models from Hugging Face, etc. ✅ Implement Responsible AI using Microsoft Foundry — Implement guardrails, prompt shields, etc. ✅ Develop an AI app with Microsoft Foundry SDK. In Visual studio we can enable it as an extension and create AI apps. ✅ How to choose Models for our application? we can choose variety of Models based on our use case — Open-source models (from Hugging face, etc.) or Azure AI models, LLM’s (Large Language Models) or SLM’s (Small Language Models), etc. ✅ Integrate custom tools as Agents in Microsoft Foundry.

This renewal has helped me keep my learning with Agentic AI development using Microsoft Foundry and recollect existing Azure AI services in Foundry Tools for

☑️ Azure Language services in Foundry Tools to analyze NLP (Natural language Processing), perform tasks like entity extraction, sentiment analysis and summarization. Also build conversational language models, and provide question-answering solutions.

☑️ Azure Speech in Foundry tools to implement text to speech and speech to text transformations. Additionally implement real-time live speech for conversational applications and Agents.

☑️ Azure translator to translate text between languages.

☑️ Azure Document Intelligence to extract fields from documents like invoices, etc.,

☑️ Azure Content Understanding — a multi-model (text, video, etc.) content analysis capability.

✅ AI-102 retires on 30-JUNE-2026. So pending renewals please do it on priority and extend the certification by one year. ✅ Microsoft is releasing next versions of Azure AI Engineer certifications in next few weeks.