I sat the AWS Certified AI Business Strategist beta on 29 September 2026, the first day it was available worldwide, and passed. If you copy anything from this, do the Claude drills first to get an idea of what kind of material you might already know, and for sure build a fact sheet, because that covers off the rote questions where logic won’t work.
The setup at a glance
- Study Notes
- why an answer is right, in syllabus order
- Rules
- cue → answer, grouped by stem question
- Fact Sheet
- straight facts and lists, one line each
- Quiz Database
- every missed or shaky question, one row each
- Last night
- repeat misses and exam technique, one phone screen
- Frameworks & Standards
- optional, for framework structure
This is the layout my instructions now build, reworked the day after the exam from the pages I used for AIB-C01. A Claude project holds the instructions and reads and writes these pages through the Notion connector, and so every drill, practice test and miss lands in them.
Why I needed this
AWS announced AIB-C01 on 1 September and beta delivery opened on 29 September. The Skill Builder course and a short Practice Question Set were there from day one. However, there was no third-party material at announcement, and I always find that practice exams work best for me, because if I’m just reading material you don’t really know how much of it is actually going in. When I did AI Practitioner earlier this year I got a Claude project to drill the statistics areas I just didn’t really get.
What you need
- A Claude project, with the Notion connector switched on.
- A Notion page to act as the hub.
- All the material you can get for the exam: the exam guide, the course, and the frameworks the guide names.
- My instructions template, or your own from a previous study project.
Start with the business problem
The steps
1. Put everything in the project first
Gather all the material you can and load it before you start, because the best practice is to get all the information in first. For an exam with an established course I’d normally get all of the slides, every PowerPoint from one of Stephane Maarek’s courses for example, and put them into the project so all the information is there. Start with the exam guide, the AWS sheet of what they’re expecting, because it and its weightings set the scope. For AIB-C01 I had the exam guide and the frameworks it names from the start, and added the Skill Builder course as I went, because I hadn’t done it yet. Practice tests are the one input that has to come in as you go.
2. Set up the instructions
Paste my template into the project instructions and fill in the exam brief. If you already have a study project, get Claude to audit its instructions against the template first. I got Claude to run through my SA Pro project’s instructions, as this exam was so new with nothing available. If you haven’t done this before, the template is fresh and works for any exam. The rule that carried furthest is how decision rules are written:
Each answer hangs off its own cue. The decoy is named as a decoy, “(GenAI is the decoy)”, and never written as a mirrored “X, not Y” / “Y, not X” pair.
My first quiz on 10 September came back 8/10, and both misses were ISO/IEC 42001 and 23053 swapped in opposite directions, because the rules sat side by side as mirror images.
The exam brief at the top is the only section you fill in. Once the exam guide is in the project, Claude can pull most of it for you: the format, the domains and weightings, what’s in and out of scope, and the frameworks and docs the guide names. The rest only you know: your exam date, which official material you have, what Claude can assume about you, your guess at your blind spots, and your Notion hub page ID. Ask Claude to fill in what it can from the guide and tell you what’s left.
3. Let Claude build the Notion pages
Have Claude build the pages from the instructions through the connector while you steer, which is how mine went. Keep the page IDs on the hub so every session can find them.
4. Ask for drills early
Ask for questions before you’ve read much, to get a barometer on your level. My first day studying I only had my phone, and so that’s where I started. The instructions hold the domain weightings and the format, and so the prompt can be as casual as this one, which came back as ten scenario questions weighted to the four domains, marked and logged by skill ID:
Let’s do some questions as I have Internet now but will lose it later
5. Put each practice test review in Notion as its own page
Copy each practice test’s review into Notion as its own sub-page under the hub, then tell Claude where it is, so it reads the page and isn’t overloading its context. It goes through what you got wrong and files each miss into the fields you already have. That’s how I did all five of mine.
6. Start the Fact Sheet on day one
Make one on day one, but expect it to be limited, because you don’t know yet what you need to look at. It gets bigger as you add detail from practice questions or from what you think is important. I built mine on 27 September, two days before the exam, because the other pages felt too heavy and I needed something I could quickly read, and it turned out to be the most useful page on the day.
My run through it
| Date | What I did |
|---|---|
| First quiz on the frameworks | |
| Full build from the exam guide, CAF for AI and the RAI Lens, five weighted drills | |
| Sundog practice test 1 | |
| Sundog practice test 2 | |
| Skill Builder course, all 13 modules in a day | |
| Sundog practice test 3 | |
| Maarek practice tests 1 and 2, Fact Sheet built | |
| Maarek practice test 3 | |
| Exam, passed |
What I used for AIB-C01
- AWS exam guide (AIB-C01)
- Skill Builder learning plan and the exam prep plan with the Practice Question Set
- CAF for AI whitepaper
- Well-Architected Responsible AI Lens
- Maturity model for adopting generative AI on AWS
- Sundog Education (Frank Kane) AIB-C01 practice exams
- Stephane Maarek and Abhishek Singh AIB-C01 practice exams
Checking the result
With AWS you don’t get told on the day anymore, and so I checked CertMetrics, where results are posted first. The Credly notification came soon after, and the email the following day.
That wait is frustrating, because you finish an exam with an empty feeling. On SA Pro, which I wrote about in The depth the recert can’t test, every single question felt different from what I expected from all the work I’d put in, and I had to talk myself back into it quite a few times over about three hours. I didn’t really have that with this one, but I did have a few where I didn’t know the exact definition, which is why I’m pushing anyone sitting it to get those really into their head.
What fought back
The first reformat of the pages failed three times with “No approval received”, because updating a Notion page needs approval, creating one doesn’t, and the prompt waits for you. I just wasn’t looking at my phone, and when I watched for the prompts all five edits landed.
On 20 September Claude decided no named AWS maturity model existed, having only searched the exam guide and the CAF for AI whitepaper, and later that day it found the Prescriptive Guidance model linked above.
In Claude’s drills and the practice tests, definitions were always tied into a scenario, and there were hardly any straight-up definition questions. However, the exam had a few that were just distinctly definitions. It wasn’t all definitions, but there were more than I was expecting. I got by on knowing what matters to a business, and that’s my experience, which someone doing this for the first time won’t have.
What I’ll take back to work
It was great to re-examine the business side in more depth again, around adoption and the empirical approach AWS takes to enterprise migration programmes in general. It’s made me think about where we live on their maturity scales for adoption at my own company, and some structures we could look to put in place.
Limits
The candidate agreement bars sharing exam questions, so nothing here says what was on the paper. It’s one exam and a few weeks of prep, and I came in already holding AI Practitioner and SA Pro.