Fundamentals of AI Solutions
What you will learn
In this domain, you learn the main AI/ML services that AWS provides. The central theme is knowing when to use Amazon Bedrock (a foundation model API), Amazon SageMaker (a machine learning platform), Amazon Q (a business-oriented assistant), and purpose-specific AI services (Comprehend, Rekognition, Transcribe, and others). It is the largest domain, accounting for 28% of the AIF-C01 exam.
Key points
- Amazon Bedrock - a service that lets you invoke multiple foundation models through a unified API. You can use models from vendors such as Anthropic and Meta, along with Amazon's own Nova, in a serverless manner
- Amazon SageMaker - an ML platform that provides end-to-end support from data preparation through model development, training, and deployment
- Amazon Q - a business-oriented generative AI assistant. There are Q Developer (development support) and Q Business (internal document search)
- Purpose-specific AI - Comprehend (text analysis), Translate (translation), Transcribe (speech to text), Polly (text to speech), Rekognition (image and video analysis), Textract (extracting text from documents)
- Search, conversation, and review - Kendra (semantic search over internal documents), Lex (conversational bots), Personalize (recommendations), and A2I (human review of AI predictions)
- Bedrock Knowledge Bases - a Bedrock feature that makes it easy to implement RAG with your own data
- Bedrock Agents - a feature that lets you build AI agents on Bedrock that autonomously execute multiple steps
- Bedrock Guardrails - a guardrail feature to prevent inappropriate statements and leakage of personal information
Terms and concepts
Amazon Bedrock
A fully managed service that lets you invoke foundation models from multiple vendors through a single API (as of August 2026, these include models from Anthropic, Meta, and Mistral AI, along with Amazon's own Nova, and the lineup keeps growing). It can be used in a serverless manner and provides additional features such as Knowledge Bases (RAG), Agents, and Guardrails.
Amazon SageMaker
A platform that supports the entire process of ML model development (data preparation, training, evaluation, deployment, operation). It provides development with SageMaker Studio, training with SageMaker Training, and production inference with SageMaker Endpoint. It is powerful when you want to build your own model from scratch.
→ ML Development with SageMaker / → Amazon SageMaker Glossary
Amazon Q (Q Developer / Q Business)
Amazon Q is a business-oriented generative AI assistant provided by AWS. Q Developer supports code generation, review, and AWS resource operations, while Q Business is an internal knowledge assistant that answers from internal documents using RAG. It is provided in a SaaS form and is ready to use right away.
→ Enterprise AI with Q Business / → Coding Assistance with Q Developer
When to use purpose-specific AI services
Comprehend (sentiment analysis, entity extraction), Translate (machine translation), Transcribe (speech to text), Polly (text to speech), Rekognition (face detection, object detection, content moderation), and Textract (extracting structured text from PDFs and images) are each APIs optimized for their specific purpose. They can be adopted easily, quickly, and at low cost.
→ NLP Analysis with Comprehend / → Image Analysis with Rekognition
Bedrock Guardrails and Knowledge Bases
Knowledge Bases is a Bedrock feature that builds RAG from data sources such as S3, automating the integration of search and prompts. Guardrails is a filter that blocks inappropriate content, personal information, specific topics, and the like, ensuring the safety needed for enterprise use.
The difference between Kendra and Q Business
Kendra is a machine-learning-based enterprise search engine that searches internal documents by meaning and returns the matching documents and passages. Q Business goes beyond search: its generative AI assembles the answer itself and returns it as a finished assistant. In short, Kendra is a search building block (usable as the retrieval side of RAG), while Q Business is a ready-made solution that bundles search plus generation - that is the contrast between the two.
→ Enterprise Search with Kendra / → Enterprise AI with Q Business
Personalize / Lex / A2I
Personalize is a recommendation service based on the same technology that powers Amazon.com's recommendations, enabling personalization such as "customers who viewed this item also viewed." Lex is a service for building voice and text chatbots using the same conversational technology as Alexa, commonly used for automated responses in contact centers. A2I (Augmented AI) is a service for building workflows that route only low-confidence AI predictions to human reviewers, and it is used in combination with Textract and Rekognition.
→ Recommendation Engines with Personalize / → Building Chatbots with Lex / → Textract and Human Review with A2I
Check your understanding
Check what you have learned with 5 questions