My Thoughts on the Brand-New Salesforce AI Associate Cert

This past Saturday, I sat the newly launched Salesforce AI Associate certification. As you will be able to see from the posts thumbnail I did in fact manage to pass the exam and as a result became a 7x Certified #Salesforce professional (if you count my Partner Accreditation in Process Automation). I'm actually quite happy to have passed this exam as my focus for certifications this has been Nonprofit Cloud Consultant ... however on both attempts so far this year I've failed the test. So I am actually happy to have passed this test as it means I have actually gotten one Salesforce certification this year ... we'll see if I pass any other this year.

But not to get sidetracked here, the purpose of this blog is to talk about this cert. In this post I'll share my thoughts on the exam itself after taking it, I'll also share my thoughts on whether or not the exam is worth taking in the first place.

Some Information About the Exam Overall

All of the information you will need about the exam is available in the certs Exam Guide over on Trailhead , so I'm not going to re-hash all of the details here. What you do need to know however, is like with the Salesforce Associate exam, this cert comes at a much lower cost than your base-level certs (Admin, PD1, etc.), as it sits at a cost of $75 (plus taxes) to take the exam with free resits if you fail. The passing score for AI Associate is slightly higher than Associate sitting at a passing score of 65% (compared to 62% for Associate). Both Associate exams include 40 multiple choice questions with a 70 minute time limit for completion of the exam.

For revision for the exam, there is a Trailmix that you can complete before sitting it.

My Experience in Taking the Exam

Before I dive into my thoughts on the exam I thought it might be worth talking about my experience of taking it. A couple of things you should know ahead of time, I didn't complete the Trailmix before taking the exam, I planned to do that on Friday evening or Saturday morning ahead of the exam but I didn't get around to it. I also only sat the exam for 15 minutes. I passed on my first attempt and calculated that I passed with a score of 78% ... part of me had hoped for a little higher of a score, but you know what they say, a pass is still a pass. And I passed.

N.B. If you want to calculate your total score without the use of a Score Checker (my main tool of choice doesn't include a checker for AI Associate yet), all you need to do is grab the weightings for the exam guide and multiply your score by the weighting to get the in-ratio score. If you do this calculation for all of the sections all you will need to do is add them together to calculate your final score. For example, if you got 100% in the AI Capabilities for CRM section like I did, your in-ration score would be 8% as it is 100% of the weighting for that section.

I went over each of the 40 questions twice to see if I could spot anything I was far off on, but I couldn't so I submitted the exam after my second review and passed. I found the questions to be quite interesting (more on that later) and found it to be significantly more challenging than the Associate exam. Just to clarify, when I say significantly more challenging than the Associate, I mean strictly in comparison to that exam. The AI Associate is still a base level exam and if you know enough about AI, you will still find this exam to be a bit of a breeze and an easy exam to sit.

Overall, my experience of sitting the exam was positive. I've never been a huge fan of exams and I do have a lot of thoughts about the nature of Salesforce Certification exams in general (read this post here for more on that). But within the context of a Salesforce cert exam, I'd say my experience was quite positive.

My Thoughts on the Exam Overall

So, let's move on now to my thoughts on the exam overall. Generally I would say that they are quite positive. If you're someone who's been using AI for a while, then this is a good cert to validate your knowledge, particularly your knowledge of how it works in the Salesforce space. I would say that from my experience of the exam that you will benefit from a knowledge of Salesforce's specific AI tooling such as forecasting, prediction builder and recommendations as they may come up in your exam (they did for me). If you have a base-level knowledge of this tooling you'll be fine. Honestly, I've never used any of this functionality in my time in the Salesforce ecosystem as forecasting isn't all too common with small to medium sized Nonprofits here in the UK and I've also not worked in environments using Einstein's functionality too much. So I don't have hands-on knowledge of these offerings, but I've read up about them enough to have passed the exam.

The thing I noticed about this exam is that it is very specific to Salesforce. Now, before you turn around and say "well, duh", let me clarify. The reason I mention this specifically is because the Associate exam didn't feel as specific to Salesforce to me as the AI Associate one did. In the Associate exam there were of course some very Salesforce specific questions, but a good chunk of the questions I saw focused on general database knowledge and could easily see the knowledge for those questions transferred to the likes of Hubspot, Monday and even Access. This exam to me felt like the questions were very specific to Salesforce, that isn't a bad thing for a Salesforce exam, but I feel it is worth mentioning so folks are ready.

I'd also say that the experience level of this exam is slightly higher than for the Associate exam. I feel that you could pass the Associate exam with anywhere between 2-6 months of knowledge and experience of Salesforce. Whereas, with the AI Associate I feel like the base level of knowledge of Salesforce that fits best with this exam is between 6-12 months. So still a beginner level exam, but one with a need for a slightly higher level of knowledge due to specificity of the exam.

In terms of who I think the exam best suits, this is also a little different than that of the Associate exam in my view. When I wrote my review of the Associate exam back in 2022, I stated that I felt it would be OK for managers, recruiters and Power Users to take the exam, this is not the case in my view for the AI Associate exam. In my view, this exam would be best served for professionals using Salesforce on a day-to-day basis. I do think that Power Users could take this exam, but based on my experience of the exam, I don't feel it's necessarily the right fit for people who don't use Salesforce on a day-to-day basis as it was so Salesforce specific. In terms of Salesforce professionals, I think any role that is using AI or going to be using AI in a Salesforce context would benefit from taking the exam. This is something that I think could easily be debated, so please do let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Let me know if you agree with me or not.

Finally, What Should You Do After Taking This Exam?

I want to close this post out by talking about what to do after taking this exam. Honestly, with this being an associate level exam, Salesforce are most likely planning to release more AI focused certifications and possibly even an AI Specialist career pathway (although the verbiage may be slightly different). Right now there aren't any other mainline AI focused certifications from Salesforce, but who knows we may of plans for other certs at Dreamforce (don't hold me to that).

So outside of using AI and getting familiar there isn't really anything official from Salesforce for next steps (except other Trailhead badges on AI). But that doesn't mean there isn't anything you can't do after completing this certification on AI.

This is where I want to recommend AI Force Training . AI Force Training is an online course focused on generative AI tooling with a focus on how to use it in the Salesforce space. There is a certification attached to it, and it is totally worth doing. When I sat the course and passed the certification it offers back in May, the course focused on things like Validation Rules, Formulas, Apex and LWCs along with general knowledge of using tools like ChatGPT properly. This course really helped me in building my knowledge of AI tooling and how to use it in a Salesforce context. And me being entirely honest here, I would say that this course and exam is a better tool for AI knowledge building than the AI Associate exam is. Again, let me state that the AI Associate exam wasn't bad, but for me (and it might be for you as well) it was a confirmation of knowledge I already had. I can't say that I learnt anything as such from the exam (again, not a bad thing in context), whereas I learnt a lot from the AI Force Training course and certification. So in my opinion, this is what I would recommend doing after the AI Associate if you haven't completed it already. So as I close, I want to give a quick shout to Mark Good who put together the AI Force Training course and certification exam.

Check out the AI Force Training course here .

But what do you think? Did you jump on the bandwagon early and take the exam? If so what do you think? Do you think I'm fairly close to the truth with my review? Or do you think that I'm way off base? Let me know in the comments below.