AWS announced today not just a new AWS Certification, but a new class of certification: Business. The specific certification is called the “AWS Certified AI Business Strategist – Business”.
This certification is open in beta now, as can be seen from the Cert Metrics portal:
Until February 2027, this USD$100 certification is half price to US$50. AWS claims no technical experience is necessary, and this certification is suitable for roles that are “Product and program managers, sales and business development professionals, line-of-business leaders, consultants and business analysts, marketing professionals”.
This brings back to 12 the number of available AWS certifications:
- Foundational (2):
- Cloud Practitioner
- AI Practitioner
- Associate: (5)
- Solution Architect
- CloudOps (was SysOps)
- Developer
- Data Engineer
- Machine Learning Engineer
- Professional (3):
- Solution Architect
- DevOps Engineer
- Generative AI Developer
- Specialty (2):
- Security
- Networking – was to be retired already, now retirement rescheduled to December 2026
Given a new class of certification, we can perhaps expect to see more certifications in the category. There’s long been rumours (circling back over 6+ years) of a FinOps certification that’s not seen the light of day yet – perhaps that would fit in this class.
As noted above, the Networking – Specialty certification was recently given a slight reprieve from being axed. It had been announced it was ending 25 August 2026, but that’s pushed out to 31 December 2026. AWS Networking is continuing to evolve and expand – particularly with managed interconnect to alternate hyperscaler cloud providers. Many comments I have seen are from engineers who feel that the content in this certification is important, and not covered by any other certification, and that remove this would be a loss, to which I agree. However, I am biased as I have contributed many questions to this certification over the last decade as one of the volunteer AWS Certification Subject Matter Experts.
Some questions I have from this:
- With 12 certifications back available, does this restore the golden jacket requirement to be “all 12” again?
- Does achieving the AI Strategist – Business certification re-certify and extend any Foundational certifications the person may have (eg Cloud Practitioner)?
As always, there is a set of AWS certifications for each audience in an organisation, and I don’t expect most people to go and achieve all of them – but the subset that are most applicable to their role.