PMI-CPMAI™ Overview — What’s Tested and How to Prepare

High-level PMI-CPMAI™ overview: what’s covered, domain weights, exam format snapshot, common pitfalls, and a practical prep loop.

PMI-CPMAI™ tests applied AI project delivery: making sensible, responsible decisions under real constraints—privacy/security, governance, feasibility, data readiness, model validation, and operational reliability.

For the latest official exam details and requirements, see: https://www.pmi.org/certifications/ai-project-management-cpmai

Official exam snapshot (PMI)

Source: PMI-CPMAI Examination Content Outline and Specifications — September 2025.

  • Items: 120 total, including 20 unscored pretest questions
  • Testing time: 160 minutes
  • Breaks: none scheduled
  • Tutorial + survey: optional (up to 15 minutes each), not counted against the 160-minute testing time
  • Note: completion of the PMI-CPMAI exam prep course is required to sit the exam (per the exam content outline)

Official domain weights (PMI-CPMAI)

The Examination Content Outline specifies the proportion of questions by domain (the exact number may vary by form):

DomainWeightApprox. target items (out of 120)
Support Responsible and Trustworthy AI Efforts15%18
Identify Business Needs and Solutions26%31
Identify Data Needs26%31
Manage AI Model Development and Evaluation16%19
Operationalize AI Solution17%21

What questions tend to reward

  • Responsible delivery: privacy/security, transparency, bias checks, audit trails, and compliance monitoring.
  • Framing and feasibility: the right problem, a realistic scope, and a defensible ROI/story.
  • Data realism: data sources, access, SMEs, quality evaluation, and communicating data limits.
  • Model governance thinking: technique selection trade-offs, QA/QC, training oversight, and go/no-go decisions.
  • Operational discipline: deployment plans, monitoring, drift/updates, transition, contingency planning, and lessons learned.

Common pitfalls

  • Jumping to model building before clarifying business need, constraints, and success criteria.
  • Treating “data exists” as “data is usable” (privacy, access, quality, representativeness, lineage).
  • Overlooking governance: transparency, bias checks, compliance monitoring, and auditability.
  • Confusing offline accuracy with real-world value and operational reliability.
  • Shipping without a plan to monitor, maintain, and respond to failures.

A practical prep loop

  1. Use the Syllabus as your coverage checklist.
  2. After each task set, review the matching part of the Cheatsheet and write a short “miss log.”
  3. Do focused drills in Practice, then re-drill the objectives behind every miss.
  4. Finish with mixed sets to force transfer across governance, framing, data, model, and operations scenarios.