AB-730: AI Business Professional
A condensed guide to Microsoft Exam AB-730, AI Business Professional, written from Microsoft Learn and organised around the skills list of 20 October 2026.
The guide is free. An account keeps it in your dashboard, where each module opens in order.
What is inside
Introduction to AB-730
By the end of this module you will know exactly which version of AB-730 you are booking, how its four skill areas are weighted, what the 20 October 2026 update added and deleted, how a scaled score of 700 is actually arrived at, and how to tell in one glance whether a study resource was written for the old exam or the new one.
about 19 min
Generative AI across Microsoft 365
How a Copilot prompt is grounded and why that keeps your organisation's data inside its existing permissions, what web search really sends to Bing, how Work IQ and the app you are sitting in change the answer you get, and how to decide between Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, an agent and Microsoft Copilot Cowork for a given piece of work.
about 19 min
Responsible AI and protecting data
How to recognise the three risks the exam cares about (wrong answers, instructions hidden inside content, and the habit of not checking), how to pick a verification step that matches what the task is worth, how to keep sensitive information out of prompts and answers, and how permissions, sensitivity labels, DLP and Restricted Content Discovery decide what Copilot is allowed to return.
about 18 min
Writing and managing prompts
How to build a prompt out of context, goal, source and expectations, choose between Auto, Quick response and Think deeper, point Copilot at the right file, meeting or site, save, schedule and share a prompt through Prompt Lab and the admin centre, turn a weak answer into a good one, and explain exactly what Copilot remembers between chats and who controls it.
about 19 min
Chats and Notebooks
How to get back to a Copilot conversation you had three weeks ago, what renaming and deleting a chat really change behind the scenes, and how to use a Copilot Notebook to hold the references, pages and outputs for a piece of work that runs longer than a single conversation.
about 17 min
Drafting and analysing business content
How to bring data from systems outside Microsoft 365 into Copilot with synced and federated connectors, how Work IQ and the semantic index shape what comes back, how to generate images, brand visuals and charts, how to carry one body of work through Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and how to check that a draft actually meets the business goal before you send it.
about 20 min
Meetings and collaboration
How to arrive at a meeting already briefed, run it with the Facilitator agent taking shared notes, catch up in the Copilot pane when you join late, mine the Recap tab afterwards for notes, tasks, chapters and speaker markers, and turn a useful Copilot answer into a Copilot Page your team can edit with you.
about 18 min
Prebuilt agents
How to recognise the business workflows a ready-made agent actually improves, when to reach for Researcher, Analyst or one of the coaching agents instead of ordinary chat, how to decide between a prebuilt agent and one your organisation builds, how to bring an agent into a task from Copilot Chat, Teams and the Office apps, and how to find an agent conversation again afterwards.
about 20 min
Microsoft Copilot Cowork
How to hand a scattered, multi-step piece of your week to Copilot Cowork and stay in charge of it, from writing the request and choosing between a built-in and a custom skill, through approving each action and reading the plan, progress and output files in the side panel, to running the whole thing on a schedule or on a trigger without losing track of what it is doing in your name.
about 18 min
Final review and exam day
The revision page for the last week before AB-730, pulling the nine teaching modules into four area recaps, the cues that separate features that look alike, the products and settings you meet under more than one name, a seven evening plan, and what actually happens in the chair.
about 18 min
How it was written
These study notes summarise Microsoft Learn material for Exam AB-730, which leads to the Microsoft Certified: AI Business Professional certification. It is a beginner exam for people who use Microsoft 365 Copilot to do their job rather than to build software, so the guide assumes no coding and no Azure.
Microsoft updates this exam on 20 October 2026, and the guide follows the updated skills list rather than the older one. That matters more here than usual: the update adds two entirely new sub-skill groups, on prebuilt agents and on Microsoft Copilot Cowork, removes the group about creating agents, and marks four more as majorly changed. Material written against the previous list will teach the wrong things.
Every module is written from the current documentation rather than copied from it, and was checked against Microsoft Learn a second time before publishing, by someone other than the writer. Each module says when it was last checked and links the Learn pages it drew on.
For the official list of skills measured, see the Microsoft Learn study guide for Exam AB-730.