Azure AI Engineer (AI-300) trap evaluation

Service capability overlap and grounding architecture confusion

Azure OpenAI and the Azure AI Services portfolio handle overlapping scenarios at different abstraction levels. The exam tests whether you can identify when a specialized AI service (Document Intelligence for form extraction, Language for text classification, Speech for voice scenarios) is more appropriate than a general-purpose foundation model prompt. A consistent second trap is RAG architecture design: the decision about whether to use Azure AI Search for grounding, how to configure the index, and when fine-tuning is appropriate versus retrieval augmentation requires understanding the tradeoff the scenario is asking about. Candidates who know the services without understanding the grounding architecture tradeoffs produce answers that are technically plausible but wrong for the described requirement.