AAISM is ISACA's Advanced in AI Security Management credential, launched on 19 August 2025. It certifies the security manager who has to govern, risk-manage, and control AI systems, not the person building them. The exam is 90 multiple-choice questions in 150 minutes, covering three domains, scored on a scale of 200 to 800 with 450 required to pass. It costs USD 459 for ISACA members and USD 599 for nonmembers, plus a one-time USD 50 application processing fee.
Before anything else, check whether you can sit it. AAISM is gated on an active CISM or CISSP, and only those two credentials qualify. AI experience does not substitute, and whichever one you qualify with has to stay active for as long as you hold the AAISM. If you hold neither, this is not your next exam. What follows is the rest of it: where AAISM sits among ISACA's AI credentials, the eligibility rule in full, the format and scoring, the three domains and their weights, the total cost, and what upkeep looks like after you pass.
Where AAISM fits in ISACA's AI lineup
ISACA's Advanced in AI family has exactly three credentials, each aimed at a different seat at the table:
- AAIA, Advanced in AI Audit, for auditors and assurance professionals
- AAISM, Advanced in AI Security Management, the subject of this post
- AAIR, Advanced in AI Risk, which launched on 15 April 2026
There is no fourth. ISACA also publishes an AI Fundamentals certificate, but that is a certificate rather than a credential in this family, and it does not belong in the same sentence as these three.
The design pattern is consistent across all of them: each one is layered on a credential you already hold, so none is an entry point into either AI or security. That is deliberate. ISACA is not testing whether you know what a large language model is. It is testing whether a working security professional can extend an existing program to cover systems that behave differently from the applications that program was built for.
If you are choosing between the audit route and the security one, AAIA vs AAISM sets the two side by side, and what the AAIA certification is covers the audit credential at the same depth as this post covers AAISM.
Who can sit the AAISM exam?
You need one active credential from a list of two: CISM or CISSP. That is the whole list. ISACA has not widened it, and it is worth noting that the company clearly knows how to widen one when it wants to, because the sibling AAIR credential carries a long roster of qualifying designations with a public lookup page attached. AAISM has nothing of the kind. Read the short list as intentional rather than provisional.
Two consequences follow. The first is that experience alone gets you nowhere. Years of securing model pipelines, with no CISM and no CISSP behind you, still leaves you outside the gate. The second is that the prerequisite is a standing condition, not a one-time ticket. ISACA's maintenance process requires proof that the qualifying credential is still active, so letting your CISM lapse takes the AAISM down with it. Budget for two sets of CPE obligations and two annual fees, not one.
ISACA also expects relevant security and advisory experience along with demonstrated AI-systems expertise. That part is not a numeric year count the way the flagship certifications use, so treat it as a description of the candidate the exam was written for rather than a checkbox. The full eligibility picture, including the application window after you pass, is in AAISM requirements and eligibility. If you are still working toward the prerequisite, start with what the CISM exam is.
What is the AAISM exam format and pass score?
90 multiple-choice questions, 150 minutes, one sitting. That works out to roughly 100 seconds a question, which is comfortable on a definition and tight on a four-paragraph scenario. Every question gives you one stem and four options, and you pick the single best answer. Some items are unscored pretest questions seeded among the scored ones, and you cannot tell which.
Scoring is scaled. Your raw correct count converts to a scaled score between 200 and 800, and 450 is the pass mark. Two things about that number are commonly misunderstood. It is not a percentage, and it cannot be converted into one, because the conversion is not published and varies with form difficulty. And the domain-level breakdown on your result report is informational only, since the scoring model does not work from domain percentages in the first place. Wrong answers carry no penalty, so leave nothing blank.
ISACA does not publish an AAISM pass rate. Nobody credible has one, and its own candidate guidance warns you off training providers that promise figures like that. For a realistic read on where the difficulty actually sits, see how hard the AAISM exam is.
The exam is offered in English, Spanish, and Japanese.
Where can you take the AAISM exam?
PSI delivers it, either at a test center or online with a live remote proctor, and you book through ISACA. Your registration opens a six-month eligibility window in which the sitting must happen.
One restriction is worth knowing before you plan around a home setup. ISACA states on the AAISM registration tab that residents of India, Mainland China, and Hong Kong can only take AAISM at a testing center, and cannot use live remote proctoring for this exam. That carve-out does not appear in every ISACA document about AAISM, but it is the most specific published statement, so plan for it if you are in one of those regions.
What are the three AAISM domains?
Three domains, and unusually for ISACA, the largest one is also the most technical.
| Domain | Title | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | AI Governance and Program Management | 31% |
| 2 | AI Risk Management, also published as AI Risk and Opportunity Management | 31% |
| 3 | AI Technologies and Controls | 38% |
Domain 1 builds the program: the stakeholder map, the frameworks that shape AI governance, regulatory requirements, AI strategies and policies, asset and data lifecycle management, and AI-aware business continuity and incident response. If you have stood up a security program before, this is the domain where your existing instincts transfer most cleanly.
Domain 2 covers AI risk assessment, thresholds and treatment, AI threat and vulnerability management, and AI vendor and supply-chain risk. It carries a naming quirk you should know about so it does not throw you: ISACA's web outline page calls this domain AI Risk Management, while its own AAISM candidate guide calls it AI Risk and Opportunity Management. Same 31%, same three sub-areas, two names in two official places. We name both and resolve neither, because ISACA has not. It is the same situation we flag on CRISC, CGEIT, and CDPSE.
Domain 3, at 38%, is where the AI-specific knowledge is: secure AI architecture and design, the AI lifecycle from model selection through training and validation, data management controls, privacy and trust and safety controls, and the security controls and monitoring that keep a deployed model honest. The plain opinion is that Domain 3 deserves your first study block, not your last, because it is the single largest weight and it is the part your CISM or CISSP background least prepares you for. A full walk through all three, sub-area by sub-area, is in AAISM domains explained.
What does the AAISM exam actually test?
The frame that decides most questions is the seat you answer from. AAISM is written for the security manager, so the credited answer is usually the one that governs, assesses, or controls the AI system rather than the one that improves or repairs it. A question about a model producing harmful outputs is rarely asking you to retrain it. It is asking who owns the decision, what control should have caught it, and what the residual risk is if you ship anyway.
The reference material behind the questions is standards-aware rather than vendor-specific. Expect the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, ISO/IEC 42001 paired with ISO/IEC 27001, the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications, and the MITRE ATLAS knowledge base of adversarial machine learning techniques. Expect the exam to test pairs that sound similar and are not: data poisoning against adversarial examples, prompt injection against jailbreak, differential privacy against anonymization, threat modeling against vulnerability management.
That is the distinction our ISACA AAISM Simply Certified Study Guide is built around, with seven teaching chapters proportioned to the real 31/31/38 split and two full-length practice exams where every wrong option is explained as well as every right one.
To see the question style before you commit, work through the AAISM practice questions walkthrough. To put a schedule around it, the AAISM study plan lays out how long candidates typically give each domain.
What does the AAISM certification cost?
The exam registration is USD 459 for ISACA members and USD 599 for nonmembers, nonrefundable and nontransferable. On top of that there is a one-time USD 50 application processing fee, which does apply to AAISM. If your six-month eligibility window runs out, one six-month extension is available for USD 75.
Retakes are full price every time, and they are rate-limited: four attempts in a rolling twelve months, with waiting periods of 30 days, then 90, then 90. That structure makes a failed first attempt expensive in calendar time as well as money. The complete breakdown, including membership math and the narrow circumstances in which a rescore is available, is in AAISM exam cost and fees.
What does it take to keep the AAISM?
AAISM follows the maintenance model ISACA uses for its Advanced credentials, which is lighter than the one behind CISA or CISM. You need 10 CPE hours a year and 30 across each three-year cycle, and all 30 have to align with the AAISM exam content outline. There is no general-security allowance the way there is on the mainstream certifications, so hours you earn on unrelated topics do not count here.
The annual maintenance fee is USD 20 for members and USD 35 for nonmembers. One detail is genuinely useful if you are stacking credentials: ISACA's AAISM maintenance page states that the total annual maintenance for ISACA Advanced certifications is USD 20 or USD 35 regardless of how many of them you hold. Holding AAIA and AAISM together does not double that line.
Reporting starts on 1 January of the year after you certify, and CPE earned during your certification year does not have to be reported. Fee timing is stated less cleanly: ISACA's AAISM page describes the fee as due annually by 1 January to renew through the coming calendar year, while its CPE policy document points at 31 December. Treat it as an annual renewal keyed to the calendar year and confirm your own first-year dates with ISACA rather than working them out from a blog post. You also have to keep the CISM or CISSP active and submit proof, and you are bound by ISACA's Code of Professional Ethics.
Is the AAISM worth sitting?
It depends almost entirely on whether AI security is already work you own or work you expect to own soon. If your organization has models in production and someone has started asking who signs off on them, AAISM gives you a defensible structure and a vocabulary your board, your auditors, and your vendors will all recognize. If AI is a pilot in one team and nobody has asked you anything yet, you will spend real money and real hours on a credential you cannot yet exercise.
Be honest about the second constraint too. The prerequisite means AAISM never stands alone. It is a specialty layered on a general security credential, with its own fee and its own CPE cycle, and it disappears if the credential underneath it lapses.
Finally, this is a young credential. It launched in August 2025, the outline in force is the launch outline, and no successor has been announced, which for ISACA is meaningful because it announces outline changes loudly. Even so, confirm the current fees, eligibility rules, and outline on ISACA's AAISM page before you pay for anything.
FAQ
How many questions is the AAISM exam and how long do you get?
90 multiple-choice questions in a single 150-minute session, which is roughly 100 seconds per question. There are no simulations or written components. The exam is available in English, Spanish, and Japanese.
Do I really need a CISM or CISSP to take the AAISM?
Yes, and it must be active. Those two credentials are the only qualifying prerequisites ISACA lists for AAISM, experience does not substitute for either, and the credential you qualify with has to stay active for as long as you hold the AAISM.
What score do you need to pass the AAISM?
450 on a scaled range of 200 to 800. Because the score is scaled, there is no published percentage equivalent, and the domain-level figures on your result report are informational only. ISACA does not publish an AAISM pass rate.
How much does the AAISM cost in total?
USD 459 for members or USD 599 for nonmembers to register, plus a one-time USD 50 application processing fee, then USD 20 or USD 35 a year to maintain it. A six-month eligibility extension, if you need one, is USD 75.
Can I take the AAISM exam online?
In most of the world, yes, through PSI with a live remote proctor, or at a PSI test center. Residents of India, Mainland China, and Hong Kong must sit AAISM at a testing center, as remote proctoring is not offered to them for this exam.
Moving into AI security leadership? ISACA AAISM: Simply Certified Study Guide teaches all three domains at the real 31/31/38 weighting, from the security manager's govern-and-control lens, with two full-length practice exams and every answer explained.
Simply Certified is an independent publisher. AAISM, AAIA, CISM and ISACA are trademarks of ISACA. Our books are independent study material and are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by ISACA.