Naive question but do people really value certifications like these?

As a consumer of them, I love them: a company with an influential, widely-used technology or platform spends a ton of money signaling to the industry exactly what's important to know about it, creating training curriculum for it, and a whole infrastructure to verify when someone knows it, I'm going to take them up on all of that, especially in the cases where the investment is like $100, a little bit of studying (the likes of which I'd want to do anyway if I'm learning something new, and I'm happy to have their structured, prioritized list of topics and/or guided curriculum) and a couple hours taking an online-proctored exam. From that perspective, I don't have a good reason not to have a certification in something that's super relevant to my role.

In interview/hiring situations where they're not expected or effectively required, they make for great chat fodder and a really good opportunity to exhibit awareness about yourself, the industry, and how the person on the other side of the table might perceive certifications given the context.

Think of these like the Google cloud or AWS certifications. A few companies that specialize in them will want you to have them. But for the rest of the industry, your ability to ace the technical interview will matter more.

Unfortunately some business leads value these types of certifications and partner programs. I imagine there’s a great deal of overlap with these folks and those who use Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for purchasing decisions.

My naive guess is that business with no tech component hire consultants, and these are part of the sales pitch.

Or governments/large organizations performing box checking exercises

Consultancies do. Deloitte are quoted on the page. Consultancy people at my place of work have all been "AI trained".

Doesn't stop them being useless though, like giving an electric drill to a chimp and telling them to build a house...lots of action, a lot of screeching, not much work.

One of the mistakes with AI is that people believe it will turn lead into gold: if you give AI bad prompts, AI will produce bad work.

Most employees at most businesses show up do as they are trained and then go home, because that is what is asked of them. Even those who might have the inclination to explore new technology often will not for fear of doing something wrong. And that creates a big market for training: a company wants their employees to use Claude so the employees must be trained.

Startups / technology companies that expect employees to be self-starters who can be set free to frolic amongst the problems are an aberration.

They do. Certifications make technical expertise legible to non-technical decisionmakers, and I've encountered people on both sides of that dynamic who affirmatively like it when companies set up programs like this. Obviously you and I would rather have someone who understands Claude make decisions about whether and how to use it, but in a lot of industries that's not realistic.

Non-technicals do.