AWS Launches 5 New AI Certifications to Boost Careers and Salaries Worldwide

AWS has launched five new AI certifications—including the flagship AWS Certified AI Business Strategist—that can boost salaries by up to 47% across IT, sales, marketing, and finance roles. These credentials validate skills from foundational AI literacy to advanced generative AI development, positioning professionals to lead in the rapidly evolving cloud and AI job market.

AWS’s latest credential, the Certified AI Business Strategist, equips organizations to identify leaders who can assess AI investments, enforce governance, and drive adoption from pilot projects to enterprise scale. Registration for the beta exam opens September 1, 2026.

Why These Certifications Matter

• Salary Impact: Certified professionals earn 42–47% higher pay across multiple industries.
  
  
• Industry Demand: Organizations struggle with AI deployment, governance, and scaling—skills these certifications directly address.
  
  
• Accessibility: Free and low-cost training via AWS Skill Builder makes entry possible for students, business leaders, and technical specialists.
  
  

Overview of AWS AI Certifications

Certification	Focus Area	Target Audience
AWS Certified AI Business Strategist	AI adoption, governance, scaling	Business leaders, consultants, program managers
AWS Certified AI Practitioner	AI/ML concepts, generative AI literacy	Non-IT professionals, entry-level IT
AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer – Associate	Deploying, scaling, monitoring AI models	ML engineers, IT specialists
AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate	Data pipelines, modeling, infrastructure	Data engineers, technical leaders
AWS Certified Generative AI Developer – Professional	Enterprise-grade generative AI apps	Advanced developers, AI architects

Key Benefits

• Career Growth: Certifications validate expertise across business strategy, technical engineering, and generative AI innovation.
  
  
• Cross-Functional Relevance: Useful for sales, marketing, HR, finance, not just IT.
  
  
• Enterprise Readiness: Helps organizations identify professionals capable of moving AI from pilot to production.
  

Training Resources

• AWS Skill Builder: Over 330 free and subscription-based courses on AI, ML, and generative AI.
  
  
• Exam Prep Plans: Practice exams and scenario-based questions tailored to each certification.
  
  
• AWS Cloud Institute: Structured virtual program to become a cloud developer in 9 months.
  
  

Risks & Considerations

• Certification ≠ Guaranteed Job: While salaries rise, success depends on real-world application of skills.
  
  
• Rapid Tech Evolution: AI tools evolve quickly; certifications must be paired with continuous learning.
  
  
• Global Competition: With AWS offering worldwide access, professionals face intense competition for top roles.
  

Takeaway

For professionals in India and globally, AWS’s AI certifications are a strategic investment. Whether you’re a business strategist, data engineer, or developer, these credentials can accelerate career growth, increase earning potential, and position you at the forefront of AI adoption.

Manipal Payment and Identity Solutions Limited’s IPO to Open on Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2026

• Not for distribution outside India
• Manipal Payment and Identity Solutions Limited’s IPO to Open on Wednesday, September 9, 2026
• Price Band fixed at ₹322 to ₹339 per equity share of face value of ₹10 each. 
• Anchor Investor Bidding - Tuesday, September 8, 2026
• Bid /Issue opening - Wednesday, September 9, 2026, closing - Friday, September 11, 2026
• Bids can be made for a minimum of 44 Equity Shares and in multiples of 44 Equity Shares thereafter. 
• Red Herring Prospectus link: https://mpimanipal.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Red-Herring-Prospectus_compressed.pdf

Manipal Payment and Identity Solutions Limited (MPISL) announced its initial public offering (IPO) details: Wednesday, September 9, 2026, the bids will open and, Friday, September 11, 2026, the bids will close. The Anchor Investor Bidding date is set for Tuesday, September 8, 2026. The Price Band of the Issue has been fixed from ₹322 - ₹339 per Equity Share. Bids can be made for a minimum of 44 Equity Shares and multiples of 44 Equity Shares thereafter. The Offer comprises Fresh Issue of equity shares aggregating up to ₹320 crore and an Offer for sale of up to 14,306,785 Equity Shares by the promoter selling shareholder, Manipal Technologies Limited.

MPISL provides payments solutions, identifications solutions, secure solutions, and smart tagging and internet of things (IOT) solutions to banks, fintechs, NBFCs, and governments worldwide. In Fiscal 2026, the company held approximately 36.4% of India's credit card and 30.9% of its debit card issuance market, positioning it among the largest manufacturers of payment cards, both globally and in India. Additionally, it is one of India's largest national identity card producers, having billed over 1 billion cards in 12 regional languages. MPISL serves customers through 10 facilities across India, catering to a diverse set of over 300 customers in Fiscal 2026 across domestic and international jurisdictions.

MPISL has been certified by payment networks Mastercard (for over 16 years), RuPay (for over nine years) and by other payment networks for over 15 years and nine years, respectively, for manufacturing and personalization of payment cards. Further, the facilities are certified for Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (Level 1) Version 4.0.1 for secure data management and the Manipal Facility is certified for ‘INTERGRAF’ (Central Bank Level) and Card Quality Management for secure card manufacturing and personalization.

The Equity Shares are proposed to be listed on BSE Limited (BSE) and the National Stock Exchange of India Limited (NSE). For the purpose of the Issue, BSE Limited shall be the Designated Stock Exchange.

The issue:

The Offer is being in terms of Rule 19(2)(b) of the SCRR, read with Regulation 31 of the SEBI ICDR Regulations. The Offer is being made through the Book Building Process and is in compliance with Regulation 6(2) of the SEBI ICDR Regulations, wherein in terms of Regulation 32(2) of the SEBI ICDR Regulations, not less than 75% of the Offer shall be available for allocation on a proportionate basis to Qualified Institutional Buyers (“QIBs”, and such portion, the “QIB Portion”), provided that our Company may, in consultation with the BRLMs, allocate up to 60% of the QIB Portion to Anchor Investors on a discretionary basis, in accordance with the SEBI ICDR Regulations, of which 40% shall be reserved in the following manner (i) 33.33% of the Anchor Investor Portion shall be reserved for domestic Mutual Funds; and (ii) 6.67% of the Anchor Investor Portion shall be reserved for Life Insurance Companies and Pension Funds, subject to valid Bids being received from domestic Mutual Funds, Life Insurance Companies and Pension Funds, as applicable, at or above the Anchor Investor Allocation Price.

Any under-subscription in the Life Insurance Companies and Pension Funds category specified in (ii) above may be allocated to domestic Mutual Funds, in accordance with the SEBI ICDR Regulations. In the event of under-subscription or non-allocation in the Anchor Investor Portion, the balance Equity Shares shall be added to the QIB Portion (other than the Anchor Investor Portion) (the “Net QIB Portion”).

Further, 5% of the net QIB Portion shall be available for allocation on a proportionate basis only to Mutual Funds and the remainder of the net QIB Portion shall be available for allocation on a proportionate basis to all QIB Bidders (other than Anchor Investors) including Mutual Funds, subject to valid Bids being received at or above the Offer Price. However, if the aggregate demand from Mutual Funds is less than 5% of the net QIB Portion, the balance Equity Shares available for allocation in the Mutual Fund Portion will be added to the remaining QIB Portion for proportionate allocation to QIBs. Further, not more than 15% of the Offer shall be available for allocation to Non-Institutional Bidders out of which (a) one-third of such portion shall be reserved for applicants with application size of more than ₹ 0.2 million and up to ₹ 1.00 million; and (b) two-third of such portion shall be reserved for applicants with application size of more than ₹ 1.00 million, provided that the unsubscribed portion in either of such sub-categories may be allocated to applicants in the other sub-category of Non-Institutional Bidders and not more than 10% of the Offer shall be available for allocation to Retail Individual Bidders in accordance with the SEBI ICDR Regulations, subject to valid Bids being received from them at or above the Offer Price.

All potential Bidders (except Anchor Investors) are required to mandatorily utilise the Application Supported by Blocked Amount (“ASBA”) process by providing details of their respective bank accounts (including UPI ID for UPI Bidders using UPI Mechanism) in which the Bid Amount will be blocked by the SCSBs or the Sponsor Banks, as applicable, to participate in the Offer. Anchor Investors are not permitted to participate in the Anchor Investor Portion of the Offer through the ASBA process.

Disclaimer:

MANIPAL PAYMENT AND IDENTITY SOLUTIONS LIMITED (formerly known as MCT Cards & Technology Limited) is proposing, subject to receipt of requisite approvals, market conditions and other considerations, to make an initial public offering of its Equity Shares ( “Offer”) and has filed the RHP with RoC and subsequently with the SEBI and the Stock Exchanges. The RHP shall be available on the website of the SEBI at www.sebi.gov.in, the websites of the Stock Exchanges at www.bseindia.com and www.nseindia.com, respectively, the website of the Company at https://mpimanipal.com and on the website of the Book Running Lead Managers (“BRLMs”), i.e. Motilal Oswal Investment Advisors Limited, Axis Capital Limited, ICICI Securities Limited, IIFL Capital Services Limited (formerly known as IIFL Securities Limited) and Nuvama Wealth Management Limited at www.motilaloswal.com, www.axiscapital.co.in, www.icicisecurities.com, www.iiflcapital.com and www.nuvama.com, respectively. Any potential investors should note that investment in equity shares involves a high degree of risk and for details relating to such risk, see ‘‘Risk Factors’’ beginning on page 20 of the RHP. Potential investors should not rely on the UDRHP-I filed with SEBI and the Stock Exchanges, and should rely on their own examination of our Company and the Offer, including the risks involved, for making any investment decision.

The Equity Shares have not been, and will not be, registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (“U.S. Securities Act”) or any state securities laws in the United States, and unless so registered, may not be offered or sold within the United States, except pursuant to an exemption from, or in a transaction not subject to, the registration requirements of the U.S. Securities Act and applicable U.S. state securities laws. Accordingly, the Equity Shares are being offered and sold only outside the United States, in "offshore transactions", as defined in and in reliance on Regulation S under the U.S. Securities Act and the applicable laws of the jurisdictions in which such offers and sales are made. There will be no public offering in the United States.

L&T Technology Services Launches FARM to Fast‑Track Deep‑Tech Startup Commercialization

Program will provide startups with access to LTTS engineering expertise, global customer ecosystems, mentorship and commercialization pathways

L&T Technology Services (BSE: 540115, NSE: LTTS), a global leader in Engineering Intelligence Solutions & ER&D Consulting Services, announced the launch of LTTS FARM, a startup engagement platform designed to accelerate the commercialization journey of deep-tech startups through Engineering Intelligence-led collaboration, co-innovation and market access.

Built on the philosophy of “Collaboration First, Commercialization Next”, LTTS FARM is targeted at startups with TRL 4+ technologies that have validated their technical feasibility and are ready to explore industry adoption. The program is focused on startups aligned with LTTS’ Technology Big Bets – Software Defined Mobility (SDM), Plant Buildout & Modernization, Energy & Industrial Automation, Digital Manufacturing, Next Gen Compute & Data Centers, Software Platforms & EI and MedTech - with the potential to further advance these strategic priorities through new technologies and solutions. By leveraging LTTS’ global presence, domain expertise and customer relationships, LTTS FARM seeks to create a structured launch pad for startups to progress from validated innovation to customer adoption and long-term growth.

The initiative reflects LTTS’ commitment to fostering a thriving innovation ecosystem by bringing together startups, engineering talent and industry stakeholders to address real-world business and technology challenges. The journey will span across evaluation, onboarding, co-innovation, pilot development and commercialization opportunities for eligible startups. Suitable solutions will be considered for broader industry deployments aided by pilot projects, proof-of-concepts, customer demonstrations and diverse commercial engagements.

Amit Chadha, CEO & Managing Director, L&T Technology Services and Member of NASSCOM Executive Council, said, “Many promising technologies struggle because of limited access to customers, industry expertise and commercialization opportunities. Through LTTS FARM, we are creating a platform where startups can collaborate with our experts, gain exposure to global markets and customer requirements, validate real-world applications and accelerate their journey from solution readiness to market adoption. By nurturing innovations that align with and further our technology big bets, LTTS FARM will also expand our Engineering Intelligence ecosystem and help transform breakthrough ideas into industry-ready solutions that deliver measurable business impact”.

About L&T Technology Services Ltd

L&T Technology Services (LTTS) is a global leader in Engineering Intelligence Solutions & ER&D Consulting Services. A listed subsidiary of Larsen & Toubro (L&T), we offer design, development, testing, and sustenance services across products and processes. Purposeful. Agile. Innovation. is how we drive growth across the Mobility, Sustainability and Tech segments. Our customer base includes 69 Fortune 500 companies and 57 top ER&D companies across industrial products, medical devices, transportation, telecom & hi-tech, and process industries. Headquartered in India, we have over 23,840 employees across 21 global design centers, 30 global sales offices, and 103 innovation labs, as of June 30­, 2026.

For additional information about L&T Technology Services log on to https://www.ltts.com/.

Viyona Fintech Goes Live with UPI Switch at Bharat Cooperative Bank

Hyderabad-based Viyona Fintech has gone live with its UPI Switch at Bharat Cooperative Bank, marking an important production deployment for the fintech company as it expands its presence in India’s banking and payments infrastructure space.

The integration enables Bharat Cooperative Bank to connect its banking systems with the UPI ecosystem through Viyona’s switching technology. The platform handles the technology layer required for processing UPI transactions, along with functions such as transaction routing, reconciliation, monitoring and operational controls.

For Viyona, the go-live is significant because it takes the company’s UPI Switch from technology development and certification into a live banking environment.

“Getting a payment switch certified is one part of the journey. Seeing it actually go live with a bank and process transactions is a completely different milestone for us,” said Ravindranath Yarlagadda, Founder and CEO of Viyona Fintech.

“We have spent considerable time building the technology, going through testing and working closely with the bank and ecosystem partners. This go-live gives us the confidence to take the platform to more banks,” he added.

Viyona has been gradually building a wider technology stack for banks rather than focusing only on consumer-facing payment products.

Its technology portfolio includes UPI and IMPS switching infrastructure, internet and mobile banking technology, Bharat Connect/BBPS solutions and systems supporting merchant payments, collections, payouts and reconciliation.

The company sees cooperative and regional banks as an important opportunity as more financial institutions look to modernise their payment infrastructure while maintaining the security, reliability and regulatory controls required in banking.

India’s rapid adoption of UPI has also changed what banks expect from their technology partners. As transaction volumes increase, the infrastructure behind a payment has to process transactions quickly while managing failures, reversals, reconciliation, fraud controls and continuous availability.

According to Yarlagadda, this is the part of fintech that customers rarely see but which ultimately determines whether a digital payment works reliably.

“When somebody scans a QR code and makes a payment, they expect it to happen in seconds. Behind those few seconds there are several systems communicating with each other. Our focus is on building that infrastructure and making it dependable,” he said.

The Bharat Cooperative Bank deployment is expected to become a reference implementation for Viyona as it looks to work with more banks and financial institutions.

The company is also developing its capabilities across other parts of the digital banking and payment ecosystem, with the broader objective of becoming a full-stack banking technology provider.

For Viyona, however, the immediate focus is on ensuring that the newly launched UPI infrastructure performs reliably at scale.

“This is an important day for our team, but it is also the beginning of the next phase for us,” Yarlagadda said. “We built the technology in India, our engineers worked on it from the ground up, and now it is running in a live banking environment. That is something our entire team is proud of.”

With UPI continuing to reshape payments across the country, companies such as Viyona are betting that the next big opportunity in Indian fintech will not only be in building payment apps, but also in building the infrastructure underneath them.

IBM Ventures Invests in BQP: Quantum Physics Acceleration Reaches Production

BQP Founding Team

• IBM Ventures has invested in BQP, bringing total funding to $8M and backing BQP's expansion from engineering design into real-time operational decisions. The investment extends a technical relationship that began in 2023, when BQP joined the IBM Quantum Network.


• Classical solvers leave roughly 85% of a GPU's floating-point capacity idle. BQP's flagship platform, BQPhy®, puts that capacity to work, resolving full-fidelity physics inside operational decision windows.


• BQPhy® is in production with aerospace and defense customers, with contracted and committed revenue up 8x since BQP's 2025 seed round and 3x customer growth.

BQP, the physics acceleration company, today announced a strategic investment from IBM Ventures, the venture capital arm of IBM. The investment brings BQP's total funding to $8M and funds BQPhy®'s expansion from engineering design into operational deployment, scaling delivery and go-to-market as BQP expands beyond aerospace and defense. Venn10 Capital and existing investor Monta Vista Capital also participated. Since its 2025 seed round, backed by New York State's venture arm and other institutional investors, BQP has grown contracted and committed revenue 8x, tripling its customer base and growing platform users 20x.

"An engineer with a deadline doesn't care where the answer came from. They care that it arrived in time and that the physics is right. The industry spent years treating this as a hardware problem that warranted faster chips, more of them, and eventually a quantum one. But it was always a software problem," said Abhishek Chopra, Founder and CEO of BQP.

Chopra added: "We spent those years earning our way into engineering workflows, so when the quantum machines are ready, nothing about how those teams work has to change. That's the path IBM has watched us build since 2023, and this investment says it's the right one."

Mission-critical decisions have deadlines, and high-fidelity physics simulations rarely meet them. More hardware has not closed the gap. Classical physics solvers leave roughly 85% of a GPU's floating-point capacity idle, because the sparse iterative methods underneath simulation are bound by memory access rather than compute. Teams choose between accurate models that return the right answer too late, or fast methods that answer on time by skipping the physics, leaving hidden risk behind over-engineered safety margins.

BQPhy® removes this trade-off between speed and accuracy. Its physics-AI optimization engine resolves the full physics inside the decision window, using the GPU capacity classical solvers leave idle. The platform delivers this through two solvers that share a single SDK, integrated natively into MATLAB as a MathWorks Connections Program partner, with standard APIs for Python, Julia, and other frameworks. This enables engineers to get the answers without leaving the tools they already use.

QuantumNOW™ is in production today on customers' existing CPU and GPU infrastructure, and each deployment maps which problems belong on a QPU - making QuantumMAX™, BQP's quantum-native solver in development, an on-ramp rather than a bet. It is written for heterogeneous CPU-GPU-QPU execution rather than a single hardware target.

"What stood out with BQP is that users don't have to change how they work to get quantum-accelerated results. Their proven track record of developing software that helps enterprises build a practical path toward hybrid quantum-classical computing is what gives IBM Ventures confidence in making this investment," said Emily Fontaine, Global Head of IBM Ventures.

In aerospace and defense, BQP's furthest-along work is in space. Under an SBIR with the U.S. Space Force and SpaceWERX, extending earlier work with the SDA TAP Lab, BQPhy®'s physics AI propagates a catalog of more than 3,000 space objects in under a second, roughly 250x faster than the open-source Orekit solver by compressing the model using proprietary algorithms. BQP also holds a CRADA with the Air Force Research Laboratory's Aerospace Systems Directorate and has demonstrated BQPhy® on radio-frequency signal problems for the tactical edge with NavalX. With Modovolo, BQP built a system-level propulsion optimization for UAV mission profiles, expanding from three design variables to more than twelve and tuning propeller and motor as a single unit; integration took roughly one week through the API.

In energy, BQP is applying the same platform to commercial systems, with EV battery thermal management work funded by India's Ministry of Heavy Industries and the Indian School of Business.

The same engine that predicts where a satellite is heading also predicts how heat moves through a battery pack or a data center rack: different industries with the same high-dimensional physics that has to resolve before the decision window closes.

QuantumNOW™ is in production; QuantumMAX™ is proving out. In work presented at USNC/TAM 2026, BQP ran QuantumMAX™ on quantum hardware for uncertainty quantification in computational fluid dynamics, reaching the same accuracy as classical Monte Carlo with fewer samples on a benchmark-scale problem. BQP's research is published in IEEE, AIAA, and APL Quantum, with best paper awards at AeroCon 2026 and the IEEE Space, Aerospace and Defence Conference (SPACE 2026).

About BQP

BQP (formerly BosonQ Psi) is a physics acceleration company applying quantum algorithms to mission-critical operational decisions. Its unified Quantum-HPC platform, BQPhy®, pairs physics AI surrogates with an optimization solver, delivering results on today's CPU and GPU infrastructure through QuantumNOW™ with quantum-native acceleration in development through QuantumMAX™ - both on a single SDK. Headquartered in Syracuse, New York, with offices in the UK and India. Learn more at https://www.bqpsim.com