With the idea of AI now firmly entrenched in the minds of many business leaders, the important decision for many firms will now be how best to employ the technology.
At its recent AWS re:Invent 2023 event, Amazon Web Services (AWS) was understandably keen to promote its entire range of AI innovation, offering new upgrades and releases throughout the entire technology stack.
But with its portfolio now covering everything from the hardware needed to train AI models (via its Graviton4 and Trainium2 chips) all the way through the software and infrastructure services required, the need for customization and tailoring to your firm's specific need certainly seemed to be one of the key themes for AWS as it looks forward.
AI opportunity
“If you look at these generative AI models, they have a really broad set of information that they use….but it’s not particularly deep - and the depth is really where most businesses operate," Matt Wood, Vice President, Product, AWS told us at re:Invent 2023
"(AWS offers) all the pieces you need to actually use AI in the real world - not in a periphery, not as a prototype, but in the center of the business...a lot of organizations, both startups and big enterprises, are very excited about the opportunity - they’ve really been chomping at the bit to move more quickly to get these capabilities into the center of their business."
We also heard from other members of the AWS leadership at re:Invent 2023 about the role AI can play in the future of all kinds of businesses, with Vice President of Data and AI Swami Sivasubramanian telling us about his idea of “intelligence augmentation”, where humans maintain a vital part in helping AI models learn and grow, with developers playing an absolutely key role.
Wood agrees, noting that when it comes to AI use in the workplace, "Everybody's interested - I honestly have not seen this level of energy and enthusiasm and excitement since the very early days of AWS - (businesses) are extremely curious, they want to learn, and developers want to learn and build intuition about these things."
"We're offering what I think is the broadest set of integrations in terms of how to understand your business, and we’re offering that knowledge in the broadest number of places."
Wood points in particular to the launch of Amazon Q, the company's enterprise-focused AI chatbot service, which he highlights can be used for tasks as varied as marketing to call center staff to developers carrying out code transformation - a use case he describes as, "a total game-changer."
“Even a three person startup - you’d be surprised how much information they throw off into the digital world," he adds, “(and) we’ll spend time chatting to anybody about how best to use AI...they’re all extremely keen to understand it.”
Looking forward, AWS is now looking to keep driving forwards the usage and implementation of its AI systems among customers across the globe, but Wood also hints at some more big releases coming soon.
“We have a pretty robust roadmap with some pretty exciting capabilities," he notes, "it’s a big area of investment for the company (and) the vast majority of product launches on our roadmap come directly from customer requests and discussions...you can't go wrong if you're aiming to delight the customer and working on problems that are meaningful to them."
More from TechRadar Pro
- AWS CEO - the cloud is for everyone, so don’t stop reinventing
- We've rounded up the best AI writers around right now
- And here are the best AI tools to boost your business
