How AWS reacts to generative AI in 2023 (and what IT pros should expect in 2024)

Starting in 2023, Rada Stanic, chief technical expert of AWS Australia and New Zealand, envisions that the main content of this year will be to help customers build a more modern data platform in the cloud and incorporate some artificial intelligence and machine learning. That plan quickly changed with the advent of ChatGPT and the new era of generative artificial intelligence.

“When generative AI came on the scene, it dominated almost every conversation we had with customers from different industries and really dominated the year,” Stanek told TechRepublic.

AWS Australia and New Zealand Enterprise Directors Stanic and Louise Stigwood expect generative AI use cases for Australian and New Zealand customers to be upgraded to production levels in 2024. Australian businesses will also focus on integrating responsible AI and building data platforms to ensure the success of artificial intelligence initiatives.

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AWS resets 2023 agenda with emergence of generative AI LLM

Generative artificial intelligence has become mainstream overnight, prompting AWS, like other cloud providers, to increase artificial intelligence-related innovation in 2023, from strategy to execution. This culminated in a series of major announcements from hyperscalers at re:Invent in November 2023.

SEE: Australia needs to be ready to reap the benefits of artificial intelligence.

These include Amazon Q, a new generative artificial intelligence assistant for enterprises. AWS has also expanded the selection of base models, fine-tuning capabilities, responsible AI tools, and more available in its new generative AI platform, Amazon Bedrock.

“Our plan is to help customers in every aspect, from creating AI-driven generative services to providing less technically savvy developers and customers with tools that help democratize technology,” Stanich said.

This is consistent with AWS’s efforts in other products and services, including Amazon SageMaker, which launched in 2017 as a platform that makes it easier to deploy machine learning models in the cloud and now has 100,000 users Customer use.

Regional AWS customers adapt to new world of generative AI

AWS customers are also riding the generative AI wave in 2023. Leonardo.Ai, a local generative AI startup that enables users to generate images and train their own custom models, produced 700 million images in the year to November 2023, or 4.5 million images daily (Figure A).

Leonardo.Ai uses Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud Inf2 instances to scale for generative AI inference and run multiple large language models. It is also the first Asia-Pacific team to complete the AWS Generative AI Accelerator program to support its development.

Meanwhile, New Zealand telecommunications company One New Zealand began using AWS’s generative AI capabilities to help its contact center agents better understand why customers called and proactively support call resolution, resulting in a 10% increase in customer trust.

Australian CEOs and boards focus on artificial intelligence and cloud cost optimization

Louise Stigwood says that by 2023, generative AI will be a talking point for nearly every local CEO and board member as they look to understand the complexity of the technology and the role it could play in change. This prompted AWS to develop training courses to help managers get started quickly.

In a cost-constrained environment, cost optimization remains another priority. Stigwood said organizations working with AWS to double down on modernizing their cloud environments to reduce costs saved customers like NAB millions of dollars last year.

Many corporate clients also use their savings to fund innovation. One example is the AFL’s announcement that Marvel Stadium will be the first stadium in the Southern Hemisphere to introduce Just Walk Out technology for checkout-free purchases at games.

AWS technologies IT pros should be paying attention to in 2024

AWS advancements in 2023 could pay dividends for customers this year. For example, two next-generation chip families – AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2 – will support cloud workloads including ML and generative AI, helping to reduce costs and improve performance.

Advanced Edition: Explore the evolution, characteristics, shortcomings, and advantages of generative artificial intelligence.

Stigwood said new tools for AWS supply chain products will help customers track and improve the sustainability of their supply chains. The upgrade includes the ability to request, collect and review sustainability data from suppliers, including Scope 1, 2 and 3 carbon emissions data.

There are many other improvements to AWS in 2023 that are relevant to local businesses in 2024.

The emergence of artificial tissue experts

The synthesis of organizational information has become a key use case for generative artificial intelligence. Amazon’s new artificial intelligence model, Amazon Q, is designed to help companies securely leverage their proprietary data for artificial intelligence, and as usage grows this year, it could have a breakthrough impact, Steinek said (Picture B).

“It will act like an expert in the client’s business,” Stanik said. “It already has strong integration with existing technologies like Amazon Connect for call centers. There is strong interest in using generative AI assistants to help call center agents provide real assistance to customers in real time.”

Generative AI democratizes building applications

Upgrading to Amazon Bedrock makes it easier for developers who are not AI experts to build generative AI applications. Stanic said many businesses with 10,000 customers are currently in the proof-of-concept phase of their applications and will go into production in the coming months.

For example, Australian client Adore Beauty uses Bedrock to support customer review analysis to determine which products perform well. Accounting software company Xero created a virtual assistant to help onboard customers and answer their questions through artificial intelligence.

Make responsible AI part of organizational innovation

Stanik said discussions with clients about how to use AI to solve a problem or do something faster and better often involve issues of safe and responsible AI. AWS is looking to integrate AI security into its tools, just like it did with Amazon Bedrock’s Guardrails.

Guardrails provides an additional layer of responsible AI protection by helping companies evaluate user input and underlying model responses according to use case-specific policies, regardless of the underlying model. It helps customers implement and evaluate models, Stanic said.

The takeoff of new low-orbit satellite networks

Amazon’s low-Earth orbit satellite program recently signed an agreement with Japan’s NTT Docomo to provide redundancy for its communications network. The program could help telecom companies expand 5G capabilities or facilitate public Internet communications between AWS and AWS.

Stigwood said AWS may work with telecommunications companies in Australia and New Zealand to expand communications networks. Miners and other organizations in remote areas can also benefit from additional connectivity options through Amazon’s LEO satellites.

Enterprise technology trends expected to pick up pace in 2024

AWS expects generative artificial intelligence to take center stage again in 2024. Stanic and Stigwood’s other predictions for the Australian and New Zealand markets include local organizations focusing on data platforms, cloud migration and modernization, and industry diversity.

The emergence of production-grade generative artificial intelligence

While 2023 will be primarily about understanding and experimenting with generative AI models, Stanic expects 2024 to be the year of production-level implementation of generative AI in the region, which could have a significant impact on a range of business verticals in the local market.

SEE: Australia has been embracing aspects of generative artificial intelligence in 2023 while striving to stay ahead of the risks.

Stanic said employees in Australia and New Zealand may be able to better leverage internal knowledge bases to find information faster and easier, while developers’ lives will be changed for the better through coding partners such as AWS’s CodeWhisperer.Figure C).

Stanage added that Australian businesses will transform their customer experience through generative artificial intelligence, including through the popular use case of virtual assistants in call centres.

“We expect these very viable use cases to gain even more traction this year,” Stanich said.

Focus on powerful data platform in the cloud

The success of generative AI depends heavily on data. Stanek said organizations should not underestimate the impact of underlying data and data platforms on AI projects, as this may ultimately determine the success or failure of a generative AI implementation.

“We believe that this year customers will redouble their efforts to create powerful, scalable and efficient data platforms in the cloud,” Stanik said.

AWS is removing some of the heavy lifting with zero ETL, which facilitates end-to-end data movement without an ETL data pipeline.

“This reduces data processing time and makes the data engineer’s life easier,” Stanik said. “It supports the critical role data plays in driving the success of generative artificial intelligence.”

Continuous Cloud Migration and Modernization

Stanek said migration and modernization in the cloud would continue in Australia and New Zealand, regardless of other trends. She said organizations want to be able to operate more cost-effectively and scalably, and the cloud can enable that for them.

This will be combined with cloud cost optimization after cloud costs have surged in recent years. With more controls available for cost optimization and support for iteration, AWS is working with customers to reinvest cloud cost savings back into innovation projects.

New opportunities for diversification in the technology industry

Stigwood said the emergence of coding partners like CodeWhisperer could start to change the way the market views traditional technology and software engineering roles. This could be a catalyst for greater diversity in Australia’s technology industry.

“When there’s diversity at the table, there are better outcomes, and that’s increasingly becoming a focus, especially for large businesses,” Stanik said. “This year, many have taken advantage of our Cloud Up For Her program, which helps women of any background become tech proficient.”