by Ruba Borno, Vice President, WW Channels & Alliances – AWS
We are on the cusp of an exciting transformation, driven by innovations in machine learning (ML) technologies, that have the potential to reinvent customer experiences, create new applications never seen before, and drive our customers to new heights of productivity.
The market impact is already evident by the unprecedented level of interest from customers that want to use generative artificial intelligence (AI) to reinvent their businesses.
While the AWS Partner community is energized about the potential of generative AI, we also recognize there are unique considerations for bringing generative AI applications into production for commercial use cases.
That’s why I am excited by AWS’ commitment to investing in building generative AI capabilities across all of the layers of the AWS ML stack. In addition to democratizing access to generative AI, these offerings bring mission-critical capabilities to support the development of generative AI business applications.
The AWS Partner community is an integral part of ensuring customers realize the full value of these generative AI offerings. AWS Partners like Accenture are now working with customers to support business reinvention with generative AI holistically.
“Innovating with large language models and generative AI requires expertise across data, AI, people, and process,” says Andy Tay, who leads the Accenture AWS Business Group.
“Large language models and generative AI solutions must be designed to be ethical, transparent, and reliable. Most importantly, they should deliver an impact on people and on the world. This is where generative AI can offer endless opportunities for total business reinvention,” he adds.
Working together, AWS and our partner community will be guiding the development of business innovations and solutions for customers of all sizes and industries. Enterprises will use these tools to become more efficient, productive, and creative across a wide range of business processes, while small and medium businesses will use these powerful tools to keep up with the pace of innovation, previously limited to industry leaders.
The stage is set for AWS, in collaboration with our AWS Partner Network (APN), to build and deliver the most comprehensive suite of foundation models (FMs), applications, and developer tools to support the diverse business needs of our mutual customers.
New innovations to build generative AI solutions and practices on AWS
AWS recently announced new generative AI capabilities with a focus on democratizing access and investing in features to support driving business application innovations.
Announcing Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Titan models, the easiest way to build and scale generative AI applications with FMs
Amazon Bedrock makes foundation models from AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Stability AI, and Amazon accessible via an API.
Bedrock offers the ability to access a range of powerful FMs for text and images—including Amazon’s Titan FMs which consist of two new large language models (LLMs) — through a scalable, reliable, and secure AWS-managed service.
AWS Partners like Deloitte are excited by the accessibility Amazon Bedrock will bring to drive innovation with their clients. “At Deloitte, we are eager to help clients deliver better, faster AI results to the mutual customers of AWS and Deloitte,” says Nishita Henry, Amazon/AWS Alliance Global Chief Commercial Officer at Deloitte Consulting LLP. “With Bedrock, we can provide clients with a cost-effective serverless API for AWS customers to build generative AI applications.”
Customers will look to AWS Partners to find their preferred FM, customize it, and integrate and deploy it into customer applications—all in the AWS environment customers trust. Amazon Bedrock is ideal for business applications, as we have taken concrete steps to help ensure it is safe and secure for our customers.
An integral feature of Bedrock is that none of the customer’s data is used to train the underlying models, and does not leave a customer’s virtual private cloud (VPC), ensuring their data remains private and confidential.
General availability of Amazon EC2 Trn1n instances powered by AWS Trainium and Amazon EC2 Inf2 instances powered by AWS Inferentia2
Over the last five years, AWS has invested in our own silicon to push the envelope on performance and price for demanding workloads like ML training and inference.
Our AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia chips offer the lowest cost for training models and running inference in the cloud. This allows AWS Partners to create cost-efficient, effective, and scalable solutions for their customers when building or customizing off-the-shelf FMs, which contain billions of parameters.
AWS Partners like Caylent, which serve customers from early-stage startups to established enterprises, are thrilled to leverage these releases to bring AI to a larger base of customers.
“The general availability of AWS’s powerful Trainium and Inferentia chipsets has been met with great excitement,” says Randall Hunt, Vice President of Cloud Strategy and Innovation at Caylent. “Trainium offers best-in-class performance for model training, and our customers across all verticals are already leveraging its capabilities to accelerate their ML pipelines. On the side of Inferentia, the Inf2 instances will open up significant cost savings for real-world AI/ML workloads. Together with the AWS Neuron SDK, these advancements are unlocking new avenues of possibility for our customers,” he adds.
General availability of Amazon CodeWhisperer is now free for individual developers
Amazon CodeWhisperer is an AI coding companion that uses FMs to improve developer productivity by generating code suggestions in real time. It helps take the undifferentiated heavy lifting out of the equation by “writing” code, allowing developers to build faster and focus on more creative aspects of coding.
There is an immediate opportunity for AWS Partners like Infosys to integrate CodeWhisperer into their generative AI investments. “The Infosys approach to generative AI is to redefine human capability by augmenting all enterprise functions and roles by applying AI,” says Satish H.C., Executive Vice President, Co-Head of Delivery at Infosys.
“We empower developers to focus on their core competencies to produce high-quality, error-free code using Amazon CodeWhisperer. The service’s natural language-based interaction allows for quick conversion of thoughts or designs to high-quality code and accelerated development,” he adds.
I love to see our partners co-innovating with AWS by actively integrating Amazon CodeWhisperer into their practices. This improves productivity, and implementation speed, and results in real cost savings for our joint customers across modernization, migration, and other cloud adoption activities.
How to Deliver Business Use Cases with Generative AI
AWS Partners play a critical role in helping customers harness generative AI’s potential, moving it from the art of the possible to the practical. While Amazon Bedrock is in limited preview, I encourage partners to get started right now on building their generative AI offerings on AWS.
Together, we can focus on four clear actions: Specialize, Familiarize, Build, and Engage Customers.
1) Specialize: Invest in developing industry-specialized generative AI practices and solutions
With cross-industry, cross-functional, as well as backend and customer experience implications, customers will be looking to their trusted advisors to navigate this age of digital transformation, and to prioritize their investments. Developing a specialized point of view will enable our customers and AWS teams to know who to proactively engage for specific use cases and capabilities.
Generative AI-powered solutions will transform industries like healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, media and entertainment, and many others. Generative AI will amplify speed to market, reduce costly errors, and drive cost savings across the business. The broad-based application of generative AI is exciting, but AWS Partners like Slalom know it’s important to have industry-specific perspectives.
“In every industry, our customers are looking to invest in generative AI solutions in ways that strike the balance between maximizing efficiencies and preparing for growth,” says Mukesh Kumar, Global GM of Data and Technology at Slalom. “We’ve seen the importance of enabling divergence ideas to be bolder, as well as the necessity of honing robust business and industry focus to prioritize ideas that deliver impactful short and long-term solutions.”
2) Familiarize: Know the right FMs for your customer use cases
Amazon Bedrock brings together a selection of some of the most powerful foundation models available in the market today, with more to come. Amazon’s focus on selection will enable AWS Partners like Pega to support customers’ varying needs because FMs are not a one-size-fits-all solution.
“Enterprise customers demand foundation model choice, and Bedrock provides just that,” says Peter van der Putten, Lead Scientist and Director of AI Lab at Pega. “Certain models provide better performance at specific tasks, and depending on the use case it’s not always the larger models that perform best. AWS provides this range of choices along with the safety, security, and scalability that clients expect.”
AWS Partners must take the time to understand the unique capabilities and value propositions of the FMs available through Amazon Bedrock. This includes the Jurassic-2 family of multilingual LLMs from AI21 Labs, which follow natural language instructions to generate text in Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, and Dutch.
Claude is Anthropic’s LLM and can perform a variety of conversational and text processing tasks, and is based on Anthropic’s extensive research into training honest and responsible AI systems.
Stability AI’s suite of text-to-image foundation models includes Stable Diffusion (the most popular of its kind), which is capable of generating unique, realistic, high-quality images, art, logos, and designs.
Amazon Bedrock also offers access to Amazon’s Titan FMs, which consist of two new large language models—a generative LLM for tasks such as summarization, text generation, classification, open-ended Q&A, and information extraction; and an embeddings LLM that translates text inputs into numerical representations (known as embeddings) that is useful for applications like personalization and search.
A selection of these and other foundation models are also available today through Amazon SageMaker JumpStart. This is a machine learning hub offering algorithms, models, and ML solutions that are ideal for customers with deep ML expertise who want to experiment with FMs and use tools to train and tune models such as SageMaker Studio, an integrated development environment (IDE) for ML, and who want to manage their own infrastructure.
3) Build: Get started building your AWS generative AI solutions and practices
AWS customers are ready to consume generative AI solutions and are looking to our partners to build complete offerings with industry-specific applications. We are working closely with AWS Partners like Salesforce to bring their generative AI solutions to AWS.
“Our collaboration with AWS and current integrations lets customers bring their custom ML models in SageMaker into Salesforce through the use of Salesforce Data Cloud,” says Rahul Auradkar, Executive Vice President and GM, Data Cloud, Analytics Apps and Einstein at Salesforce. “We are excited to extend this integration to AWS’s generative AI offerings and are working closely to extend our generative AI products with AWS, all with our continued shared commitment to trust and security on behalf of our customers.”
There are many ways to start building your generative AI solutions and practices with AWS today. Start by identifying a subset of use cases that deliver a Minimum Lovable Product. The APN is ready to support these proofs-of-concept with subject matter experts, funding support, and working backwards methodologies such as our Digital Innovation program.
We also have accelerators such as AWS Solutions Library, AWS Solution Constructs, and the Partner Solutions Factory to help deliver high-quality, trusted solutions without reinventing the wheel. Additionally, we’ll be working closely with each of you to seamlessly integrate Amazon Bedrock into your existing practices and solutions over the next few months as it becomes generally available.
4) Engage Customers: Bring your expertise to our joint customers
AWS customers are enthusiastic about this technology and eager to reap the benefits it promises, and AWS Partners can make that happen. Our vast partner network ensures customers can leverage deep industry experience and investments to innovate quickly and effectively.
AWS Partners like PwC are investing to bring complete generative AI practices and solutions to our joint customers. “At PwC, we see the wide-reaching transformational benefits of generative AI on knowledge, work, life, and society,” says Bret Greenstein, Partner, Data & AI, GenAI GTM Lead at PwC. “PwC has long been a pioneer in responsible AI and is recognized as a leader in AI services among the top analysts. We help our clients drive productivity and new growth opportunities with generative AI and do so in a responsible way.
“By leveraging the power of AWS, we can rapidly scale our AI capabilities to deliver even greater value to our clients,” Greenstein adds. “With AWS’s robust, enterprise-ready infrastructure and advanced AI tools, we are well positioned for success in unlocking the full potential of generative AI.”
Get Started Today with Generative AI on AWS
AWS is at the forefront of an exciting and evolving digital era with generative AI. We are committed to investing and continuing to drive innovation in this space, including supporting AWS Partners as they develop generative AI practices, solutions, and offerings.
Work with your Partner Development Managers (PDMs) and Partner Marketing Managers (PMMs) to develop your generative AI go-to-market (GTM) strategy. Your PDMs and PMMs will connect you with our dedicated generative AI-aligned practice and solution development team to build and execute on a better together vision.
Once you have a solution that’s compelling to customers, simplify the customer buying experience by using AWS Marketplace as your primary channel. AWS Partners play a crucial role in helping customers harness generative AI’s potential, and we are enabling our partners with the tools and resources to deliver customer success in this rapidly emerging field.