A new approach to your customers' business with Generative AI in AWS

We are on the threshold of an exciting transformation driven by machine learning (ML) technologies and innovations that could reinvent the customer experience, create new applications never before seen, and take our customers to new productivity levels. The impact on the market is already evident, and there is an unprecedented level of interest from customers looking to use generative artificial intelligence (AI) to reinvent their business.

While the AWS partner community is excited about generative AI's potential, we recognize that there are unique considerations for bringing generative AI applications into production for commercial use cases. Therefore, the authors are excited about AWS' commitment to investing in building generative AI capabilities across all layers of the AWS ML stack. In addition to democratizing access to generative AI, these offerings provide mission-critical features to support the development of generative AI-based business applications.

The AWS partner community is integral to providing customers with the total value of these generative AI offerings. AWS partners like Accenture are working holistically with customers to support business renewal through generative AI.

"Innovating with big language models and generative AI requires expertise in data, AI, people, and processes," says Andy Tay, who leads Accenture's AWS Business Group. "Big language models and generative AI solutions must be designed to be ethical, transparent, and reliable. Most importantly, they should interact with people and the world. This is where generative AI can offer infinite possibilities for the complete rebirth of business."

Working together, AWS and the partner community will drive 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 various business processes. In contrast, small and medium-sized businesses will use these powerful tools to keep up with a pace of innovation that was previously limited to industry leaders.

The stage is set for AWS, in collaboration with the AWS Partner Network (APN), to build and deliver the most comprehensive set of core models (FMs), applications, and development tools to serve the diverse business needs of our mutual customers.

Innovations to create generative solutions and artificial intelligence practices on AWS

AWS recently announced new generative artificial intelligence capabilities focusing on democratizing access and investing in features to support innovation in business applications.

Announcement of Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Titan models, the easiest way to create and scale generative AI applications using FM

Amazon Bedrock shares foundation models with AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Stability AI, and Amazon via an API. Bedrock can access a range of powerful FMs for text and images - including Amazon Titan FM, which consists of two new large language models (LLMs) - through a scalable, reliable, and securely managed AWS service.

AWS partners like Deloitte are excited about the ease of access that Amazon Bedrock will bring to drive innovation for their customers. "At Deloitte, we are eager to help clients deliver better, faster AI results for joint AWS and Deloitte clients," - says Nishita Henry, commercial director, Amazon/AWS Alliance Global at Deloitte Consulting LLP. "With Bedrock, we can provide customers with an affordable serverless API for AWS customers to create generative AI applications."

Customers will turn to AWS partners to find their preferred FM, customize it, and integrate and deploy it into client applications - all in an AWS environment that customers trust. Amazon Bedrock is ideal for business applications because specific steps have been taken to ensure customer security. An integral feature of Bedrock is that no customer data is used to teach core models and does not leave the customer's virtual private cloud (VPC), ensuring that their data remains private and confidential.

Overall availability of Amazon EC2 Trn1n instances hosted by AWS Trainium and Amazon EC2 Inf2 instances hosted by AWS Inferentia2

Over the past five years, AWS has invested in its silicon to push the boundaries of performance and price for demanding workloads such as training and machine learning inference. 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-effective, efficient, and scalable solutions for their customers when building or customizing off-the-shelf FMs that contain billions of parameters.

AWS partners such as Caylent, who serve customers ranging from early-stage start-ups to established enterprises, are excited to use these versions to bring artificial intelligence to a more extensive customer base.

"The general availability of the powerful AWS Trainium and Inferentia chipsets has been met with great interest," 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 industries are already using its capabilities to accelerate their ML pipelines. On the Inferential side, Inf2 instances will open up significant cost savings for real AI/ML workloads. These enhancements and the AWS Neuron SDK open up new opportunities for our customers."

The general availability of Amazon CodeWhisperer is now free for individual developers

Amazon CodeWhisperer is an AI coding companion that uses FM to improve developer productivity by generating real-time code suggestions. It helps remove undifferentiated hard work from the equation by 'writing' code, enabling developers to create faster and focus on more creative aspects of coding.

AWS partners such as Infosys have the immediate ability to integrate CodeWhisperer into their generative AI investments. "Infosys' approach to generative AI is to redefine human capabilities by extending all enterprise functions and roles through artificial intelligence," - says Satish H.C., executive vice-president and co-head of delivery at Infosys. "We are enabling developers to focus on their core competencies to create high-quality, error-free code using Amazon CodeWhisperer. The natural language-based interaction of the service allows them to quickly convert a thought or design into high-quality code and accelerate development."

The authors love seeing their partners co-create innovations with AWS by actively integrating Amazon CodeWhisperer into their practices. This improves productivity and speed of deployment and results in actual cost savings for our joint customers in upgrades, migrations, and other cloud deployment activities.

How do we deliver business use cases using generative artificial intelligence?

AWS partners play a crucial role in helping customers realize the potential of generative artificial intelligence, taking it from the art of the possible to the practical. While Amazon Bedrock is in a limited preview release, it is worth encouraging partners to start building their generative AI offering on AWS now. Together, you can focus on four clear actions: specialize, familiarise, make, and engage customers.

#1 Specialise: Invest in developing industry-specialised generative AI practices and solutions

Due to cross-industry, cross-functional implications, client backgrounds, and experiences, clients will seek trusted advisors to help them navigate the digital transformation era and prioritize their investments. Developing a specialized point of view will allow our customers and AWS teams to proactively know who to engage with for specific use cases and opportunities.

Generative AI-based solutions will transform industries such as healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, media, and entertainment. Generative AI will accelerate time-to-market, reduce costly errors, and drive cost savings. The broad adoption of generative AI is exciting, but AWS partners like Slalom know it is essential to have an industry-specific perspective.

"In every industry, our customers want to invest in generative artificial intelligence solutions in a way that strikes a balance between maximizing efficiency and preparing for growth," says Mukesh Kumar, Global GM of Data and Technology at Slalom. "We recognized the importance of enabling bolder ideas and the need to refine a solid business and industry focus on prioritizing ideas that provide effective short and long-term solutions."

#2 Get acquainted: explore the right FMs for customer use cases

Amazon Bedrock brings together a selection of the most powerful foundation models available on the market today, with more to come. Amazon's focus on selection will enable AWS partners such as Pega to support different customer needs, as FM solutions are not one-size-fits-all.

"Enterprise customers require a core model selection, and Bedrock provides just that," says Peter van der Putten, chief scientist and director of AI Lab at Pega. "Some models provide better performance for specific tasks, and depending on the use case, larger models don't always work best. AWS provides this range of choices and the safety, security, and scalability that customers expect."

AWS partners need to take the time to understand the unique capabilities and FM value proposition available through Amazon Bedrock. This includes AI21 Labs' Jurassic-2 family of multilingual LLMs, which follow natural language instructions to generate text in Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, and Dutch.

Claude is Anthropic's LLM and can perform various conversational and text-processing tasks and builds on Anthropic's extensive research into training honest and accountable artificial intelligence systems. Stability AI's core text-to-image processing models include Stable Diffusion (the most popular of its kind), capable of generating unique, realistic images, graphics, logos, and high-quality designs.

Amazon Bedrock also offers access to Amazon's Titan FMs, which consist of two new large-scale language models - generative LLM for tasks such as summarisation, text generation, classification, open-ended Q&A, and information extraction and embedding LLM, which translates text input into numerical representations (known as an embedding), which is helpful for applications such as personalization and search.

These and other foundation models are available today through Amazon SageMaker JumpStart. It is a machine learning hub offering ML algorithms, models, and solutions that are ideal for customers with deep ML knowledge who want to experiment with FM 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 infrastructure.

#3 Build: Start creating generative solutions and AWS artificial intelligence practices

AWS customers are ready to use generative AI solutions and expect partners to create complete offerings with industry-specific applications. Developers work closely with AWS partners such as Salesforce to bring their generative AI solutions to AWS.

"Our partnership with AWS and current integrations allow customers to move custom ML models in SageMaker to Salesforce using Salesforce Data Cloud," says Rahul Auradkar, executive vice president and general manager of Data Cloud, Analytics Apps, and Einstein at Salesforce. "We are excited to extend this integration to AWS' generative artificial intelligence offerings and are working closely to extend our generative artificial intelligence products to AWS, all with our continued shared commitment to trust and security on behalf of our customers."

There are many ways to create generative AI solutions and practices with AWS today. Start by identifying a subset of use cases that provide a minimum product to like. APN is ready to support these proofs-of-concept with subject matter experts, financial support, and backward working methodologies such as our Digital Innovation program.

Developers also offer accelerators such as AWS Solutions Library, AWS Solution Constructs, and Partner Solutions Factory to help deliver high-quality, trusted solutions without reinventing the wheel. In addition, they will work 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 knowledge to familiar customers

AWS customers are enthusiastic about the technology and eager to reap the benefits it promises, and AWS partners can deliver this. An extensive network of partners ensures customers can leverage deep industry experience and investment to innovate quickly and effectively.

AWS partners like PwC are invested in providing our mutual customers with complete generative AI practices and solutions. "At PwC, we recognize the wide-ranging transformational benefits of generative AI for knowledge, work, life, and society," says Bret Greenstein, Partner, Data & AI, GenAI GTM Lead at PwC. "PwC has long been a pioneer of responsible artificial intelligence and is a recognized leader in AI services among top analysts. We help our clients increase productivity and new growth opportunities through generative AI, and we do it responsibly.

"By harnessing the power of AWS, we can rapidly scale our artificial intelligence capabilities to deliver even more value to our customers," Greenstein adds. "With AWS' robust enterprise-ready infrastructure and advanced artificial intelligence tools, we are well positioned to succeed in unlocking the full potential of generative AI."

Start collaborating with generative artificial intelligence on AWS today

Because of generative artificial intelligence, AWS is at the forefront of an exciting and evolving digital era. It is committed to investing in and further innovating in this space, including supporting AWS partners in developing generative AI practices, solutions, and offerings.

Work with partner development managers (PDMs) and partner marketing managers (PMMs) to develop a generative artificial intelligence (GTM) go-to-market strategy. Your PDM and PMM tools will connect you with our dedicated, generative, AI-focused practice and solution development team to build and deliver a better-shared vision.

Once you have a solution that appeals to customers, simplify the buying process using the AWS Marketplace as your primary channel.

AWS partners play a key role in helping customers realise the potential of generative artificial intelligence, and AWS provides AWS partners with the tools and resources to ensure customer success in this rapidly evolving field.