Since 2017, AWS, the cloud subsidiary of Amazon, has trained over 5.5 million people in India on AI and cloud skills and over over 8.3 million across the APAC and Japan region.
With generative AI moving from proof of concepts to deployment this year, the company plans to train about two million individuals in AI globally by 2025 through its “AI-Ready” initiative.
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“We want to democratise and simplify generative AI so that customers can innovate and scale through AWS services. Keeping responsible AI as our goal, we work backwards from customer needs and provide what they require,” Guru Bala, head of solutions architecture, AWS specialised services, told AIM at AWS Summit Bengaluru, last month.
Through a mix of free and paid courses on platforms like Coursera, individuals can enhance their skills in generative AI. Competency partners like Shellkode also play a crucial role in developing various generative AI services to meet the diverse needs of customers.
“Our approach to responsible AI involves defining, measuring, and mitigating risks at every stage, from model training to deployment,” explained Bala. “We want to make sure that AI technology is used ethically and responsibly.”
Productivity Enhancement with AWS AI
A recent EY report shows that generative AI could potentially boost India’s GDP by an estimated $359 to $438 billion by 2030.
Organisations across India are recognising substantial gains in productivity and improved customer experiences by integrating generative AI into their products and solutions.
Bala noted, “As a result, boardrooms here (India) are increasingly asking, ‘What is the business impact in terms of productivity, customer experience, or time to market?’”
For example, Amazon Q’s coding companion Amazon CodeWhisperer enables developers to work more productively by providing AI-powered code suggestions in real-time, across 15 programming languages. In some cases, developers were 27% more likely to complete tasks successfully and did so an average of 57% faster, helping them build whatever fuels their passion more easily.
Bala emphasised the importance of understanding business problems and leveraging data as the biggest differentiator.
“One thing that companies should really understand is their business problems. The data that they have got is their biggest differentiator, and they should learn how to apply generative AI on their data to solve business problems,” he said.
Amazon Bedrock Now in India
At the summit, AWS announced that Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed generative AI service, is now generally available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region.
Bedrock provides the choice of top-notch models from both Amazon’s own first-party offerings (like Amazon Titan, and Amazon Q) and various third-party models. This includes families of foundational models from AI-focused companies like Meta, AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, AI21, Mistral, Stability AI, and more.
Bala explained that the launch in India enhances generative AI capabilities by improving processing and response times due to its proximity to users. It also brings more flexibility and choice of models without getting bogged down by the complexities of deployment and inference.
Initially launched globally in select regions in 2023, Bedrock’s expansion to Mumbai enables customers, including those in the public sector and regulated industries, to innovate with generative AI while maintaining control over application execution and data storage.
“Plus, we have several customers in regulated industries, such as life insurance, who require services to be available within India for regulatory compliance. By making these services available in the India region, we ensure that these customers can leverage Bedrock while adhering to local regulations,” he added.
However, adopting generative AI comes with several challenges. AWS approached these by first helping businesses define their objectives.
Instead of offering generative AI as a one-size-fits-all solution, it has worked backwards from customer needs, determining whether traditional AI or generative AI would best solve their problems.
Future in India
According to Bala, India’s teams play a crucial role in AWS’s global operations. The expertise of Indian engineers and developers is integral to services like Amazon Bedrock, driving the company’s innovation, both in the country and globally.
Looking ahead, AWS’s vision is clear and focused. It aims to continuously innovate in generative AI, introducing new models and variants to make the technology more accessible and easier to use.
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