As small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and the startup ecosystem in India gear up to embrace generative AI-based Cloud solutions to unlock the true potential of their data and boost productivity, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced a plethora of new capabilities and solutions at its annual flagship ‘re: Invent 2023’ conference in Las Vegas, the US.

 

In the presence of more that 50,000 participants, AWS unveiled industry-first AI and Cloud based solutions that will help organisations of all sizes grow their business. A recent AWS study has found that small businesses embracing cloud-enabled technologies in India are estimated to unlock up to Rs 1.6 trillion in annual productivity gains by 2030. This will lead to 45.9 million jobs being created across healthcare, education and agriculture sectors, representing 9 percent of total jobs in India.

 

Amazon Q: Reimagine the future of work

 

AWS announced Amazon Q, a new type of generative artificial intelligence-(AI) powered assistant that is specifically for work and can be tailored to a customer’s business. Customers can get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, generate content, and take actions — all informed by a customer’s information repositories, code, and enterprise systems. 

 

Amazon Q provides information and advice to employees to streamline tasks, accelerate decision making and problem solving, and help spark creativity and innovation at work. Designed to meet enterprise customers’ stringent requirements, Amazon Q can personalise its interactions to each individual user based on an organisation’s existing identities, roles, and permissions. 

 

Amazon Q brings generative AI-powered assistance to customers building on AWS, working internally, and using AWS applications for business intelligence (BI), contact centres, and supply chain management to help organisations of all sizes and across industries use generative AI safely. 

 

“AWS is helping customers harness generative AI with solutions at all three layers of the stack, including purpose-built infrastructure, tools, and applications. Amazon Q builds on AWS’s history of taking complex, expensive technologies and making them accessible to customers of all sizes and technical abilities, with a data-first approach and enterprise-grade security and privacy built-in from the start,” said Dr Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Data and Artificial Intelligence, AWS.

 

 

Next-generation AWS-designed chips

 

The company announced the next generation of two AWS-designed chip families — AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2 — delivering advancements in price performance and energy efficiency for a broad range of customer workloads, including machine learning (ML) training and generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications. 

 

Graviton4 and Trainium2 mark the latest innovations in chip design from AWS. With each successive generation of chip, AWS delivers better price performance and energy efficiency, giving customers even more options—in addition to chip/instance combinations featuring the latest chips from third parties like AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA — to run virtually any application or workload on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

 

Today, AWS offers more than 150 different Graviton-powered Amazon EC2 instance types globally at scale, has built more than 2 million Graviton processors, and has more than 50,000 customers—including the top 100 EC2 customers—using Graviton-based instances to achieve the best price performance for their applications. “Thousands of customers have implemented Databricks on AWS, giving them the ability to use MosaicML to pre-train, fine-tune, and serve FMs for a variety of use cases,” said Naveen Rao, vice president of Generative AI at Databricks. 

 

Three new serverless innovations

 

The three new serverless innovations announced across AWS database and analytics portfolio make it faster and easier for customers to scale their data infrastructure to support their most demanding use cases. The announcement introduces Amazon Aurora Limitless Database, a new capability that automatically scales beyond the write limits of a single Amazon Aurora database, making it easy for developers to scale their applications and saving them months compared to building custom solutions. 

 

Additionally, Amazon ElastiCache Serverless helps customers create highly available caches in under a minute and instantly scales vertically and horizontally to support customers’ most demanding applications, without needing to manage the infrastructure. AWS is also releasing a new Amazon Redshift Serverless capability that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to predict workloads and automatically scale and optimize resources to help customers meet their price-performance targets. 

 

"Data is the cornerstone of every organization's digital transformation, and harnessing data to its full potential requires an end-to-end strategy that can scale with a customer’s needs while accommodating all types of use cases. The dynamic nature of data makes it perfectly suited to serverless technologies, which is why AWS offers a broad range of serverless database and analytics offerings that help support our customers' most demanding workloads,” said Dr Sivasubramanian.

 

Amazon Connect introduces GenAI capabilities

 

Amazon Connect is AWS’s cloud contact centre that enables organisations of all sizes to deliver better customer experiences at lower cost. Powered by large language models (LLMs) and other foundation models (FMs) available through Amazon Bedrock, the latest Amazon Connect enhancements include new generative AI capabilities that expand on the service’s existing machine learning (ML) features to transform how companies provide customer service. 

 

Amazon Q in Connect — a generative AI-enhanced evolution of Amazon Connect Wisdom — provides agents with recommended responses and actions based on real-time customer questions, for faster and more accurate customer support. Amazon Connect Contact Lens — an Amazon Connect feature that provides real-time contact center analytics and quality management — now helps identify the essential parts of call-centre conversations with AI generated summaries that detect sentiment, trends, and policy compliance. 

 

Lastly, Amazon Connect Customer Profiles — an Amazon Connect feature that enables agents to deliver faster, more personalized customer service— now creates unified customer profiles from disparate software-as-a-service applications and databases.

 

Four new capabilities for AWS supply chain

 

The company has announced four new capabilities for AWS Supply Chain —combining Amazon’s nearly 30 years of supply chain experience with the resilience, security, and business continuity of an AWS managed service to help customers optimise their supply chains. These new capabilities, which will be available in 2024, expand existing data lake, demand planning, and machine learning (ML)-powered insights. 

 

With new supply planning, collaboration, sustainability, and generative AI capabilities to support upstream supply chain processes, such as supplier orders, AWS Supply Chain is making it possible for an entirely new set of customers, including manufacturers, to benefit from the service.

 

“Customers are excited that we're making our extensive supply chain experience available to them as a managed service. That, combined with our industry leading analytics and ML means customers can now track and plan for products more predictably, from manufacturing facilities to final points of distribution,” said Diego Pantoja-Navajas, vice president of AWS Supply Chain.

 

AWS introduces Amazon One Enterprise

 

Amazon One Enterprise is a palm-based identity service for comprehensive and easy-to-use authentication that improves organisational security and helps prevent costly security breaches. The new service enables organisations to provide a fast, convenient, and contactless experience for employees and other authorised users to gain access to physical locations (e.g., data centers, office and residential buildings, airports, hotels and resorts, and educational institutions), as well as digital assets such as restricted software resources (e.g., financial data and HR records). 

 

Amazon One Enterprise eliminates operational overhead associated with the management of traditional enterprise authentication methods, like badges and PINs. IT and security administrators can easily install the Amazon One devices and manage users, devices, and software updates in the AWS Management Console. To learn more about Amazon One Enterprise, visit aws.amazon.com/one-enterprise.

 

Amazon One Enterprise is a new, fully managed service that provides highly accurate and secure enterprise access control through an easy-to-use biometric identification device. Security is built into every stage of the service, from multi-layered security controls in the Amazon One device to protection of data in transit and in the cloud.

 

“Amazon One Enterprise’s palm recognition technology is designed to deliver a highly accurate identification service that increases an organisation’s overall security, while offering seamless authentication management with lower operational overhead,” said Dilip Kumar, vice president of AWS Applications. 

 

“With Amazon One Enterprise, security administrators also have a centralised view of all user authentications across the organisation, taking the stress out of managing multiple access control solutions. Businesses appreciate the privacy and convenience for their users, who can access physical locations and software assets with just a hover of their palm," he added.