When Redwood City, California-based company C3 AI, founded and helmed by tech legend Tom Siebel, launched its enterprise generative artificial intelligence suite earlier this year, it joined a growing cadre of companies that are swiftly developing generative AI solutions aimed at helping other organizations develop their own AI products and services.
And the market for generative AI is exploding, as businesses of all sizes and across all industries use it to improve productivity, operations, and customer experiences. In the McKinsey State of AI 2023 survey, one-third of respondents said their organizations “are using generative AI regularly in at least one business function.”
What C3 AI and other forward-thinking companies realize is that the key to accelerating innovation with generative AI is putting in place a solid foundation on which to build applications. This means having a secure, scalable cloud infrastructure that offers high-performance and cost-optimized computing. Companies also need cost-effective services for bringing together different types of data, including proprietary information, and making that data easy to use for training and refining generative AI models that can differentiate their businesses.
“There’s a lot to consider when building with generative AI—including compute performance, data management, choosing and fine-tuning foundation models, and ensuring security, privacy, and responsible use,” says Adam Taisch, global partner leader of generative AI and machine learning at Amazon Web Services (AWS). “Our goal at AWS is to remove the heavy lifting and make it easy for any organization to innovate with generative AI.”
Bringing Speed, Ease, and Choice to Generative AI Builders
To do this, AWS offers a broad set of powerful AI and machine learning capabilities. These include computing services powered by purpose-built chips that deliver the performance needed for generative AI applications while reducing costs and energy consumption. The company also provides foundation models (FMs) and developer tools that make it faster and easier to build and scale generative AI applications, as well as secure data services that help organizations use their data to differentiate those applications.
One tool that is helping democratize access to generative AI: Amazon Bedrock. This fully managed service offers easy access to a choice of high-performing FMs from leading AI companies, along with a broad set of capabilities that businesses need to build generative AI applications. It simplifies development while maintaining privacy and security. Even organizations without machine learning expertise can use Bedrock to apply generative AI to a variety of tasks, such as search, personalization, conversational text processing, and image generation.
“You can see the power of the AWS approach when you look at our AWS Partners that have moved quickly to incorporate generative AI into their platforms and offerings,” Taisch says. “Already, a wide range of AWS Partners are building on and with AWS to create generative AI applications that help them deliver more value to their customers.”
Take C3 AI, for example. It provides turnkey enterprise AI applications to some of the largest organizations around the world, in virtually every industry. “There was a natural pairing between AWS’s scalability, innovation, and agility with C3 AI’s industry-leading software,” says Nikhil Krishnan, chief technology officer, products, at C3 AI. The company’s platform and applications all run on AWS services—including storage, databases, and serverless processing—and are designed to be fully compatible for AWS customers.
“We heard from our shared customers that they wanted use case–specific AI applications that could scale to meet their unique business needs,” Krishnan says. With its partnership with AWS, C3 AI can provide prebuilt AI applications that scale easily on infrastructure that its customers are familiar with and already using.
Secure, Scalable, and Flexible Infrastructure
For C3 AI, an important factor in its ability to innovate with generative AI is getting access to the latest best-in-class FMs. Amazon Bedrock helps with this.
“Each model has its strengths, and our applications leverage different models for different tasks,” says Krishnan. “Bedrock gives us access to transformational foundation models like Anthropic’s next-generation large language model (LLM), Claude, and Cohere Command with a single API, accelerating our development work and increasing the speed at which we can serve our customers.”
Says Taisch, “Our goal is to provide our customers and partners of every size with everything they need to accelerate innovation with generative AI. That includes offering enterprise-grade security and privacy, a choice of leading foundation models, a data-first approach, and the most performant, cost-effective infrastructure.”
For AWS Partner Privacera, which provides a unified AI and data security and governance platform, having the right infrastructure helps ensure that it can scale new features and applications while keeping costs low. This is critical for a company with ambitious growth plans, as it works to make responsible data access available to all organizations.
“With AWS, we’ve dramatically reduced the overhead of installing, managing, and upgrading our services,” says Don Bosco Durai, Privacera’s co-founder and CTO. “AWS has also helped us be more elastic and scale up or down, based on the load and customer growth.”
Privacera was an early adopter of Amazon Bedrock and easily integrated it into its platform, which runs on AWS. “Because Amazon Bedrock supports a breadth of high-performing model choices, it enabled us to try out and select the model best suited for our unique requirements,” Durai says. “Our customers have experienced similar advantages and flexibility in using Bedrock.”
Tools to Move Faster in Building with Generative AI
AWS Partner Local Measure places a premium on speed, particularly when it comes to releasing new products and features. Engage, its pre-built contact center platform for Amazon Connect, uses generative AI to provide businesses with highly personalized experiences. Building on AWS helps Local Measure “radically speed up our development and time to market,” says CEO Jonathan Barouch. The company came up with and prototyped Engage in about six weeks, “which really speaks to the power of the innovation within our business, the capabilities of Amazon Connect, and our partnership with AWS,” he says.
Local Measure uses Amazon Bedrock and generative AI to drive efficiencies in case and knowledge management, saving time for contact center agents. The company has integrated Bedrock into Engage to make it easier for its clients to improve their customer experiences by using generative AI to assist agents. This includes automating repetitive tasks, providing intelligent recommendations, and improving agent productivity.
Barouch notes that Local Measure has been using generative AI to better serve its customers around the world. “We’re seeing generative AI produce significant time savings for human tasks, which leads to cost savings, especially when it comes to streamlining workflows and eliminating time-consuming processes.”
Graph database and analytics leader Neo4j also uses Bedrock. With it, says Sudhir Hasbe, the company’s chief product officer, “our customers can build generative AI applications using Retrievals Augmented Generation as their framework and leverage Neo4j knowledge graphs via Amazon Bedrock.” Neo4j has seen rapid growth in customers using its platform to store knowledge graphs that have been created and consumed by Bedrock.
Creating Growth Opportunities
These AWS Partners typify what McKinsey calls generative AI “high performers,” using the technology to increase the value of their existing offerings by providing new features. Moreover, they are identifying opportunities where generative AI can make a significant difference to the business rather than rushing to use it simply out of fear of being left behind.
“Our AWS Partners are not only early adopters who demonstrate how to move quickly with a new technology,” Taisch says. “They’re experts who can help other organizations innovate with generative AI, and they’re a critical part of our mission of putting generative AI at the fingertips of every business.”
Learn more about how AWS cloud infrastructure can help you innovate to build and run secure and high-performance applications that create new customer experiences, improve efficiencies, and scale your business faster.
This story was produced by AWS and edited by WIRED Brand Lab.
