Held on June 7, 2023, the AWS Summit London 2023 offered a valuable opportunity to take stock of Amazon’s Generative AI vision. During the Summit, Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of Database, Analytics, and ML at Amazon Web Services (AWS), highlighted the transformative potential of ‘net new’ ideas in reshaping companies’ digital transformation strategies as he addressed over 9,000 attendees. Swami described these ideas as “sparks of innovation” that enable us to solve complex problems and reimagine new ways of doing things. He believes net new ideas shape many of today’s most innovative and transformative technologies.
Driven by these net new ideas, he believes that Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Titan, and Amazon CodeWhisperer will fundamentally change the software product engineering process and accelerate business transformation. We highlight the top four of them here:
- English as the next programming language: The most profound impact of Generative AI-assisted coding is that anyone can code now. Since coding companions such as CodeWhisperer work with natural language prompts, software engineering moves closer to business users. The potential of such a shift goes beyond boosting developers’ productivity to encoding software with business context, aligning it better with the end purpose, or to the benefit of the end user. Going forward, this shift will reflect on the assessment of developer skills, deployment, and billability across projects, and how clients accept and understand the implications of business applications developed with AI-assisted code. Persistent acknowledges the change this will trigger in software engineering, and we are committed to being one of the early adopters of Amazon CodeWhisperer, taking it to our 16,000-strong developer community. We are also working with our clients to sensitize them about AI-assisted code to get their buy-in. (Read our Press Release).
- Complex inputs, complex output: While highlighting the evolution of Machine Learning (ML) models, from simple algorithms to today’s complex neural networks, Swami, in his keynote, talked about how the current generation of Large Language Models (LLMs) are pre-trained on massive amounts of unstructured, largely unlabelled data so they can complete generic tasks with complex output at low latency and high accuracy. The resources (manual effort, cost, IT infrastructure) needed to set up something as revolutionary as this are significantly lower than those required by the traditional ML models and it is now possible to start innovating right off the bat. For enterprises, this opens channels that allow them to develop fast and fail faster – putting as many innovative ideas as possible to the test. At Persistent, the office of our Chief Technology Officer, Dr. Pandurang Kamat, is running pilots with Amazon’s Generative AI tool CodeWhisperer and other generative AI tools to reimagine software engineering as we know it today.
- Task-specific generative AI: Swami maps out Amazon’s Generative AI trajectory from creating blogs, videos, or even code snippets to enabling functionalities (such as summation or search relevancy) to immersive customer experiences (with chatbots or Q&As) and supporting decision-making. Fine-tuning customizes pre-trained LLMs through small amounts of contextualized data to execute highly specialized, specific tasks, including decision-making. The implications are enormous, and what this can spin-off is already being predicted. It is estimated that by 2025, generative AI will be used in the discovery of 30% of new drugs, up from zero today and that is huge. At Persistent, we are watching out for the transformative power of Generative AI, with CodeWhisperer and other Generative AI tools, to manifest in software engineering, project delivery, and value monetization. We believe this technology, enabled to execute complex, contextualized tasks, will change how industries run, businesses interact with each other and their customers, and critical decisions are made (backed with data-driven insight and truly little human hunch). Some of this may be a long way from here, but it has been a long time coming.
- Removing heavy lifting: Generative AI will abstract much of the grunt work for developers, content creators, enterprises, and decision-makers. AWS has introduced tools and solutions that democratize access to Generative AI by making below-the-line work almost invisible. They offer the right model trained on the right data, made secure with the right protocols, and easily customizable for industry use cases. They have removed the heavy lifting and enabled the doers to do what they do best. Persistent is currently working on an onboarding strategy for Generative AI, which will use advances made by AWS and its peers. These solutions will help us serve our client needs better, faster, and cheaper, deepening the focus on what we do best at Persistent.
Unlock net new ideas with Persistent
Persistent partners with AWS to unlock our clients’ digital potential by abstracting away most of the subsidiary initiatives, such as setting up data warehouses, automating business processes, and implementing AI and ML solutions to aid in decision-making, and accelerating time to value. European enterprises have traditionally been fence-sitters, due to concerns around data security, and sovereignty but we see a shift happening as emerging technologies such as Generative AI create traction from businesses and individuals alike. Our European clients trust our decade-long partnership with AWS to bring the most complex digital transformations to life.
As an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, we can help your business unlock the next ‘net new idea’. Get in touch with us for a free assessment of your digital readiness.
