In the business world, they often say that when a company’s beliefs align with its IT strategy, good things happen. Amazon Web Services is a prime example of this. The company’s value is skyrocketing to $3 trillion, as a result of its philosophy-technology combo.

The e-commerce giant’s cloud unit recently held its annual conference showing off the scale of its business and dominance in the market. The 17-year-old company has followed a set of principles to reach the podium. AIM got in touch with some of the executives at re:Invent 2023 to understand the company’s multi-layered philosophy.

Anupam Mishra, Head of Technology and Solution Architecture, Commercial Sales, AWS India and South Asia stated that the philosophy for AWS since the start is to make customers do what really matters to them. “We have been deeply embedded in how we work with customers across India, ranging from startups to small and medium businesses to enterprises,” he said. 

“We see almost every company has a use case, which they will benefit from by going to the cloud. A lot of which is driven by them reacting to their customer needs,” added Mishra who has been with the cloud giant for almost a decade now.  

One example that remains close to his heart is the PayTM voice box, which was developed in just a few weeks to streamline payment verification he mentioned. Initially, when somebody made a payment using a QR code, a merchant had to look at their phone and see if the payment was done. The nifty internet-connected device reads out payment confirmation messages for small business owners and vendors across India. 

In Terms of GenerativeAI

India is home to more than 70 generative AI startups, which have raised over $440 million between 2019 and Q3 2023, as per an Inc42 report.

“Observing patterns in how companies embrace generative AI, it’s evident that the adoption is significant and expected to grow, with India ranking third globally in terms of anticipated spending on generative AI by 2026 with an estimated $3.6 billion,” stated Mishra. “We want to continue to be laser-focused on what generative AI can do for customers in India,” he added. 

He further went on to explain the importance of companies having their databases sorted to flourish generative AI. “Many companies, especially enterprises, which have been in business for a very long time, have a huge amount of data sitting in their business. Once you have a database in order, all this data can be available to the models because models will be as smart as data which affect feed into,” he noted.

The Security Layer 

“AWS is always focused on thinking of security as a first principle,” emphasised Mishra. But he was not the only one. On a similar line, Samira Bhaktiar, the director of Media and Entertainment at AWS further elaborated, saying “Our customers right now are focused on how they can create, deliver, and monetise their content, through our cloud-based solutions. Everything that we have to do has to continue to be extremely secure with privacy in mind and have the proper guardrails associated with how it’s being leveraged.”

She further explained that Amazon has over 143 different security standards and compliance certifications. “The workloads that are on our cloud are secure enough for regulatory organisations around the world. We’re very focused on ensuring that everything that we do is secure and that to the degree in which we can help our customers ensure that they’re leveraging customer data with compliance and privacy,” Bhaktiar added. 

Speaking about generative AI she said, “Like any tool, it’s going to be up to the industry to determine how we’re going to leverage this. Because the opportunities to leverage it are endless. Again, it’s going to be up to the industry to determine how and where it should be leveraged,” leaving the onus on the users. 

Mishra and Bhaktiar were not the only Amazonians to chant the secure and reliable mantra. Every member of the tech giant which took the stage including the CEO Adam Selipsky made sure the audience knew the company’s stance on prioritising their customer’s security over everything else. 

During the conference, the AWS CEO also introduced Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock to let companies building AI language models define its limits. If a user asks irrelevant questions to a chatbot, the latter will now have an option of not answering instead of providing a wrong and convincing response — or something hateful and worse.

The cloud giant also introduced a default watermark for its AI image generator as a means to show its continuous effort towards making future models and their responses safer and secure. 

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