Amazon Web Services (AWS) is holding a Cloud and Generative AI Summit in Sydney this week.
Steve Ahern reports from the Summit.
Hundreds of Amazon team members and customers are sharing knowledge about the latest tools and technology and some high profile Amazon clients are telling their technology and AI stories, in 90 deep dive technical sessions and over 120 workshops and demonstrations.
“Generative AI is the biggest tech transformation since the internet, it will impact how we live, work and connect,” said Rianne van Veldhuizen Vice President of AWS Australia & New Zealand. The summit aims to answer questions, inspire startups and help existing businesses to innovate. Most examples are not about media, but the lessons learnt from other companies are just as useful for our media industries.
Security and sustainability “remain foundational to everything we do at AWS,” said van Veldhuizen. “AWS is committed to the growth and prosperity of Australia and New Zealand. We contribute $35 billion to GDP in Australia and $10.8 billion to New Zealand,” she said.
One of the features of the Summit is a startup accelerator program. Last year, an AI DJ product called Splash Music evolved out of that accelerator.
Canva’s chief technology officer Brendan Humhrey urges companies to be “fast and scalable,” just like the design enabling company has been doing for the past ten years.
To handle the 1.2 million requests the company gets for its services every second, Canva has moved from MySQL to DynamoDB. It was part of the company’s initial plan to scale up when needed to handle the growing usage, not just in Australia, but around the world. Canva now has cloud services deployed around the world to handle international peak loads, such as the 1am Sydney time peak which happens when Americans arrive at work and create a peak load in their time zone.
Canva has successfully integrated third party LLM models, for example the company’s Magic Media service using the SageMaker real time interface. SageMaker is a fully managed machine learning service that enables developers and data scientists to build, train, and deploy ML models efficiently.
The company used Bedrock to scale its generative AI applications.
Financial services are at the forefront of change in Australia, to deliver better service to customers, streamline compliance, prevent fraud, and repair their damaged image from the previous decade. All 4 of Australia’s big banks have stories of change using cloud services and AI.
Commonwealth Bank of Australia CEO Matt Comyn talked about how AI is reshaping financial services to “deliver customer service with the best competitive advantage, quality and speed.” The three biggest challenges for any financial services company are: customer experience, cyber hacks, fraud and scams, so any changes being made are taking those priorities into account.
Talking about how he and his leadership team have navigated change within the bank, he emphasised that everyone in leadership team needs to explain the context for the change to “ensure clarity and alignment.”
Leaders of the future also “need to be very hands on with the new tools.” The bank has begun using AI Agents, not just internally, but for customers as well. “The risks of doing things that are customer facing are high,” but it is important to be “building that capability now.” To bring staff along on the journey Comyn believes “a policy framework is important – speak about it, acknowledge the uncertainty, then be part of shaping the future.”
“Don’t be a reluctant or late adopter. It will be difficult for late entrants to catch up… Have multiple speeds for implementation across the organisation,” Comyn said. This thinking is similar to the discussion I had with Clive Dickens this week.
CommBank has educated its board about the technology and prepared staff to “learn as you go,” but with a cautious collaborative approach due to the fact that “financial institutions are heavily regulated.”
Dr Teresa Anderson, CEO of NSW Health outlined a huge project that will initiate a single digital patient record to transformation the way that doctors and patients interact with the state’s health services. There are 178,000 staff, 228 hospitals and 600 community health centres in the NSW Health Department involved in this project.
“The scale is big, its scary and exciting.”
All the Health department’s systems will integrate with a system called EPIC, using AWS as a host. A high degree of governance, data management and cyber security are essential and a company able to handle the huge datacloud service was essential to the project.
Change management is crucial to the successful implementation of the system. Anderson says it has been “essential” to communicate “what the end-state will be.” She is working with her teams to understand the risks and put strategies in place to manage those risks.