‘Amazon Bedrock brings Gen AI capabilities closer to Indian enterprises,’ says Guru Bala of AWS.
Guru Bala of AWS India believes that generative AI has become a boardroom conversation, with organizations actively researching it.
“Every organization is now looking to innovate with generative AI so that they can provide a better customer experience,” said Guru Bala, head of solutions architecture for specialized services at AWS India and South Asia. At the AWS Summit in Bengaluru on May 15, the business made its Amazon Bedrock platform broadly available in the Asia-Pacific (Mumbai) Region, providing more access to generative AI.
On this occasion, indianexpress.com spoke with Bala about how the cloud provider is boosting Indian enterprises with Amazon Bedrock, AWS’ machine learning platform for developing generative AI applications.
During the wide-ranging conversation, Bala described how Amazon Bedrock is bringing the potential of large language models (LLMs) and generative AI to Indian clients. According to him, this localized availability results in faster processing times and lower latency for apps developed on the platform.
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“What this means for our customers is that they will be able to access Amazon Bedrock as a platform from our Mumbai region, which will help them with faster processing time of these generative AI applications, as well as helping them get outputs at a much faster pace,” Bala stated. “So increasing the responsiveness of generative AI applications – this is what it means to our customers.”
Amazon Bedrock and Indian Companies Amazon Bedrock Amazon Bedrock:
In the interview, Bala highlighted several instances of Indian businesses in various sectors like media, insurance, technology services, automotive, and health/wellness using the Amazon Bedrock platform to improve customer experience and increase productivity.
He mentioned Happyfox, a provider of enterprise help desk solutions, which managed to automatically respond to over 40% of customer inquiries by incorporating generative AI models from Amazon Bedrock. Bala stated that this integration resulted in quicker response times, enhanced customer satisfaction, and a 20% boost in agent productivity due to the AI’s assistance in providing improved answers.
Another instance he referenced is L&T Technology Services, which offers engineering services to automotive manufacturers transitioning to software-driven vehicles. By constructing applications on Amazon Bedrock, L&T could expedite application development cycles and establish virtual testing environments in the cloud, ultimately reducing time-to-market. Bala expressed that companies are adopting generative AI in innovative ways to enhance customer experience, increase productivity, and reshape their workflows by utilizing AI-assisted tools and technologies.
Democratising AI :
Bala stated that AWS is committed to democratising AI and making generative AI accessible to organizations of all sizes, from corporations to startups. According to him, the Amazon Bedrock platform intends to simplify what is already a sophisticated technology by providing LLMs via easy-to-use APIs.
“We provided these LLMs to our customers as an API because it is the simplest and quickest way for them to avoid having to take an LLM, deploy it on a GPU, and then expose it as an API.” All of this heavy lifting comes at the expense of our clients,” Bala stated.
When questioned about adoption patterns in the Indian industry, Bala stated that generative AI has become a boardroom topic, with executive teams across enterprises actively studying how to incorporate these capabilities into their products and services.
“Every organisation is now looking to innovate with generative AI so that they are able to offer better customer experience,” he stated. “And when they have to do this, everyone is in the race to adopt generative AI.”
Support from AWS :
AWS offers resources such as the AI Ready programme to help businesses in their adoption journey. They also partner with companies like Shellkode to provide solution-building expertise, and conduct innovation workshops to assist in identifying relevant use cases.
Bala highlighted that AWS provides standard support mechanisms for all its IT services, including generative AI services like Amazon Bedrock, Amazon SageMaker, and Amazon Q. These services are all included in the regular AWS support offerings.
In response to concerns about AI replacing human jobs, Bala emphasized that AI is meant to assist humans, not replace them. He gave an example of a fintech customer using AI to draft email responses by pulling data from internal systems, with human agents reviewing and approving the final outputs, resulting in significant productivity improvements.
