As enterprise businesses and startups continue to embrace generative artificial intelligence, Amazon Web Services Inc. furthered its investment in the technology today with the announcement of its Generative AI Innovation Center, a new program aimed at helping customers build and deploy AI solutions.

The company said it’s investing $100 million in the program, which will connect customers to AWS artificial intelligence and machine learning experts who can guide them through building and launching their own generative AI solutions, products and services.

Generative AI is a specific type of artificial intelligence that hit global popularity with the emergence of chatbots such as OpenAI LP’s ChatGPT and image generators such as Midjourney. ChatGPT and other chatbots are capable of answering questions, doing research, producing poetry and holding humanlike conversations, which makes them useful for human-software interfaces and reducing tedious knowledge work. Image generators can create vivid, lifelike artwork based on text prompts, making short work for marketing teams.

“The Generative AI Innovation Center is part of our goal to help every organization leverage AI by providing flexible and cost-effective generative AI services for the enterprise, alongside our team of generative AI experts to take advantage of all this new technology has to offer,” said Matt Garman, senior vice president of sales, marketing, and global services at AWS.

Customers will be able to tap into the expertise and resources at AWS to build generative AI apps and solutions through the Generative AI Innovation Center through a team of strategists, engineers and solutions architects who will work with them step-by-step to build bespoke systems.

The center will help by providing workshops, engagements and training in the latest technologies and by helping customers understand the scope and use cases that will help them get the best business value out of implementing generative AI. That will include guidance in industry best practices and ethical applications for applying the technology responsibly.

AWS will also help customers by giving them assistance with connecting to its services such as CodeWhisperer, an AI-powered coding companion, and Bedrock, the company’s fully managed service that provides foundational generative AI models from AI21 Labs, Anthropic and Stability AI, along with Amazon’s own models. Customers will also be able to train their models on Amazon’s high-performance infrastructure and build, train and deploy their own models with SageMaker, its managed tools and infrastructure for AI development.

AI-powered sales team productivity platform Highspot Inc. and customer engagement and communications platform Twilio Inc. are among the first customers to engage with the new Innovation Center to develop new generative AI solutions.

“Highspot is obsessive about helping our customers drive efficient growth by delivering capabilities that unlock new levels of sales productivity,” said Kurt Berglund, vice president of science at Highspot. “The potential generative AI brings is huge and at Highspot. The AWS Generative AI Innovation Center is providing us with novel solutions and creative guidance for some of the most complex challenges and opportunities involved in bringing generative AI workloads to life at scale.”

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