The artificial intelligence industry is filled with big vendors and upstarts, and Amazon Web Services Inc.’s AWS Summit in New York City earlier this months provided Amazon the platform to make its claim as the leader in AI.

To do that, the company put Matt Wood (pictured), vice president of AI products at AWS, in the keynote spot. Here are five takeaways from his keynote that I felt best demonstrated the company’s leadership in AI and generative AI:

Takeaway No. 1: Gen AI and machine learning are already a big business for AWS

In his keynote, Wood said the company already has “hundreds of thousands of customers today that are running their AI and machine learning workloads on AWS.” Wood added that Bedrock, AWS’ service for building generative applications is one of the “fastest-growing AWS services of the last decade.” He said that “across all of AWS, machine learning and AI is a multibillion-dollar annual run-rate business.”

Wood shared some statistics to back up his words. “Ninety-six percent of all AI machine learning unicorns run on AWS,” he said. “And if you look at the Forbes AI 50, 90% of those organizations also run on AWS.” According to Wood, the corporations using AWS for their AI applications range from the New York Stock Exchange and insurance leader Sun Life Assurance Co. to pharmaceutical innovator Pfizer Inc. and life science giant Bayer AG.

Takeaway No. 2: AWS is committed to continuous AI innovation

Since 2023, AWS has launched 326 gen AI features into general availability, Wood told the audience. He added that the company has “by far, the broadest set of AI capabilities” and has launched “more than twice as many new capabilities for machine learning and generative AI into general availability than all of the other cloud providers combined.”

“You would be surprised how many successful startups and enterprises are in the exabyte club on AWS,” he said. “A huge number of customers have huge volumes of privately held data, which allows them to analyze that data, maybe that’s market research, clinical trial results or healthcare information. They’re able to apply generative AI to understand and leverage that existing data in new and exciting ways.”

Wood said there are three layers to the AWS gen AI stack: One is a foundational element for building, training, tuning and tinkering with foundation models. A second layer, Amazon Bedrock, a service that makes it “really easy for anybody to be able to build applications using generative AI,” Wood said. The third layer is services to apply AI in the real world such as Amazon Q, a generative AI-powered natural language tool for building machine-learning models.

Wood described Amazon Q as “the easy button for generative AI. It allows you to take information from anywhere inside your organization and start to harness it, such as you can start to remove all of the ‘muck,’ or the 70% of that undifferentiated heavy lifting associated with all these different tasks inside your organization.”

Takeaway No. 3: AWS has become the place to be for organizations that are on the cutting edge of AI innovation

National Australia Bank uses Amazon Q’s code customization capabilities for onboarding new engineers and helping developers ramp up quickly. “Their [applicant] acceptance rate jumped to 50%,” he noted. “And more than 40% of developers that they surveyed saw improvements in productivity. As a result, they have more than doubled the number of employees that are using Q for these development tasks from 450 to over 1,000 in just a couple of months.”

Bayer has been developing solutions in AWS since 2014, according to Will McQueen, the company’s head of crop science global data assets. “When evaluating where to place our bets, we needed a partner and a technology platform that would be instrumental in powering innovation and market-leading solutions for the next 10 years,” he said. “We determined that AWS was where we wanted to place our bet for our next-generation data science platform. In the last year, we have made great progress toward where we need to be to accelerate our ability to bring data science solutions to market.”

Takeaway No. 4: AWS is serious about security — and so are its customers

One of the keys to AWS’ AI success is its total commitment to ensuring the security of its customers’ data. “AWS customers in every industry are able to meet and exceed the security requirements for generative AI and their data,” said Wood.

He added that there’s no higher priority for AWS than security. “We will stop all work to focus on security. And we build security in from day one. You don’t usually build a secure service by taking an insecure service and bolting security on later. You have to build it in at the foundations.” Security scanning is also one of the tasks performed by Amazon Q.

“There is a schism in some customer’s minds that in order to be successful with generative AI, you have to make some sort of negative tradeoff when it comes to the confidentiality, privacy and security of your data,” Wood said. “But it’s just not the case on AWS. We don’t use any of the data that moves through our paid AI services to improve the underlying models. We don’t have humans reviewing any of that information. And [customers] control where the data lies inside your VPC and the flow of all that information within the network.”

Takeaway No. 5: AWS is fully committed to sustainability

As fast it is growing, AWS is achieving that growth with sustainability as a top priority. Wood said that in 2019, Amazon set a goal to match all the electricity used across its global operations — from AWS data centers to corporate buildings, grocery stores to fulfillment centers — with 100% renewable energy by 2030. Wood said the company “completed that goal seven years early.”

With all of the stress on the global power grid and related resources, AWS’ commitment to sustainability bodes well for its continued success.

We’re still very early in the AI age, and it’s far too soon to declare a singular winner. However, with the portfolio AWS has built, which is already attracting big-name customers and enabling organizations of all types and sizes to use gen AI to innovate and accelerate growth, AWS staked its leadership claim at AWS Summit New York. But the race is far from over.

Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE. 

Photo: SiliconANGLE