Kick-start your inclusive journey: Inclusion Powered by AWS Playbook

Let me first start off by welcoming you to the launch of the Inclusion Power by AWS Playbook session. We know AWS's innovations wouldn't be possible without the diverse team of builders that help us think bigger and better about what we create for our customers.

We also believe inclusion is the key enabler of all efforts to increase diversity and equity. Increasing representation of all diversity dimensions in the workforce is vital. So is offering those diverse employees equal opportunities to grow, learn and reach their fullest potential.

However, to attract those people, we first need to create a workplace culture where they feel trusted, connected and like there's space for them at the table. That's why at AWS we lead with inclusion. We are committed to always working, always learning, always diving deeper and always iterating to enhance our ID&E strategy and approach.

We also know achieving true inclusion isn't possible without collective action. And today, I'm pleased to introduce a few partners that have been instrumental in helping advance our identity efforts.

Kelly from Blue Ocean Brain, Peter from Cultural Infusions and rounding off our panel is Neil our worldwide go to market leader for AWS QuickSight. Welcome you three. Thank you.

We've got an exciting discussion lined up for you today during which we'll dive into what AWS, Blue Ocean Brain and Culture Infusions are doing to support inclusion diversity and equity and how other companies can use our new playbook to advance similar efforts.

As a company founded in technology, we believe in leveraging the latest and greatest digital solutions to advance our ID&E efforts. This includes Diversity Atlas, a unique software as a service platform created by Cultural Infusions that helps create holistic real time dashboards of workforce diversity according to ethnicity, country of birth language and worldview religion. And I've really enjoyed using Diversity Atlas Peter. So thank you.

It also includes Blue Ocean Brain, a full service employee training platform that delivers modern accessible actionable microlearning in an accessible interactive and actionable format which we use for our inclusion pledge, which has been awesome. Kelly.

During today's discussion, Peter and Kelly are going to walk us through how their solutions support inclusion both in partnership with AWS and on a wider scale. But to start with, we're going to chat with Neil about how AWS is developing responsible AI solutions that level the playing field for our data.

And now I'm gonna take it over to Neil.

Neil: Thank you Lavia. So how AWS is, is, you know, going about responsible AI is very similar to our data story from a security and privacy perspective. So obviously, this is a shared model, a lot of those benchmarks and best practices in the same fashion. And so you'll see that infused throughout our generative AI tools and QuickSight, which I represent from a generative AI perspective, it will follow those same best practices as well.

Lavia: Perfect. And before I kick off with our general questions, we'll cue the video.

[Video plays]

Lavia: So we've been busy at AWS as you can see from the video and these partners have helped us really propel our strategy forward. So I'm gonna first start with a question that each of you can answer. Why is data so important when it comes to developing effective ID&E strategies? Let's start with you Neil.

Neil: So data you know, is super important because it gives you, you know, the transparency that you need, right? And so when you have that foundation around the transparency, then you can make accurate decisions. And if you want to take advantage of, you know, next generation capabilities around AI and machine learning, it starts with a strong data foundation and also a transparency model around that data.

Lavia: Kelly?

Kelly: Definitely thinking about the data as a way to track how your progress is going. When you're looking to meet those inclusion goals within your organization, you need to be able to reference the data to see if any of the changes you're trying to make are sticking.

Lavia: And Peter are your Diversity Atlas tool really helped us to collect a lot of data through survey. Let us tell us why is data so important when it comes to developing effective ID&E strategies.

Peter: Well, how do you manage what you can't measure at the end of the day? And I think when it comes to data, it's about what data are we seeing? What data aren't we seeing? And often what happens in this space is a lot of survivorship bias, which is we're making decisions on only what we can see rather than what can't see. So when it comes to human identity, it's extraordinarily complex and human identity is made up of many different attributes. So one of the things we have done with Diversity Atlas is begin to disaggregate, you know, identity into all these different categories. So we can now start to take a deep dive and give the visibility to every single individual.

Lavia: I'm gonna stick with you Peter. So as a follow up, why is it important to encourage workforces to learn about and take an interest in ID&E?

Peter: Well, there's 1000 studies out there which speak to the benefits of, you know, diversity, equity and inclusion. The McKinseys, the PWCs, the Deloittes, talk about organizations that are more diverse and inclusive and equitable. You know, are six times more responsive and adaptive to change. They're better at decision making, they're two times more profitable. 83% of millennials today are more engaged in workforces that embrace inclusion. So it's a, it's, it's a given, you know, it's, it's, it's a no brainer. So we need to be able to embrace this work because that starts to lead to a whole range of great outcomes, not only for the workforce but also business outcomes too.

Lavia: Thank you, Peter and, and Kelly, of course, with our inclusion pledge, leveraging Blue Ocean Brain, that's really how we're encouraging our workforce to learn more in, take an interest in ID&E anything to add there?

Kelly: I would just add, you know, that the workforce is made up of people and everybody brings their own diverse perspectives, thoughts and even unconscious bias can come into the workplace. So it's thinking about how can we meet people where they are with their unconscious bias to recognize that and then using that to then embrace change?

Lavia: Ok, Kelly, I'm gonna stick with you. What were some challenges your teams faced? And how did you address them? Like around working with us and building the system?

Kelly: Definitely, I think challenges is a, is a fun word. We, we like to say opportunities for sure. But looking at different ways to make sure that we can help pair our clients with the unique opportunities to reach their people and culture goals. So things can come up where maybe we need to create a new learning journey to help reach a goal that would be considered. I think a challenge that we'd have to overcome, finding a way to also reach learners within their flow of work and the busy demands coming at you day to day is, is something that we're constantly trying to work through and believe that we have with micro learning.

Lavia: Yeah. Yeah, Peter. Anything to add there as we built together?

Peter: Yeah. So I think it's an exciting time at the moment because we have technology and technology is going to allow us to really understand who we are better. And if we understand who we are better, then we can start to create a whole range of intervention strategies with much greater nuance than ever before.

Lavia: Peter, I'm gonna stick with you. And then Neil I haven't forgot about you. I'm coming to you next. Talk to us about what the future looks like. What does the future of ID&E look like and what role will data collection, visualization and analysis play in that?

Peter: Well, I, once again, I think it's a very, very exciting time for this space. And I think now organizations are recognizing that when we talk about diversity, equity and inclusion, we need to go way beyond gender and accessibility because if we don't, what we start to do is create all these unintended consequences, which we're starting to see out there. And next year I have a paper coming out where I'm gonna basically put forward that I believe one of the reasons why we have increased polarization is because we're taking this limited lens when it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion.

So I think it's an exciting time for us where we can start to really through comprehensive insights into human identity, start to really get a lot more nuance and create much more inclusive and also representative, you know, workforces.

Lavia: So now I wanna dig deeper into the three services that you all represent here. So starting with you Neil, let's, let's talk about QuickSight. What is QuickSight?

Neil: Oh, great question. So QuickSight is our, our cloud serverless BI tool. And what that means is, it's a, it's a BI tool or insights engine meant to scale out to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of, of individuals, right? Um and so when we first created QuickSight, um it was about, you know, being able to create, you know, beautiful dashboards so that individuals could consume them, but we've evolved to much more than just dashboards to reports to the ability to leverage the next best generation capabilities around AI and machine learning. Um so that leaders can make insightful decisions and take actions on that.

Lavia: Ok, thank you, Neil. And what business intelligence problem was it created to solve? And what was the research and development process undertaken to produce an effective solution?

Neil: So, you know, the problem you know, with, with data is democratization of that data. And what I mean by that is in a lot of organizations who have maybe 5,10,000, 100,000 employees putting data in everyone's hands can be very not cost effective, right? And so the the aim of QuickSight was to be a pay as you go and to truly democratize data at scale. And so that was the initial problem that we were solving. Um and we've evolved past that and what's really cool is that is a problem that we solved in AWS with our product QuickSight, like really scaling access to data, we have hundreds of thousands of users internally at Amazon utilizing QuickSight today.

Lavia: What ID&E issues is it trying to address and how?

Neil: Well I think it's, you know, the ID&E issues that it's trying to address is, you know, just the ability to put data in everyone's hands. But also um the ability now and we'll see this even more announced this week is the ability to have leaders like yourself tell data driven customer stories, right? To prompt to literally type out the question and what you're trying to create and have it create that story for you. A template to build upon your strategy. That's exciting. I'm sure for some of the chief diversity officers in the in the audience, that's really exciting to, to learn more about how do the platform's data visualizations help democratize these efforts of insights?

Neil: Yes. So you know, in the, in the case, people learn different ways, right? Some I'm I'm a visual learner, you know, but in some cases, folks need text contextual information or insights. And so what QuickSight does is it marries the visualization with the contextual data as well um to help you understand, so that you can make better decisions and just doubling down on that. How do the products, natural language capabilities support a more user friendly?

Now, this is this is something I'm I'm super excited about because um we've all, you know, some of us in the room have created dashboards or we've had dashboards sent to us, they're about 96% right. You know, there's a lot of, you know, research done by the, the wonderful analysts who build these dashboards for us. There's always questions, right? And so our natural language query capabilities give end users the ability to ask questions of that dashboard, you know, dashboards are starting point, but it's not the full story, right? So being able to ask questions of that data, it actually gives the analyst that feedback loop to understand what types of questions your report populations are asking and how to like curate those insights so that you have a more enrich data experience.

Lavia: Nice. Nice. Let, let's talk more about customers specifically. Are there any success stories from AWS customers who have used QuickSight to to democratize and de biased data?

Neil: So, so great question. Um so we do have customers in the ed tech space, right? Where they're serving up students from very diverse backgrounds, multicultural backgrounds, you know, socio economic backgrounds. And we've seen a lot of ed tech customers, you know, utilize QuickSight at scale to democratize the data so that they can help students behaviors and predict patterns, right? So they can mitigate any risk, you know, with adverse students. So we've seen some really great stories around that.

Lavia: Interesting, interesting. So what does the future of QuickSight look like?

Neil: Wow!

"So you know, it's Monday. So I can't, you know, talk about what the future future looks like. But what I can say is, you know, what we've all done in this data driven world is we've built these phenomenal foundations of data, right? And now it's almost like everything is a sci fi narrative as I am is coming true.

The ability to ask those questions of the data, um the ability to really interact um with AI in a way that's meaningful and it really drives value. So I would say the future of QuickSight is about the productivity gains that you're gonna get from accessing this data. And you utilizing AI and ML sounds like there's more to come later on this is we keep on knocking on the door there.

Um how will we keep iterating the software to develop it for usability, data clarity and inclusive insights? You know, that's a, that's a, you know, it's an ongoing process that I, you know, since I've been with QuickSight, you know, over the last six years, we've rolled out 600 plus features. And so, um you know, accessibility um inclusiveness is, is part of our DNA in terms of what we're really trying to engineer for. Like I said, we have edtech, we have, you know, different, all different types of customer personas utilizing QuickSight. And so those three things that you just laid out is is core functionality that we are rapidly iterating upon.

I know that our team can't do our job in, in AWS ID and E without QuickSight. So, thank you. I appreciate it.

Ok, Peter, you're on the hot seat, spend some time with you and talk about Diversity Atlas, what is Diversity Atlas?

Well, Diversity Atlas is a data analytics platform that's able to provide comprehensive insights not only into the extent and type of cultural but a whole range of other demographic dimensions of diversity. So when organizations use it quickly, they get all these insights which allow them to really start to do an intersectional analysis for the first time. So they can understand where equity might be lying in an organization where it might not be lying. But then they can start to use this data for the first time because they can understand who they are. Because most organizations out there, they understand their customers to the point where they know what the customer is gonna buy before the customers work out what they're gonna buy. But do they understand who they are? And that's the question we wanted to answer with Diversity Atlas - who are we?

Yeah, it's one of the first tools that I know I use as the leader of the team because I really want to understand who our employees were all over the globe. And I found that the best way to capture that information was through Diversity Atlas. So thank you. And what that needed was inclusive data sets to make that happen.

So when you're filling out a survey, how often do you fill out a survey? And I know in my case, there would always be a box there called other. And I was over this being all the time. So how can we now start to give that visibility to that person? Because if you know who that person is now you can develop through the self ID process, this, you know, a strategy that can cater for everyone.

So it sounds like you just answered this question, but I'm gonna go ahead and pose it to you. What was the inspiration behind creating this sort of diversity insights platform?

Well, there's a whole lot of reasons and I, I suppose it fits back into the bigger vision of Cultural Infusion, which is to build a world that's culturally harmonious. And we do that through intercultural action, but to also understand culture a lot better. And we don't understand culture well enough, but we don't also understand diversity and what we realized with diversity and cultural diversity, we realized it was poorly defined, analytically neglected and it was in need of robust understanding because if you asked me what diversity meant, I would have given you a long explanation up until 2015. If you asked me what cultural diversity meant, I would have said the same thing.

So we conducted more than 300 literature reviews to be able to try to define diversity, apply metrics to it and algorithm. So we can start to measure diversity and then start to really define cultural diversity and desegregate this into, into distinct pillars. Because if you can't do that, then how do you develop a strategy moving forward?

So you, you've again, started to answer this question. I'm gonna ask it anyway. So you can break it down for us even more. How does it work? And what information is collected to create an index of workforce diversity?

Well, through a simple survey which takes 4 to 5 minutes, um we ask a series of questions and when it comes to cultural diversity, we desegregated that into country of birth. Going back, you know, three generations, we ask questions around what secular non secular traditions, you know, give meaning to you. We ask questions around, you know, what cultures and what ancestral groups, what languages do you speak? And then we intersect that against gender expression, gender identity, biological sex, sexual orientation, position type position level. Because when you start to look at position, type of position level, you can really start to see what the balance of diversity looks like in an organization.

So we're starting to apply these metrics. This framework that we've developed of, you know, variety balance disparity is a very, very important metric of diversity. Looking at the dissimilarity of the components. And then another method that we look at. Another dimension is this notion of mutuality, which is how does one department compare to another. But more importantly, how does your organization reflect the community? It's delivering products and services to.

And we've come up with some amazing insights like we've noticed hospitals, for example, they have workforces that reflect the patients, they're delivering healthcare to patients. Spend less time in hospital. There are better health outcomes. They save money on interpreters on and translations. Even less women die on the operating table when they've been performed on by women.

Now start to think of all the socio cultural determinants when it comes to health, start to think of all the psychiatric assessments which fail so many people because they've created by the anglosphere. So we're now, I mean, that's just giving you one value proposition of how it can be used for one particular sector. How are findings displayed where the findings are displayed through a dashboard and you go into the dashboard and it produces all these different reports and you can cut that data up any way you want.

We're about to introduce AI and benchmarking. Now that's about to come into it. So organizations will be able to use AI which will create a whole range of different, you know, strategies come up with a whole lot of different ideas which you can look at and go well, can I use this for my organization or not? So, it's very simple, it's easy for anyone to use.

Has the user interface been designed in such a way to support accessibility and ease of understanding?

Yeah. Absolutely. And we've just now hired a product designer and they're gonna take us to the next level. Now, we've been able to afford a product designer. So we're constantly, it's a, it's an iterative process. We're constantly looking at ways to be able to improve what we're doing and, and also understand identity better because no one had bothered trying to define these concepts of diversity and cultural diversity.

And I just want to talk about diversity, which I forgot to say earlier on to us, diversity just means difference. And in immense difference, then we can apply a whole range of different metrics which allow us to start to measure this concept of diversity.

The Diversity Atlas was created back in 2019. What level of uptake have you seen since then?

Ok. So we started the whole process in 2015 and we started to commercialize in 2019. And what we thought would take us a six month process, took us really the better for 4.5 years because we needed to conduct these literature reviews and we needed to build the technology and we also needed these inclusive data sets. So we have 42,000 categories. To date, we have about 250 customers that are using Diversity Atlas in across the globe.

The pandemic. It was a bit of an obstacle for us. But now that we're able to get out there and travel across the world, we're starting to get a lot more uptake. I was invited to the Council of Europe just a few weeks ago to speak at the World Forum for Democracy about Diversity Outlets and how it can start to shape global policies and how it can start to feed into things such as peace and creating more democratic societies as well. So we're getting lots of interest from across the globe.

How many organizations are using it and in how many countries?

So we have to date Diversity Atlas has been deployed in 32 countries across the globe. And in total, we have about 250 organizations that have used the Diversity Atlas platform.

What features have been developed to ensure the Atlas works for as many people in as many geographies as possible?

Ok. Initially, we started off in English. Now we're up to 11 languages. Arabic was the hardest - it was a real challenge introducing Arabic because it was from they read from right to left and that was affecting the code and all sorts of other things. So we want to continue to translate it into as many languages as possible.

And the other thing we've done with Diversity Atlas is built an access control function because we understand some of these questions might be a little bit sensitive because everyone is on a different journey when it comes to, understanding who they are and they recognize that, you know, these questions can't be asked so we can switch those questions of depending on the geography.

But what we're finding is that most countries now are ok with asking these questions because we have a forced anonymity. So there's no risk of anyone being de-anonymized in the process.

Yeah. And I'll, I'll, I'll just say the feedback from my employees has been that it was just an inclusive exercise just asking them to take the survey. We had a really large percentage of our employees that took the survey and just having the opportunity to answer those questions like that took it farther than just being check the box at your other, but really trying to understand them and who they are.

So, can I just speak to that? Because what we're noticing is when people answer the question, there's, there's always an answer they called, prefer not to answer. And we're finding now that preferred not to answer for some of the questions is starting to go down now on the 2nd and 3rd year because organizations are recognizing, well, people don't probably feel culturally or psychologically safe to disclose this information.

But we're noticing all sorts of insights like our lead data scientist who is also an anthropologist, we can now say with confidence that people who select, prefer not to answer generally are a men. Caucasian men over the age of 30 who don't have a degree and don't have a medical condition. And we can say that with 90% confidence. Now. Interesting, very interesting diversity.

Atlas was created using AWS cloud technology.

Thank you. How have you partnered since then? To enhance the platform to your mutual benefit?

Having a partner like AWS has been a real godsend for us and something like Diversity Atlas, I don't think would have been possible 20 years ago, maybe even 10 years ago because we have available to us huge in computing technology. The future for us, I think will start to allow us to once we start to get tens of millions of data points, we're gonna have all sorts of insights that are gonna start to really inform a whole range of strategies and having a partner like AWS is making this, you know, is really facilitating this process for us.

Are there any plans in place to continue developing the platform to enable even more detailed insights into diversity demographics?

Yeah, all the time, we're always looking at ways of how we can start to now create all these benchmarks. So organizations can start to track how they're performing from year to year, but how they're performing across a whole range of, you know, indicators, looking at the diversity recruitment strategies, looking at the marketing strategies looking at their profitability. How does that correlate to them, collecting all this baseline data? So we're building that as well as the AI features that I talked about earlier on.

Thank you, Peter Kelly."

Let's dig into Blue Ocean Brain. What is Blue Ocean Brain?

Blue Ocean Brain is a professional development solution that delivers learning the way our brains and our schedules work best. This is bite sized and easily accessible throughout the employee experience. Our content strategy really focuses on helping companies reach their people and culture goals - you know, it's those mission critical initiatives that really help build inclusive high performing teams and to engage and retain top talent.

Ok. What challenge or gap in the market was it created to address?

So traditional workplace L&D has a generally low engagement rate - this is across the board. It can be seen as irrelevant or stale or even just unrelatable. If you think about a traditional L&D, it can gather dust - it's the same lesson year over year with not an opportunity to refresh or revamp that topic. And if you think about things like diversity and inclusion, hybrid work, handling change - topics that are only a couple of years old can feel extremely out of touch very quickly.

At Blue Ocean Brain, we address this by publishing fresh learning content every business day. This allows us to remain topical and front of mind for learners - every day there's something to engage with.

The other piece I mentioned being unrelatable - a lot of traditional diversity and inclusion work, we don't see ourselves in those types of trainings. People need to see themselves reflected, to really engage and go further. If you think about somebody with an unconscious bias, for example, they're not likely to lean into that type of learning right away. We have to help them see themselves, maybe develop a growth mindset, and have those next steps to ask, active listening and ask the right questions moving forward. So we have things that are approachable for our learners. We even pull in pop culture references - we might have leadership lessons from Ted Lasso or we break down topics like the ABCs of ERGs, for example. We really wanna make it relatable for people to want to engage in the learning.

And at least to my next question - why microlearnings over longer term employee training programs?

Definitely - today's workforce, we don't have time like we used to maybe for L&D learning during our work day, pulling someone out of work for a day long training - those days are very difficult now. And today's minds - we're unable to focus on that long term training which can make retention a real struggle. So micro learning brings the soft skill development back to the to do list and this is especially relevant and important for things like diversity and inclusion. We're able to break down those larger topics into smaller digestible bites. So we really love to break down nuanced topics like active allyship and spread it out over several micro learning lessons that build on themselves over time, building that retention, but also to pull in storytelling elements to really help connect with the learner and make it approachable.

Yeah our sales teams really rave about those micro learnings and being able to very quickly almost get kind of a taste of a learning and take that forward into their day or even into their conversations with customers.

Exactly - that just in time actionable learning. What role does employee training play in advancing business approaches to ID&E?

Well, I think culture shift, for example, is something that is, it's a large, a large undertaking, it takes time, it takes everybody really to be involved and so many skills go into something like that. So we really look at employee training as not just an opportunity to make people smarter and safer in their jobs, but to really become better humans in the workplace. And so with that, we're building skills like active listening, empathy, handling difficult conversations - and weaving those types of skills into DEI learning topics like allyship, inclusive leadership, addressing bias for example. It's those types of elements to weave in throughout an entire L&D ecosystem that can make that culture change. And it goes the other way too - like I said, it's not just DEI learning on an island on its own, it's weaving in those topics throughout all of the L&D ecosystem so that it can really be that culture ingredient to make transformational change.

So you've talked a bit about the types of trainings that people can access via the platform. So I'll ask a follow up question - how do you identify which topics to create lessons on and how frequently are new topics launched?

So we do have a large library in our DEI content space, but we also develop learning in 12 other soft skill areas - leadership development, communication, mental health and wellbeing. And each year our content team gathers emerging trends from across industries - they do this through surveys, client discussions, conferences, research - things like that - and take those emerging trends to really identify an overarching theme to help us drive new content development, but also to help us refresh and revamp things in our existing catalog.

So for example, in 2023 our content theme was "Igniting Connections". So it's how can we have connections across every bit of the soft skills and DEI space? So this is things like making connections in a hybrid work environment or meeting people. Yes, igniting connections, but also how can we use storytelling to help build inclusion? So those were our themes for this year and we're adding new content to our catalog every week - there's gonna be new lessons there - and looking ahead to 2024 our content theme will be "Future Ready Teams" which we're really excited about. So this will be, you know, how will mid-level managers lead with inclusion in this time and the current things that are going on in our hybrid environment? How can leaders have a space for psychological safety for their teams and the constant challenges in our environments today? And how can individual contributors find support for their own mental health and wellbeing and handling all that's on their plates? And we're also gonna be researching and including things with AI and how I can use that type of technology in my job role specifically and how we can make it work for ourselves. So that's really exciting stuff coming from our team!

Awesome, awesome. So we have been really lucky in Amazon and AWS that, you know, we use Blue Ocean Brain. Our sales team uses Blue Ocean Brain. For those who aren't as lucky, who don't have access to Blue Ocean Brain, talk to us about some notable trends in ID&E learning or interest that's been emerging from user feedback.

Definitely - I would say over the past year, we have a few major emerging themes - psychological safety has been a real drive this year, inclusive leadership, and also continually trying to reach frontline workforce - how do we provide training, learning moments within people's flow of work and even how do we connect with those that don't have access to a laptop or aren't being in meetings constantly having training moments? So those are the types of things we're learning about, we're creating content about and we also have other supporting resources like webcasts and things like that to talk about those topics.

Interesting. How are lessons designed to ensure learning is accessible and engaging and effective?

Well, accessibility for us is definitely a major focus for our content development and our design. So for us, we really want that learning to be something that people can bump into in their busy day, it can be approachable learning - like I said, breaking down nuanced topics, it needs to be relevant and then we also have to have that actionable element. So like you mentioned searching the library, finding a lesson and being able to take that quick learning bite and apply it directly to your day - those are the pieces that help people come back more and more for that learning.

Perfect, perfect. And what does the future look like for Blue Ocean Brain in terms of ID&E microlearnings?

Definitely for Blue Ocean Brain, ID&E really will not be that single source of content, it is baking it into every piece of our content library and our platform design. So it's thinking about inclusive conversations within performance management or it's even psychological safety in productive meetings or teamwork to even just having more authentic inclusive voices throughout all areas of the workforce. That is really the principle of our robust ID&E efforts and a really big principle of what Blue Ocean Brain stands for.

So we know Neil couldn't break any news about Quicksight just yet, but I'm hoping that maybe you can break some news for us. Are there any plans for significant developments in what trainings you deliver or how you deliver them?

We will continue to focus on micro learning as our major mode for delivery. We also really want to lean into the fact that Blue Ocean Brain is something that is a platform that is nimble and flexible in the way that the learning is delivered to all of the learners. So we have constant flexibility to make sure that we're curating learning journeys to reach specific goals. We want to design the platform to host internal resources or things - so people have that one stop shop for their learning. You have every client is paired with a Customer Success Manager like myself and we're really that extension for those L&D teams to help build out their content. So to continuously be partners with our clients and move forward with their learning initiatives is where we're going in the future.

Ok, so we're gonna talk a bit about the playbook now. We're gonna open up Q&A from the audience. I just wanna make sure we're ready for Q&A - make sure that there is a microphone somewhere.

Alright, the Diversity Atlas, Blue Ocean Brain, and Quicksight are all key tools in AWS's inclusion approach and are highlighted in our brand new tool - the Inclusion Power by AWS Playbook. So we're gonna talk a little bit about what the playbook is and how companies can use it.

Sharing information - now the playbook is a snapshot of AWS's efforts to advance ID&E for employees, customers and communities, including what we're doing, the challenges we face, and our major successes to date. It's a living document designed to help organizations from any industry think critically about the steps they can take to advance ID&E today.

We launched the first edition today, but we will continue to iterate and update as we go because we know ID&E is a journey that's never done - there's always more to learn. It's not a step-by-step roadmap to good ID&E strategies, but rather a compilation of things to consider along the way, with recommendations for tools and actions that will support you in developing an effective and tailored approach.

It features flow charts of questions to support you in exploring your current efforts and identifying key areas of improvement.

With only about 60 seconds left, I just want to give each of you the opportunity to give a quick closing remark. Start with you, Peter.

Peter: Well, I, uh, first of all I just want to say thank you to AWS for inviting me. I've come all the way from Australia and I might just leave you with the thought of how important is it to you and to all the people that you work with to give the visibility to that person that they deserve.

Very good, Neil?

Neil: I would just say, you know, it's an honor to, to speak today. Um you know, definitely, you know, the diversity is at the, at the core of what I believe in obviously. And this is a, you know, I work for a company that, that affords me that so thank you so much for allowing me to.

Thank you, Kelly - wrap us up!

Kelly: Well, I've been so excited to be here today. It's great to showcase the work that we've been doing and I've been doing with AWS personally. But with Blue Ocean Brain, I really believe in the micro learning content that we share - it's really fun, engaging, and helps fill those culture change moments. It doesn't feel like work. We believe in Amazon and not going over time. So I'm not gonna be long winded. I'm gonna say thank you and have a great evening!