Using the AWS Generative AI Center of Excellence (COE)

Well, welcome to the session, leveraging the AWS Generative AI Center of Excellence. My name is Priya Aurora and I'm the global lead for the COE. I just have to start off by saying I'm incredibly impressed with all of you that you are still here at 5pm end of day two with Vegas is uh in, in the background. But this is a short session, 20 minutes, and I'm really excited about the topic and I'm hopeful that I can share a little bit of this excitement with you guys and that you can walk out of this session with a few tips, resources and assets that you guys can use.

So my goal today is to do three things:

First, I want to give you more context as to what is the Generative AI Center of Excellence.

Second, what I would like to do is give you some insights into why we built the center of excellence.

And then third, give you some tips about how you can start using it and leveraging it today.

Just for some context setting, who in this room is an AWS partner? Awesome. So the COE is a tool for AWS partners. For those in the room that are not AWS partners, I still encourage you to stay and listen. What we will or what I will share a little bit about is the value that our partners bring in our generative AI strategy and our value proposition and how AWS relies and works with them to deliver on our customer needs. And I think it's really helpful and insightful for all of you to hear that especially in this expo where you get a chance to meet and talk to many of our partners.

So first, let me talk about what is the Generative AI Center of Excellence for AWS partners. The COE is focused on building and curating resources, training and market research around generative AI for our AWS partners. We are a, we are staffed with dedicated and specialized resources within the AWS partner organization, but we work collaboratively with teams across AWS - so a lot of our service teams, our product marketing teams, as well as our research teams internally. And we also partner with many of our AWS partners to curate and build insights and trainings working with them.

The goal when we built the COE was to really provide a simplified partner experience while also trying to meet your needs around generative AI understanding that this domain is evolving rapidly. For those of you that, you know, join this morning's keynote, I think that was a big theme of Adam's, which is everything is changing quickly. So we recognize that we need to make sure that our partners are aware and abreast of all of our AWS offerings, our customer needs as well as the market trends that we're seeing.

So myself and my team are focused on delivering on this goal by doing three things:

First is to provide the best and most up to date resources to all of our partners through the COE that are focused on our AWS offerings on generative AI, as well as what we're hearing from our customers as far as their needs, their concerns and gaps that they may have internally and support where and where they may need support from partners.

Second is we're trying to create an environment where our partners can engage with one another with the goal of knowledge sharing. Every time I sit down with one of our partners, I learn something new and I think it is our responsibility as AWS to ensure that we're creating that community of knowledge sharing and joint thought leadership.

And then third, we're trying to create the space through the COE for our partners to give us feedback on our offerings, our strategies so that in the end you guys can inform our roadmap. Our AWS partners will engage with the COE primarily through our resource hub.

So if you don't have your phones out now is a good time to take them and grab a couple of pictures of the screen. There's a few links that'll be really helpful if you want to explore the COE, if you want to share it with some of your colleagues and coworkers. The first couple links are available to everybody and you can access them directly through the QR code, anything in light purple that you'll see here. And in a few other slides are behind our partner central firewall. So they're exclusively available to AWS partners. So take the picture, but you'll need to be logged into your partner central accounts to be able to access them later.

Ok. So I've talked a little bit about what the COE is. Now, let me share a little bit about why we built it.

I don't think this slide is gonna be surprising to too many people. But one of the first reasons that we wanted to invest in the Center of Excellence is that, you know, many of us myself included, believe that generative AI is going to be a market disrupting technology.

Earlier this year when we launched some of our generative AI offerings, Swami - RVP of Database, Analytics and ML - wrote, "We believe most customer experiences and applications will be reinvented with generative AI." That sentence has always stuck with me. And the reason for that is because that sentence is not bound by industry, it's not bound by function. It doesn't talk about improvements, but it talks about true transformative change in many experiences and market research. Today, current forecasts that are being published agree and support that far reaching statement.

One of the stats on this page that I think resonated with me was here on the bottom left which is current forecasts estimate that current enterprise spend on generative AI is $16 billion by 2027. That is forecasted to grow to $143 billion. That's four years away. That's not that long from now.

So what does that mean for our partner community? Yes, that means first and foremost, that there is going to be big business opportunity for our partner channel community. But secondly, is that there's going to be a very steep learning curve. Our partners need to understand the implications, applications, best practices of generative AI across a multitude of use cases, industries and customer segments. Our investment in the Center of Excellence is our commitment to our partners to support you through that learning journey.

The second reason we invested in the Center of Excellence is that partners are key to us delivering on our customer needs for generative AI. AWS has four pillars to our generative AI strategy, many of which you've heard today in Adam's conversation and in Adam's keynote. You'll hear much more about this tomorrow in Swami's keynote as well. But what we recognize is to meet our overarching goal of delivering on our customer needs around generative AI, we are better positioned partnering with our partner community to fully meet those needs.

And so what do I mean by that? What is a better together story look like?

Our first value proposition or our first pillar of our value proposition is that AWS provides the easiest way to build with leading foundation models. But when we partner with our AWS partner community that turns from the easiest way to build, to giving our customers the easiest way to deploy into production, their generative AI solutions.

In a lot of the conversations that I've had today with a multitude of partners, this is where a lot of our customers are today. They are testing solutions, but they need the support then to take that into production, which is a critical role that our partners will play.

Second is that, you know, our second value proposition is that AWS is always focused on security and Bedrock was built with security in mind. That being said, many of our customers are gonna need tailored approaches to responsible AI, to security and to governance. And this is again where partners can build on the foundation of our services and offerings to meet our customers unique needs depending on their risk tolerance, their industry or regulatory requirements, or the specific use cases that they're focusing on.

Our third pillar of our value proposition for generative AI is increasing our customers productivity. One of the things that is a consistent conversation point today around generative AI is that our customers are investing in it to unlock business value. And in order to do that quickly and efficiently, one of the best ways is to leverage purpose-built applications.

AWS recognizes that. And so we're investing in Amazon CodeWhisperer, Scribe and augmenting many of our services with generative AI. But the reality is the breadth of use cases of functional needs is huge today. And so our customers need more selection. And this is again where our partner community can build on our promise and bring our customers that selection to unlock value quickly with generative AI through purpose-built applications.

And then lastly, again today in the keynote we talked a lot about our investments across the generative AI stack, right? All the way from infrastructure to applications. And one of the things we are doing with that investment is we're ensuring that all of our services and offerings are optimized to work together and similarly, our customers are asking us to make sure that those same either optimized or native integrations exist with our partners offerings where our customers have already made investments. And that's another area where we really want to make sure that we're working closely with our partner community. Here is the remaining transcript formatted for better readability:

So in short, the second reason that we invested in the Center of Excellence is that we need to make sure that AWS and our partners are in lockstep in delivering on our customer needs. And so through the COE we can provide our partners with just in time insights on our new offerings, our value proposition and work together to meet on our growing customers needs.

The third reason we invested in the Center of Excellence and probably to be honest with you, the most important, it's simply that our customers are telling us they need the help of our partner community and our partner network.

The COE, one of the things we're trying to do is invest in market research that we can share with our partner community that you can leverage to inform your strategies and your customer conversations. And we recently did a research with over 850 respondents and one of the takeaways is that four out of five customers are already using partners today to support them in their generative AI adoption journey.

And so of course, we wanna make sure that we're providing our partners, the support to execute on those customers needs. And one thing that I think is also really important to note on this slide and one of the takeaways from the survey is that there's six key areas that our customers are looking for support in.

I think the first three are, I would say where we commonly look for our partner support, right? So what, what are the use cases? And it's where we're seeing a lot of our partners engaged today - what are my use cases, what should my generative AI strategy be, support me in my POC implementation, support scaling and production.

But I think as you continue to move down this list where we talk about vendor selection, we've had a lot of conversations today about how do I choose the right language model.

How do I choose the right tooling? As well as understanding the needs around organizational change management, it would become more and more important to ensure that our customers are fully realizing the value of generative AI. And that's an area that we're gonna focus on and branch into in the COE.

That is historically an area that we don't normally spend a lot of time on, on, on joint um training um with our partners. So that was a quick introduction to the COE, some insights as to why we built the COE.

Now let me tell you how you actually use the COE. Um, so as I previously mentioned, the Center of Excellence is available. It is anchored by a resource hub that's available through Partner Central and exclusively available to our AWS partners.

Um, our content is structured in uh a variety of ways to align with how we think our partners will need to consume the content depending on where you are with your customers. So we provide, you recommend did learning paths uh based on um three different ways:

• Where you are in the sales cycle, so you're um this way, we're providing training for your sellers as well as we are for your builders.

• Uh depending on your customer segment that you service, uh understanding that public sector has different needs than start up um as an example.

• And then lastly based off of a call to action, uh this one might be new to some of you. But since you know, in the last year, i've had multitude of conversations with partners. And the most common question i have is what should i be doing? Um and myself alongside many other a pn leaders have kind of summarized it into five key, five key actions we need, we would like or we recommend that our partners prepare by:

1. Understanding our AWS offerings

2. A generative a i, we recommend that you specialize so that you have a clear perspective of where you can add value to your customers. So what are the industry use cases? What are the functions? What are the applications that you guys are known for or have um experience and customer successes in?

3. Third is to familiarize. So, you know, we talk a lot about our AWS offerings, but we have uh uh you know, a network of partners that have a multitude of offerings that are optimized to work with AWS. It might be exactly what your customer needs. So make sure you have a um wanna make sure that you have a broad understanding of all the tools and resources available to you and to your customers to support their generative a i needs.

4. Um and then fourth is to build, so build those purposes, build applications, um build the best practices, uh build the reference architecture that allows you to accelerate your customer's ability to deploy their generative a i solutions.

5. And then lastly engage, right, talk to your customers, help them understand the opportunity.

So knowing that this is what we have always recommended to our partners of where, what you should be doing, uh where you should be spending your time. We wanted to make sure we provided you the resources to do that effectively.

Um one of the things we're also focused on with our content in the Center of Excellence is providing just in time modular training. So we are um you know, you will see quick iterations on our content, you will see short uh nuggets of information that can be self-service. Um and that's focused on both, you know, video training as well as uh documentation. So that depending on your learning goals and your needs, there's a multitude of different assets and types on there.

The other thing that's unique in our way of uh in our approach with the Center of Excellence is that we're actually curating a lot of content from our partner community. Um as i mentioned previously, um you know, r a davis offerings are one option or about for deploying generative a i in native us, working with our partner offerings on native us is also um can help you meet the growing needs of our customers.

Additionally, i think this domain is continuing. Uh we all know this domain is continuing to evolve quickly. So being able to provide different perspectives around market trends um is another thing that we're trying to do with the Center of Excellence by partnering with thought leaders like BC G um and McKinsey, as well as a multitude of other generative a i um leaders in the space.

An example of ac oe event where we're bringing our coe contributors in is um actually an event that we're hosting here tomorrow. Um it is a responsible a i panel that will have panelists from five different organizations including Accenture, Anthropic, Arthur, AIB, CG um and IB M um to provide their perspective of how they're approaching responsible a i. And this is again part of our goal with the coe to ensure that we're providing opportunities for knowledge sharing and ensuring that our community has different perspectives and insights of how um folks are tackling some of the biggest issues around generative a i.

Ok. I've shared a lot about the theory of the COE, what it is, what it's intended to do, but to make this action and to hopefully give you guys something to leave with today, I wanted to highlight some of my um I think, you know, favorite or top assets to get started with.

Um so on the, the top left here, these are examples of what we're calling asset packs. Uh so at, at launch, we have three AWS asset packs and four CO contributor asset packs. Um each asset pack provides you insight on the value proposition of the service, uh technical resources and how to build with those services and then best practices and guidance that your sales teams can use in customer conversations.

Are AWS asset packs were made in conjunction with support firm at AWS service teams. So it has the latest and greatest information and includes insights such as FAQs uh based on the multitude of cus customer conversations. We've had our asset packs with our COE contributors were made hand in hand with our COE contributors. So all the content in this asset pack was provided by Anthropic with the purpose of helping train our AWS partners on our joint offerings and messaging.

Um the two assets on the, the far left over there or you're right, sorry. Um are examples of assets that I think will be highly useful as you think about your 2024 generative AI strategy. So this moves a little bit away from our services and our offerings and two where it's best practices and opportunities.

The one on the left is an APN blog uh that's available to everybody and it's a Q&A session that I myself did with um a partner from McKinsey that talked about the trends they were seeing in the marketplace and where they see immediate opportunity for AWS partners to support customers and the gaps that are or challenges that customers are having.

The partner playbook is um an aggregation of our tips and tricks of how to best work with AWS, how to fully leverage all the resources available to you as AWS partners as well as all the, the players at AWS that could support you in your uh generative AI strategy development and execution.

And then the bottom two are examples of us being reactive to the demands um that we're hearing from our, our partners about what do they need to know about. So, a hot topic today has been around the economics of generative AI and that's a conversation point. We've been hearing a lot from partners which is ok, great. Our customers wanna test it. The technology is cool, but now, we need to talk ROI, we need to talk TCO.

Um and so we partnered with BCG to provide some best practices, insights and tools on how to start thinking about sizing your generative AI opportunities across varied um deployment, archetypes, um uh uh archetypes and uh design decision, uh choices.

And then the other um area that we constantly get topics or questions around is give me insight on the specific needs of industries and what are the industries that you're seeing? The highest demand and interest in generative AI and that are moving quickly with generative AI.

And so uh we are building these um industry packs up. We, when we launched earlier this month, we launched with the healthcare and life sciences industry pack that does a deep dive in about i think it's four specific use cases within healthcare and life sciences where we're seeing the most traction, but also gives you deep insights around how to build those solutions. So reference architecture and best practices.

Um so this is my, you know, in addition to the guides that you'll find in the COE, this is my personal recommendation of where to get started.

Um and if you have put your phones away, take them back out. Um here are the links to these assets. Everything in the light purple is behind the firewall. So you'll need to be logged in just to make it easy. I've given you the direct links as well as the QR code. So that way if you need to log in at your computer later on, you can do that.

Um my time is up, but I would be remiss if I didn't leave you guys with a few CTAs, calls to action. So, you know, I spent a lot of my time today talking about the Center of Excellence. But the thing that I will always say whenever I have a moment to talk to AWS partners is that, you know, if you're not doing it already, you need to start kind of thinking about your plan around building your generative AI offerings on AWS, um or your practices on AWS.

Uh having a strategy and plan to mark jointly market your offerings with AWS. And then lastly is working with us to collectively talk to our customers around how you can support their goals around generative AI.

Um and I know those are tall asks. So here are three recommended places to get started. So I would say if you can take it a personal goal to complete three trainings on the COE by the end of the year, I promise you it won't take you that much time.

Um second is make sure your offerings are available on AWS Marketplace. Um we spend a lot of time and resources driving traffic and customer interest to Marketplace. It's a great opportunity for both our internal field teams, but also our customers to hear about your offerings. Here is the remaining transcript formatted for better readability:

And then lastly based off of a call to action, uh this one might be new to some of you. But since you know, in the last year, i've had multitude of conversations with partners. And the most common question i have is what should i be doing?

Um and myself alongside many other APN leaders have kind of summarized it into five key, five key actions we need, we would like or we recommend that our partners prepare by:

1. Understanding our AWS offerings

2. A generative AI, we recommend that you specialize so that you have a clear perspective of where you can add value to your customers. So what are the industry use cases? What are the functions? What are the applications that you guys are known for or have um experience and customer successes in?

3. Third is to familiarize. So, you know, we talk a lot about our AWS offerings, but we have uh uh you know, a network of partners that have a multitude of offerings that are optimized to work with AWS. It might be exactly what your customer needs. So make sure you have a um wanna make sure that you have a broad understanding of all the tools and resources available to you and to your customers to support their generative AI needs.

4. Um and then fourth is to build, so build those purposes, build applications, um build the best practices, uh build the reference architecture that allows you to accelerate your customer's ability to deploy their generative AI solutions.

5. And then lastly engage, right, talk to your customers, help them understand the opportunity.

So knowing that this is what we have always recommended to our partners of where, what you should be doing, uh where you should be spending your time. We wanted to make sure we provided you the resources to do that effectively.

Um one of the things we're also focused on with our content in the Center of Excellence is providing just in time modular training. So we are um you know, you will see quick iterations on our content, you will see short uh nuggets of information that can be self-service. Um and that's focused on both, you know, video training as well as uh documentation. So that depending on your learning goals and your needs, there's a multitude of different assets and types on there.

The other thing that's unique in our way of uh in our approach with the Center of Excellence is that we're actually curating a lot of content from our partner community. Um as i mentioned previously, um you know, r a davis offerings are one option or about for deploying generative AI in native us, working with our partner offerings on native us is also um can help you meet the growing needs of our customers.

Additionally, i think this domain is continuing. Uh we all know this domain is continuing to evolve quickly. So being able to provide different perspectives around market trends um is another thing that we're trying to do with the Center of Excellence by partnering with thought leaders like BC G um and McKinsey, as well as a multitude of other generative AI um leaders in the space.

An example of ac oe event where we're bringing our coe contributors in is um actually an event that we're hosting here tomorrow. Um it is a responsible AI panel that will have panelists from five different organizations including Accenture, Anthropic, Arthur, AIB, CG um and IBM um to provide their perspective of how they're approaching responsible AI. And this is again part of our goal with the coe to ensure that we're providing opportunities for knowledge sharing and ensuring that our community has different perspectives and insights of how um folks are tackling some of the biggest issues around generative AI.

Ok. I've shared a lot about the theory of the COE, what it is, what it's intended to do, but to make this action and to hopefully give you guys something to leave with today, I wanted to highlight some of my um I think, you know, favorite or top assets to get started with.

Um so on the, the top left here, these are examples of what we're calling asset packs. Uh so at, at launch, we have three AWS asset packs and four CO contributor asset packs. Um each asset pack provides you insight on the value proposition of the service, uh technical resources and how to build with those services and then best practices and guidance that your sales teams can use in customer conversations.

Are AWS asset packs were made in conjunction with support firm at AWS service teams. So it has the latest and greatest information and includes insights such as FAQs uh based on the multitude of cus customer conversations. We've had our asset packs with our COE contributors were made hand in hand with our COE contributors. So all the content in this asset pack was provided by Anthropic with the purpose of helping train our AWS partners on our joint offerings and messaging.

Um the two assets on the, the far left over there or you're right, sorry. Um are examples of assets that I think will be highly useful as you think about your 2024 generative AI strategy. So this moves a little bit away from our services and our offerings and two where it's best practices and opportunities.

The one on the left is an APN blog uh that's available to everybody and it's a Q&A session that I myself did with um a partner from McKinsey that talked about the trends they were seeing in the marketplace and where they see immediate opportunity for AWS partners to support customers and the gaps that are or challenges that customers are having.

The partner playbook is um an aggregation of our tips and tricks of how to best work with AWS, how to fully leverage all the resources available to you as AWS partners as well as all the, the players at AWS that could support you in your uh generative AI strategy development and execution.

And then the bottom two are examples of us being reactive to the demands um that we're hearing from our, our partners about what do they need to know about. So, a hot topic today has been around the economics of generative AI and that's a conversation point. We've been hearing a lot from partners which is ok, great. Our customers wanna test it. The technology is cool, but now, we need to talk ROI, we need to talk TCO.

Um and so we partnered with BCG to provide some best practices, insights and tools on how to start thinking about sizing your generative AI opportunities across varied um deployment, archetypes, um uh uh archetypes and uh design decision, uh choices.

And then the other um area that we constantly get topics or questions around is give me insight on the specific needs of industries and what are the industries that you're seeing? The highest demand and interest in generative AI and that are moving quickly with generative AI.

And so uh we are building these um industry packs up. We, when we launched earlier this month, we launched with the healthcare and life sciences industry pack that does a deep dive in about i think it's four specific use cases within healthcare and life sciences where we're seeing the most traction, but also gives you deep insights around how to build those solutions. So reference architecture and best practices.

Um so this is my, you know, in addition to the guides that you'll find in the COE, this is my personal recommendation of where to get started.

Um and if you have put your phones away, take them back out. Um here are the links to these assets. Everything in the light purple is behind the firewall. So you'll need to be logged in just to make it easy. I've given you the direct links as well as the QR code. So that way if you need to log in at your computer later on, you can do that.

Um my time is up, but I would be remiss if I didn't leave you guys with a few CTAs, calls to action. So, you know, I spent a lot of my time today talking about the Center of Excellence. But the thing that I will always say whenever I have a moment to talk to AWS partners is that, you know, if you're not doing it already, you need to start kind of thinking about your plan around building your generative AI offerings on AWS, um or your practices on AWS.

Uh having a strategy and plan to mark jointly market your offerings with AWS. And then lastly is working with us to collectively talk to our customers around how you can support their goals around generative AI.

Um and I know those are tall asks. So here are three recommended places to get started. So I would say if you can take it a personal goal to complete three trainings on the COE by the end of the year, I promise you it won't take you that much time.

Um second is make sure your offerings are available on AWS Marketplace. Um we spend a lot of time and resources driving traffic and customer interest to Marketplace. It's a great opportunity for both our internal field teams, but also our customers to hear about your offerings.

And then lastly, every customer conversation that I have around generative AI anchors around, tell me the customers that have deployed it this way or that you've supported or show me the demo of what this looks like. So if you haven't done it already, share with us your customer success stories, um or your solution demos and make sure that um your PDMs um make them available and help you market them internal to our AWS sales teams.

And because you guys stuck around at 5pm on a Tuesday at end of day two, I'm gonna leave you with my personal email address as well. And if you have those customer success stories, those demos share them with me. Um and I'll make it kind of my personal goal to make sure that we get the word out because, you know, I really do believe that when we partner together, we can do more for our customers. Thank you.