Empowering citizens through digital innovation

Please welcome Vice President, Worldwide Public Sector AWS Dave Levy.

Hello, everyone and welcome to re:Invent 2023. Uh it's been an amazing start already and I'm excited and thank you for everyone joining us here in Las Vegas.

Today, we're going to be sharing success stories from our government education, nonprofit and health care and aerospace and satellite customers around the world. And it's through these powerful stories, we hope that you can learn and how your peers are using the cloud to deliver on their mission and meet the needs of those they serve.

These organizations are empowering their customers to do more and better and faster. In addition, they're improving the lives of the people and the planet. So you're also going to hear stories today directly from the customers themselves. Three amazing guest speakers will join me on stage and share their stories of digital innovation and reinvention.

So I hope you leave today feeling inspired and ready to get started on your next innovation or idea. And you know, we have a saying in Amazon about thinking big and we want to help you think big about what's next for your organization.

My name is Dave Levy and I'm the new leader, not new to AWS, but the new leader of Worldwide Public Sector here at AWS. And I'm, and I'm excited to be here with you today. So let's get started and let's begin with something that you already have and lots of it - data.

IDC expects that 100 and 29,000 exabytes of data, 100 and 29,000 will be generated in 2023. And that will more than double to 291 exabytes by 2027. So to put that in context, some scientists expect that all the words ever spoken by humans equals only five exabytes. Now, my team likes to tell me that I talk a lot. I think I'm responsible for at least one of those exabytes. Um and so I want you to think about your data. What are you doing with it? Now, could you do more? Is your data working for you? And by using our machine learning and analytics capabilities, you can get more actionable insights faster.

For example, the World Bank is using AWS partner TIA's data analytics powered by AWS to help local governments rehabilitate infra road infrastructures and connect underserved communities in Mexico, Peru and Tunisia by using computer vision and geospatial satellite imagery. They're able to assess road infrastructure faster and at less cost. And as a result, just three weeks were needed to complete the mapping and assessment of about a half a million kilometers of roads compared to 15 years that would be needed using traditional method methods and at 15% of the cost.

And what about mapping the cells in the entire human brain? The Allen Institute for Brain Science is using AWS to support the development of a complete brain cell atlas and create the largest open source brain cell database in the world. It will mean so much for advanced advancing brain research and scientific breakthroughs.

In Brazil. a hospital is using the cloud to improve patient care hospital. Serio Lebas is using Amazon Chime SDK to perform virtual daily clinical rounds. in 16 remote intensive treatment units around Brazil. These efforts have reduced mortality at the units they supported from 42% to 20%. A dramatic reduction.

Now, what I love about working in the public sector is the work that we that all of you do really matters. Our nonprofits, for example, are improving the lives of people and the planet with their ingenuity, their resourcefulness and compassion, one global nonprofit, the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation uses AWS to optimize patients access to their data and information and digitize their electronic medical records.

Now, this allows clinicians real time access to data to make informed decisions about their patient's care. Even in the most remote clinics in places like Malawi, the foundation was a winner of last year's AWS Imagine Grant award.

Now you may be wondering Dave just said, Imagine Grant. What is the Imagine Grant? Every year we fund select nonprofits work through AWS. Imagine Grant and the winners receive not only unrestricted funding but also access to training, expert technical guidance and support from AWS. These winners have missions from helping to find a cure for cancer to making services more accessible to people who are blind or visually impaired to connecting underserved students with scholarships.

And although they represent diverse missions, each organization is committed to innovating with the cloud using their data to fuel their missions and scaling access to vital services throughout cloud enabled digital tools. So I'm excited to announce this year's winners. Congratulations. And let's give them a round of applause.

So if you're a nonprofit, check out the details of the Imagine Grant program and maybe we'll be sharing your success story on stage next year.

Now, the expectations of an increasingly digital savvy community are high state and local governments are turning to the cloud to meet their citizens' needs in a rapid more streamlined way by leveraging data state and local government agencies can meet demands to digitally innovate an agency in the biggest state here in the us is leading the way they migrated to aws by doing so. they've been able to serve millions of people more effectively improve health access, reduce health disparities and ultimately provide better health care for their citizens. they're eager to discover and advance innovative ideas and technologies to ultimately elevate and enhance the consumer and citizen experience in the great state of California.

So let's watch this short video before we welcome our first speaker up on stage

Covered California is the largest state based marketplace in the nation connecting Californians with financial help to buy health insurance from the top brand name plans in the state. We've provided health care coverage to Californians in need for a full decade. Now, we've understood the need to highlight personal stories from our consumers. It's their success stories that show the importance of obtaining affordable health coverage and we're ready to meet any challenges the future may bring.

Hello, I love what I do and I'm passionate about serving millions of Californians Cover California is a free service that helps connect individuals with name brand health insurance. And I can tell you this is a dream come true because many people previously struggled to afford basic medical care. No one should have to choose between paying rent or paying their medical bills. Also, research has shown that having access to affordable health care insurance may help individuals live longer healthier lives.

There's 40 40 million people in the state of California. That's just over 10% of the entire population. Before the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, we faced 17% on insured rate. California was the first to set up a health benefit exchange and the Cal here system, otherwise known as California Health Care Eligibility, Enrollment Retention System was stood up to help nearly a million people enroll in the first year. Now, the system at that time was on premise consisting of two data centers.

I'm excited to be here today to talk about the amazing impact that the AWS cloud has had on Cover California. And most importantly, the positive impact that it's had on our consumers accessing health care. As you can see from the chart, we have steadily increased. We're now at 1.7 million in additional 12 million individuals go through the state's medicaid program after an assessment for those enrolling and cover california. It's the only place where you can get financial assistance to help purchase insurance from well known plans.

We collectively work with our partners to help reduce the rate of the uninsured. We also look at how to improve healthcare quality, lowering costs, reduce healthcare disparities and we do this in an innovative and competitive marketplace that empowers consumers to choose a plan that's best for them and meets their needs. Today, I'm happy to share with you that we have an uninsured rate of 6.5% given that we were at 17%. This is a remarkable achievement for California.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right. So now, just like any other organization, we have faced our fair share of challenges. And I want to highlight a few of those eight years in after we start it, the first was aging on premise, infrastructure and what i wanted to avoid was the looming capital expenditures of hardware and software. Also with the legacy system, you're incurring more technical debt and how do i have that fiscal responsibility when you can operate 24 7 in the aws cloud and you can scale up and achieve, you know, efficiency and speed.

Next was engineering for the unexpected Cover. California faced this from the very beginning and after the American Rescue Plan was signed, who needed to get benefits into the consumer's hands quickly. And last, how do we address the consistent consumer experience? So I'm sure a lot of these issues are not challenges that i have faced alone. I'm sure all of you in this room have faced similar challenges

By the numbers. Cal here's system is complex and the underlying, you know, infrastructure is large 14 million consumers and 70% of our, you know, volume transactions occur in open enrollment, which is just a few short months. So we can go from a few 100 consumers in a given day to up to 300. And during the pandemic, we saw large spikes up to 400,000 and it's those times and those moments that we appreciate and recognize the value and the power of the aws cloud.

Also, I want to share with you after we launched our cal here systems performance and improved 200%. And we were able to handle 100 million transactions in a given day without any serious or critical issues.

Thank you.

So our cloud journey, you know, has gone from your traditional a cloud migration to now more of a cloud modernization. What that means is we're actively building on it. We're refining the digital infrastructure and we're going to be better prepared and capable of what's coming next, whatever next might be.

We added more customers. We also added 45% more future widgets. We also lowered cost so we could invest in other technologies in terms of scaling. We had containerization to break down the system into smaller, more lightweight, you know, robust sub components. So it gave us greater flexibility to scale up. And we also for human centered design deployed web analytics and so that we could understand the consumer journey and where they struggled and better prioritize our system and service design improvements. Without these technical strides, we would not be able to meet the demands and deliver efficiently our services.

And finally, I would like to end with a Covered California story all across the state. Affordable health care insurance is changing lives and giving individuals and families with a peace of mind. California was there for Charlie and her family. They know now firsthand what it means to have affordable comprehensive coverage when challenges are happening and cost or sky skyrocketing. We were there for Charlie.

So I want you to hear in their own words, watch the video and listen to their story and then you can better understand why we're so passionate about what we do and the work at Cover California and serving the millions of Californians. So let's move to the video.

It was like the first couple of days of summer, all the neighborhood kids were swimming in the pool and the kids were grabbing each other by their arms and pulling each other in. I just called the pediatrician and just explained the situation. So she looked at her and said, let's just do routine blood work to be on the safe side. So she ended up calling us back at 730 that night, telling us that her platelets were at a dangerously low level and we've tested her and she has leukemia months.

We were at $275,000 to the chemotherapy. It's access to the oncologist. She's looking at a i think it's 90 to 95% cure without relapse rate. Hopefully, we will have no other issues and she will go about.

Thank you.

Thank you for the opportunity to be here today, for us to share our story. And if you want to know more about our AWS cloud journey, please come see me after the presentation or look me up on LinkedIn.

Thank you everyone.

Thank you, Karen. We heard a lot of amazing things in that presentation, 100 million transactions a day reducing uninsured to nearly 6%. But I think what really resonated for me is the mission. You don't have to make a choice between paying rent and having health coverage and to be able to deliver on that mission is really inspiring. And we've been lucky to be a part of the journey with Karen and her team in California. So thank you again, Karen.

So what new thing can you do with your data? How can we help you think big and think differently? Check out some of the breakout sessions in on data including transform data into actionable insights to improve public safety and bridging, research and computing. to tackle the world's grand challenges.

With all your data, there is a critical need to keep all data and solutions secure and operational. At the same time, it's imperative to make sure all compliance requirements are met. So at AWS, security is our top priority and we know it's top of mind for you too.

Public sector organizations can collaborate with AWS to design solutions with the shared responsibility model that protects patient data, financial records or other highly sensitive workloads because AWS builds with your needs in mind, AWS can help meet compliance requirements with 230 security compliance governance services and features and we support 98 security standards and compliance certifications for virtually every regulatory agency around the globe.

AWS is helping public sector organizations manage highly sensitive workloads that we know so many of you have at our AWS Cloud Innovation Center or KICK at Cal Poly. In collaboration with the San Diego cyber community, we built My eISO a prototype and it's a generative AI enabled chat box to make secure cloud based cybersecurity recommendations for under-resourced public, public and private organizations to help foster greater regional resiliency.

We always work backwards from our customers' needs including when it comes to security and to address our regulated and and regulated industry and public sector customers who need dedicated infrastructure to help meet the regulatory and compliance requirements. We recently launched AWS Dedicated Local Zones. DLZs, DLZs are a type of AWS infrastructure that is fully managed by AWS, but it's built to your standards for, for your exclusive use where you want it and how you want it and it's located in your specified location or data center, Dedicated Local Zones, meet the same high security standards that apply to AWS regions and local zones.

One government customer in Singapore is already using Dedicated Local Zones. The Smart Nation Digital Government Group of Singapore is tasked with leading Singapore's digital government transformation and developing public sector engineering capabilities and to accelerate the government smart nation plans in Singapore into a digital economy and society. SNDGG is migrating workloads that need higher levels of security and isolation.

So let's watch this short video and welcome our next speaker to the stage

So today we use technology to shape the world we live. The story is one we create - what's next - to enhance and ensure a safer future. We unleash our imagination through research and development, to innovate new frontiers in digital technology, creating a safer cybers, strengthen our defense and enriching lives.

We're building digital infrastructures and sustainable solutions together, we can harness technology to transform the way we live. Look has become a catalyst, excel of vocal solution as we move towards personalization.

Very good afternoon to everyone. Um I'm going to spend the next couple of minutes talking about our journey to become a smart nation in Singapore. So what is a smart nation if you think about it, our role is really to make Singapore a society that leverages technology to make life better for citizens, make business more productive and capable and also to build communities that no one has left behind.

So what was the compelling reason for that? We started this journey probably about 10 years ago. Um we realized that, you know, more and more so um the way that we spend money on technology in government was not very good. Um there has to be payback, there has to be a level of efficiency and effectiveness that could make Singapore a better place.

The second thing that kind of bothers a lot was really safety on the internet. And I think many of, you know, today that, you know, um trust and safety has become paramount in terms of making the government trusted by the citizens because more and more people are transacting online and i think the third thing that's quite important is that because everything is today online, there's really zero tolerance for failure.

So those three things, this environmental shift has made it quite compelling for us to do something different. The second thing is that technology has shifted now, there could be a lot of new technology which has come and gone. But a couple of things kind of like are here to stay for a long time. Daphne cloud says a i that everyone talks about today.

So again, the environmental shift and the technology shift has been a compelling reason why we need a new approach to technology. But most governments are kind of like held back by a few things. One legacy systems, every government has many legacy systems. Second thing is that most governments including ourselves really did not have the technology capabilities in the people that we have. And the last and probably the worst thing is that most of our policies are antiquated. They are still written back in the days whereby it makes the democratization of technology almost impossible.

So what do we do? We move to the cloud? One of the things about moving to the cloud, it's like, you know, i i kind of like look at cloud as like a young person leaving home for the first time, going to university or college, right? Whereby it's full of freedom, excitement, anxiety, but it's also full of risk, fears and uncertainty. So how do you manage these things as you look as we move to the cloud?

A couple of things came to light came into the mind. Very quickly cloud became a kind of a aaa precondition for many things going forward. One is that the focus on security now they mentioned quite a fair bit about security. Security is important but security in a different paradigm, because many many uh uh security people in the government are very used of parameter security, right? So do we change the paradigm? How do we move to the concept of least privilege in zero trust? Very important as i talk about zero tolerance, resiliency becomes well, uh everyday thing, we need the resiliency to make sure that we are able to deliver services on the on the on time and best capable basis. And then cost as i talk about payback, um we need to do things a lot more efficiently today. The cost of technology is way too high and two other things that is quite important for the government. One is how do we scale, you know, we need to keep scaling and it cannot be keep building data centers after data centers and finally survivability. Um as a government, we need to survive catastrophes and other kind of uh uh very critical situations.

But that leads to something quite different. It give us call give us a productivity that was impossible before that. Both from my engineering productivity point of view. As well as application productivity. And it allows us to innovate. So many people ask me that. Well, you know, they talk about a i, they talk about c talk many, many things. And the first thing i asked them is that, are you even on the cloud? Because it becomes almost impossible to talk about these topics if you not even on the cloud in the first place. So that's a precondition. And the most important thing of all is that the cloud opens up an ecosystem, a global ecosystem that allows us to work together and deliver much better applications and systems as we go forward.

Now, what does that mean? Right. Um oh, sorry, i got to go backwards. Ok. So we work with aws um for over a year period whereby we said that as we move more and more towards moving workloads to the cloud, we need a higher security and a higher transparency system and that's where dedicated local zone was born. So we became the first customer actually to work with aws at bank and we implemented dedicated local zone in six months.

So today in our cloud journey, about 70% of our eligible workloads are already on the commercial cloud, which is something we never expected about 78 years ago. When we started this journey, the local zone provides a different aspects of cloud computing. It gave us really the ability to exact the transparency that we need as a government, it gives us also the kind of security and resiliency and trust in a cloud that will take us forward to mission critical systems as well as system that really are very important in terms of confidentiality and privacy.

But you know, for clothes to work, you really need to build competencies and where it's become a personal assets to many of our employees. Right? First thing is that as a government, as most governments, the focus is on checking audits after audits more and more checks, we need to move from checkers to make us the whole philosophy and culture to change, whereby the things about automating checks as much as you can and let people make, create things innovate.

The thing is that because we don't run our data centers anymore or or very few of them, we need to move away from operators to experts in the past with hundreds of people running data centers today, our focus is more on things like sr for example, where our job is to keep making it better and better and automating as many things as we can and the cultures flatten, right? The bureaucracy has to change whereby the focus is more on doers rather than managers. Today, every single manager has to be a doer, he can't just manage for the sake of managing.

Basically this cultural change is actually very difficult to do, especially for public sector. But over time, i think we have achieved a satisfactory amount of debt. Now, what does this all mean? Right in the past, when we outsource almost everything, it was a very linear progress, you throw more money, you throw more people, you achieve some output, but that's growth, it's not scaling.

So our our job was to move from growth to scale just like any other commercial company or start up whereby we use products. So today, instead of building application from scratch, the concept of products and services allow us to assemble them like legal blocks basically and deliver very quickly. We use platforms, platforms allow us to accelerate even faster. And i keep mentioning again over and over again that you the ecosystem, you can't do it alone. All these things move us forward significantly. And the concept of 10 x becomes a reality as we move as a government, which is something that is unheard of before this.

So let's go back to what is a smart nation? Again, this allows us to create opportunities for citizens, for businesses in singapore. And singapore is now a country that has embraced technology en masse to make sure that all these things will be done. But at the same time, trust and safety is paramount because the moment people lose trust in the in the environment, people will stop using technology. But this is probably by far the biggest challenge. And i and i had a minister who challenged me and said that singapore is very safe you can walk around the streets at night, you can leave the door open and be crime. Can you make the internet as safe as that? And honestly, i don't think i can because now we are dealing with extremely challenging kind of threats that's gonna impact us every day. So very important but very important. At the very, at the end of it is how do we keep building communities both digitally as well as physically to engage each other as a government? Unlike a commercial sector, you can't choose the customer you serve, you got to serve everyone, so no one can get left behind. How do we bring people together? How do we use technology to really empower people to contribute to the country to move forward?

So if you look at this journey, it's, it's really only the beginning actually. Um ii i, we thought that this can be done in a couple of years, but really um it's really a journey and never a destination. So with that, thank you very much.

Thanks c ho. One of the things i heard in that presentation was um imagine, imagine resiliency and agility being an everyday thing in government. So we heard from our customers in europe that they are facing regulatory scrutiny over data location, operational autonomy and resilience, which is why last month we announced our plans to build the aws european sovereign cloud. It's a new independent cloud for europe to provide customers with more choice to meet requirements. The aws european sovereign cloud will be separate and independent from our existing regions with infrastructure located and operated within the european union. It will have the same security availability and performance our customers are getting from existing regions today. So if you want to hear more, check out our breakout session, aws european sovereign cloud. A closer look.

Now, are you architecting with security in mind? Are you looking for solutions tailored to your unique needs? Check out our other breakout sessions including zero trust to reduce security risk for the public sector or cyber events simulator, incident response, a tabletop exercise.

So there's a revolution happening in public sector. It's the democratization of advanced technologies and it's empowering all sorts of organizations around the globe. It's helping them innovate faster and bring on new services or even improve existing ones and it's doing it in a fraction of the time and the costs. It used to one government organization in australia transport for new south wales is using machine learning to improve commute time and the experience of millions of residents and tourists in and around sydney. They're transitioning from historically based analytics to a forward looking model with predictive capability. Now, this helps provide commuters real time information on their travels like tracking their mode of transport or even which train car is least crowded. It also helps operators plan for and react quickly to disruptions and delays. Now by using amazon sage maker. The new south wales teams effectively saved half the time required to build and train machine learning models. I was just in sydney last week and able to try it for myself. So how cool to have all this information at my fingertips?

Now, how about using cloud computing and geospatial big data tools to monitor and combat illegal deforestation? That's what the government of power brazil is doing. Powered by aws, they built cla verde platform which uses a i and machine learning to monitor environmental compliance of 20 million hectares of forest areas in near real time. Also today, arizona state announced the launch of the a su artificial intelligence cloud innovation center powered by aws. This kick will harness the capabilities of artificial intelligence to help global government agencies, education institutions and nonprofits to address their mission related challenges.

Now, what about this thing we've been hearing about? It feels like the last 10 years called generative a i hasn't been that long but it feels like it. It's the first day of reinventing and i'm sure you've already heard quite a bit about it or have plans to attend a session about it. And our ceo andy jazzy has said we are, we are three steps into this marathon that is called generative a i. Many public sector organizations are already taking off experimenting and using generative a i in india ed tech bri books is using generative a i to develop ryoo. It's an a i assistant that can help young learners with their writing and overcome writer's block. We help train the open source gp tj 6 billion parameter model on their past data. Fine tuning an llm on amazon sage maker. How about building your own large language model? The technology innovation institute of the united arab emirates launched the falcon llm s3 foundational large language models with 7 billion, 40 billion and 100 and 80 billion parameters. Falcon ll ms are built on amazon sage maker. If you want to hear more and you missed the breakout earlier session today, breakout session. Earlier today, you can hear more from ti i at the aim l innovation talk with bratton saha on wednesday.

Now back in april, we announced the preview of our generative a i solution. Amazon bedrock, which is now generally available. Bedrock is a managed service for building and scaling generative a i applications. Organizations have model choice with bedrock and can tailor foundation models with their own data and integrate and deploy securely into applications using aws tools. They're already familiar with bedrock makes it a foundation models with amazon and leading a i start ups accessible via an api in the uk. Two customers are using amazon bedrock to do things like make services more accessible, make them faster, make citizens safer.

Swindon borough council, a local authority in england is using bedrock to make government information more accessible and more comprehensible for the learning disability community. They created something called simply readable. It's an innovative solution that converts complex documents into easily accessible, easy read format. Enabling a community where no one is excluded or disadvantaged. Swindon is working to open source the solution and license it free worldwide.

About a two hour drive east of swindon in bedfordshire, their police force is using generative a i to help them redact documents for third party disclosure in use in court. They created the platform called doc defender which helps bedfordshire police quickly redact pi i personally identify identifiable information from these documents. This offers time savings of up to 92% or the equivalent of at least five full time police officers, officers that can instead be investigating crimes and keeping citizens safe.

We're inspired by the countless ways you are showing us what's possible regenerative a i like taking your information or material and adding it to your preferred model to accelerate training your workforce or helping your students learn faster. Let's turn it over to one of our chief technologist leo to show you how it can be done today.

We're going to take a look at the s generative a ilm chatbot. We're going to experiment with different foundational models and we're going to have it examine specific sets of data using your retrieval augmented generation. This chatbot is available on github and it's open source and i've set up my own copy of it in my aws account and the first thing i've done is i've preloaded some data into it. I've set up a workspace on flying because i'm personally really into aviation and this workspace is powered by amazon opensearch. And i've added some data into it, including the airplane flying handbook from the faa s website, the pilot's handbook, i aeronautical knowledge also from the faa. And i also had to crawl the public notices web page again out of the faa website. And i can have it add more data by uploading files or having it crawl any website i'd like. So let's see what we can do here. The first thing i'm gonna do is i'm going to choose my foundational model. Some of these are powered by amazon bedrock, others by amazon sage maker

In this case, I'm choosing Anthropic called V2. I'm making sure I have my flying workspace lifted. I'm gonna ask it, are there any FAA notices about winter weather readiness? And while that answer is coming up, I'm going to be wondering, where did this answer come from? And explainability is really important when it comes to generative AI.

So I'm going to go to settings and I'm going to enable to show metadata. And as you can see, I have an answer and it points to specific FA notice and I can see that it came from the specific FAA safety website which was linked to the public notices web page.

Now let's switch to a multimodal model, this one by Hugging Face and let's have it upload an image in this case of a plane being deiced. And I'm going to ask it, what's in the image? What is this image? And let's see what it comes up with here. So as you can see the plane is, the photo is actually a plane being deiced. And what this is doing is it's examining this image and it looks like it got me the right answer.

So it says an airplane in an in an airport being diced by a truck that's spraying it with a substance. So that looks pretty good to me.

Now, let's switch back to Anthropic Cloud V2. And let's ask you a question that I think is gonna come from one of the hymn books that I uploaded. So what guidance does the FAA Fly in the Handbook provide on the use of anti icing equipment for aircraft?

So it looks like we've got an answer here. And if we look at where the answer came from, we can see it came from Chapter 13 of the Flying Handbook, which I uploaded. This shows you just some what you can do with this chatbot. And the really exciting thing here is that you can load any data you like and you can start experimenting today.

Now, thank you, Leo. Um you can see how this is one example of how applications across industries from education to government, from citizen support to training. Notably, our generative AI services are built from the ground up with key dimensions of responsible AI like explainability. I think that's pretty important when we're talking about something like de icing as we all fly around.

Now, you saw this in the demo, it's to easily clarify and evaluate inputs. So get out there, start experimenting with confidence. Public sector organizations are using advanced technologies to help them discover new frontiers and re invent themselves to help to help their citizens.

Axiom Space is going all in on AWS to help them power their terrestrial IT infrastructure. They'll use AWS to continue developing cloud based technology that will support on orbit on orbit research, scientific discovery and space exploration. Migrating its IT enterprise to AWS will support the Axiom Space teams building Axiom Station, its next generation commercial space station.

Now back here on earth, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston also known as the Federal Reserve released Fed. Now powered by the cloud, it lets customers of banks and credit unions use their financial institutions, mobile app website or other interfaces to send instant payments quickly and securely. This solution could potentially scale to more than 9000 banks across the country.

Now, let's watch this short video and we'll welcome our next speaker to the stage.

I'm Dan Anthony CIO for Fed. Now with the Federal Reserve Financial Services Fed now is the first American federal payments rail in 50 years and it allows American citizens and businesses to move money instantly throughout the country. As a technologist, I'm super excited at how food now is going to allow business to innovate, not just for the benefit of the businesses and the corporations who are going to be able to move money around better to manage their business processes, engage with customers differently. But the economic innovation that it's going to deliver, that innovation is important because it's going to allow the economy to grow and thrive for decades to come. It will drive future growth for the American economy and by extension, for the rest of the world.

Thanks Dave. Uh good afternoon, everyone. So I'm going to talk about the Federal Reserve Financial Services or FRFS and fell one of the most exciting evolutions in the US payment space in decades.

So first, a little bit of background on the Federal Reserve. So we're comprised of 12 self funded district banks under the supervision of the Board of Governors and subject to congressional oversight. Now, we serve several major functions for the nation. We're responsible for monetary policy, which is what we're all probably most familiar with the stability of the financial system, safety and soundness of individual financial institutions throughout supervisory and regulatory arms, promoting consumer protection and community development, and fostering payment and settlement system safety and efficiency.

And so in this payment space, we really have three key roles. We're a leader catalyst where we advocate educate act as a change agent and influencer in the payment process and policy areas. We're a fiscal agent providing a broad set of services to the US Treasury and the government and we're service provider providing payment services to the US depository institutions.

Now, FOFS is responsible for managing critical payments and security services that process more than $5 trillion that's trillion with a T daily. Now, the latest uh member of the FRFS family of products is Fed Now and it's the first new federal payments rail in 50 years. It joins cash check ACH which is how we will get paid and wire and F now clears and settles payments between bank accounts 24 by 7, 365 days a year and does it in seconds, not hours or days in the cloud every day of the year, including holidays.

The settlement is full final and instant meaning recipients have immediate access to their money without having to wait for delayed settlement or for banks to take on credit risk to make it available to them sooner. There's no delay to get it out of another product and into your bank account. So you can use it unlike some of the other payments applications out there today that you may already be familiar with.

And so this is really what brought me personally to fit now is the opportunity to give every citizen in America the ability to get paid and make payments instantly whether that's wages or rent or groceries or popcorn at the cinema because it turns out that's tremendously important for some of our most vulnerable citizens.

So every year, billions and billions of dollars are lost in the form of check, cashing fees, payday loans, interest payments, and late fees. And the burden of that cost, uh disproportionately falls on folks in the lower income into the spectrum on fixed incomes. That plurality of Americans that has less than $400 in savings. And so if we can help them avoid even a small percentage of that cost by giving them a tool to better manage their money and their cash flow. It's billions of dollars we're putting back in the pockets of people who need it the most.

And so for me, that's a tremendously compelling reason to be a part of bringing Fed out of market F also supports a range of use cases and serves as a springboard for private sector innovation. So uh banks and credit unions, businesses and start ups can all build on top of the services they now offers and it's offered to all eligible financial institutions to enable businesses and citizens to send and receive instant payments.

Now, for that to, to really benefit the nation to its maximum extent. A key goal for us is ubiquitous access to instant payments for every citizen, every business in America, whether they bank with the largest bank in San Francisco or New York or the smallest credit union in Maine, which is in the first district r based. Interestingly, it's some of the smaller banks and credit unions that are doing some of the most interesting things with, with instant payments, which I love to see as a trusted partner to financial institutions across the country.

FRFS is uniquely positioned to deliver that ubiquitous access. So we launched four months ago with 27 live participants. As of last week, that number is now 247. Now there's nearly 10,000 financial institutions in the US. So we got a ways to go before we get to ubiquity. But we're driving hard and we're really focused on simplifying the onboarding process. We streamlined on boarding and automation and in fact, our record uh from ink on paper to go live is eight days.

So that's great. But what does it have to do with the cloud? Well, we've known for centuries that money makes the world go around. As economist David Hume noted a few 100 years ago, the US economy depends not just on policy but on our ability to move that money as the Federal Reserve has always done and that money keeps the engines of commerce running. And so we need to ensure that not only can it be moved instantly but that it can be moved whenever it's needed. And that implies resilience and resilience is at the forefront of F now and we cannot compromise on that. And we take the burden of paying fast and above all reliable payments to the nation very seriously. And the cloud gives us unique tools and opportunities to deliver resilience.

The clouds predicated on resilience, distributed processing replication, redundancy, automation, cloud tooling, including things like the fault injection service. Uh these all provide the opportunity for F out to leverage resilience techniques from a variety of industries and a variety of products. Resilience is about more than up time. It's also about safety. And so security is a key part of resilience strategy for Fed. Now, we not only need to move money when it's needed, but we have to do it safely. And the cloud both enables and forces different security models, security and breadth and depth, which is a key benefit of the cloud something we've really been able to take advantage of for F now.

And in the shared responsibility model, security of the cloud, which is AWS's responsibility. That's complex physical security, the low level protocol, the control plane, securing the silicon and the tin, like that's all a lot to manage, but we don't have to worry about that someone does. But it's not me. And the sheer amount of talent that can be brought to apply to that problem in the cloud context is more than any enterprise can generally deliver alone. And because I don't have to worry about those things, I can focus on activities that are higher up the value chain, both in the security space and in the business space.

Now, security in the cloud, which is our responsibility lets us implement new and industry leading security techniques in ways that are really challenging in traditional environments. And so with security tools that are available to us in the cloud, including but absolutely not limited to automation, observability, learning capabilities, machine learning and artificial intelligence. We can responsibly and proactively ensure the best possible security in the rapidly changing threat landscape that we all exist.

Arguably a key benefit of the cloud though is how it enables us to bring technology in the business together. And so virtually, every industry disruption has been driven by tech, whether it's the printing press cars, steam electricity. More recently, robotics, machine learning AI or quantum. All of these things have shown that the impossible can become possible and the practical can become obsolete. And with the pace of technology only growing cloud and its enablement of innovation, speed and scale, really let us bring a future perspective to the business.

Take one more step on the journey to a unified operating model, rapidly evolve and implement real forward looking business strategy together. The business is technology and technology is the business now more than ever now, virtually now the the vast array of products and and partners in the cloud um makes technological innovation more accessible to a wide variety of businesses organizations and teams more than ever. Whether that's through deeply technical native services, higher level of abstractions or products that are just built to run in the cloud, but it's more than innovation.

The cloud allows us things as prosaic is directly tying technology and cost to business value. Um and it allows us to make real time pivots and adjustments. So FOPS is the word of the day right now and now it's a great financial tool, but it's really also a great driver to directly align the business and technology perspectives to make decisions jointly.

So all the things we've talked about today came together for Fed Now to increase our velocity and our time to market. So in 2019, we announced that we would launch in 23 to 24 and with an actual July of 2023 launch, we hit the early end of that guidance that now has a robust road map of features over the upcoming months and years. And we're well positioned to deliver on that leveraging both our own delivery techniques as well as the options afforded to us by being in the cloud.

So that brings me to one of the key lessons of the last couple of years and um Dave's probably gonna kick me about this later on, but you know, that's what happens when you let me have a microphone. Don't be afraid to ask for what you need. You know, we're all used to feature requests falling on the deaf ears of vendors are coming months and years. Too late. Amazon prides itself on customer obsession and my experience has been that's real. So leverage that ask for what you need be pushy with your account team, leverage your partners. They know how to work with AWS and they can bring the voice of multiple customers to then wait your request. You might be surprised as my daughter will happily tell you every Christmas you don't get what you don't ask for.

So, thanks a lot for the time. I really appreciated the opportunity to talk to you about Fed Now and our cloud experience. Um if you'd like to learn more about Fed, now visit the Fed. Now explorer by scanning the QR code and now I'll hand you back to Dave.

Thanks Dan. I would never kick Dan, maybe a slight nudge every now and then, but I wouldn't kick that. Now, I'm sure you're wondering how you can quickly get started with advanced technologies and learn what's possible. We've got lots of free and low cost training courses available through offerings like AWS Skill Builder. And we launched eight new free AI and generative AI courses in November. It's part of the pledge we made earlier this year this month to train more than 2 million people in AI for free. By 2025

The cloud is helping the communities where we live and work by making services more accessible both in normal times in our times of greatest need. We heard from lots of amazing speakers today on the power of leveraging data architecting for security and using advanced technologies to accelerate missions and empower citizens.

If you have a challenge and you're not sure where to start or if you already have an idea of what you want to do, but you need help figuring out the details. We're here, we're here to help. So reach out to your account manager, your account team or you can stop by our public sector kiosk in the AWS village at the expo. We've got technical people on site ready to help you today.

Now, before we go, I really wanted to highlight and applaud our public sector customers who are doing the work that is not only improving the lives of their customers but making the world a better place. Thank you. Thank you for taking the time out of your busy week to join us in Vegas and to hear more about our worldwide public sector customers and I'll see you all soon. Thank you.