The proliferation of data, access to scalable compute, and advancements in machine learning (ML) have led to a surge of interest in generative artificial intelligence (AI). In fact, IDC reports two-thirds of organizations in Asia-Pacific are already exploring or have invested in generative AI technologies this year.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is making it easy, practical, secure, and cost effective for customers of all sizes and developers of all skill levels in Asia-Pacific to harness the potential of generative AI. This includes investments in cost-effective infrastructure to help customers scale generative AI applications, machine learning (ML) tools to make coding easier, and purpose-built AI services.
Generative AI will have a profound and positive impact on industries and society and there’s been a lot of excitement from businesses and governments that have quickly experimented with AWS’s broad suite of generative AI offerings.
Here are some examples of how AWS customers and partners are approaching generative AI today in areas such as content creation, employee productivity, customer experience, and digital skills.
Boosting productivity in the construction sector
Founded in 1610, Takenaka Corporation is one of Japan’s leading construction companies that collaborated with AWS to develop the Building 4.0 Digital Platform, which uses data and analytics to drive efficiencies across the corporation’s business operations. Generative AI is set to deliver significant efficiency gains to the construction sector, making it a key focus of Takenaka Corporation’s digital transformation efforts.
Takenaka Corporation is building a platform underpinned by Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Kendra (a highly accurate and easy-to-use enterprise search service powered by ML) that aggregates information from vast amounts of construction industry laws and regulations, internal guidelines, and best practices to help employees make smarter, faster business decisions, and improve work-life balance.
Making life easier for accountants
Kiwi-born tech company, Xero provides cloud-based accounting software to more than 3.7 million small business subscribers across the globe. For small businesses, there are many time-consuming manual tasks in running a business. Any opportunity to save them time means those extra efficiencies can unlock the ability for them to focus on higher value business activities (or their personal hobbies).
Xero is using AI to support its small business customers and their accounting and bookkeeping advisors, by streamlining time-consuming, manual processes, and to deliver the right insight at the right time. For example, Xero is using Amazon Bedrock to experiment with different large language models (LLMs) combined with Xero’s extensive knowledge article base to enhance its support provided to customers.
Delivering creativity at the speed of imagination
Founded in 2005 in Malaysia, 123RF has grown to be one of the world’s largest digital stock agencies serving more than 10 million registered users and 3 million subscribers worldwide. 123RF helps businesses—from startups to Fortune 500 companies—tell their stories using creative imagery, sounds, and motion, contributed by artists from around the world.
In March 2023, 123RF launched an AI Image Generation service, which uses Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion’s text-to-image FM and Amazon SageMaker (a fully managed service to prepare data and build, train, and deploy ML models) to help users generate unique, custom images from text prompts. 123RF’s users can quickly turn their imagination into reality by starting with a text prompt (such as subject, actions, and keywords), review the AI-generated image options, and then downloading and licensing visuals for personal or commercial use.
The AI Image Generation Service has drastically improved 123RF’s user experience and diversified its product offerings, delivering a 20% uplift in licensing rates of AI-generated content in just six months.
Accelerating the development of automotive solutions
L&T Technology Services (LTTS) is a global leader in engineering and research and development (R&D) headquartered in India that operates in more than 30 countries worldwide.
Together with AWS, LTTS is helping global automotive manufacturers transition towards the development of software defined vehicles (SDVs). To accelerate this ambition, LTTS selected Amazon CodeWhisperer (an ML-powered coding companion) to help engineering teams speed up the development of smart applications for advanced vehicles, including connected cars and SDVs. Amazon CodeWhisperer will enable LTTS developers to streamline development processes and efficiently create high-quality solutions, ensuring the best driving experience.
Adding a (digital) human touch
Soul Machines is a technology company that provides hyper-realistic, interactive AI digital people for businesses and celebrities globally. Their digital people are used by more than 4,000 creators across different industries such as banking and finance, healthcare, automotive, and consumer brands.
With the emergence of generative AI, Soul Machines is working with AWS Partner, Slalom, to integrate Amazon Bedrock into the company’s Digital DNA Studio, which empowers creators of all kinds to easily make AI avatars with a more human-like user experience in minutes – from brand ambassadors, customer assistants, digital concierges, to human resources (HR) trainers. According to Soul Machines, Amazon Bedrock’s lightning-fast responses enables the company to rapidly train of conversational content and continually improve its offering.
Improving teacher and student experiences
The Ministry of Education (MOE) Experiential Systems and Technology Lab develops innovative solutions in education to enhance the school experience for teachers and students in Singapore. The MOE collaborated with the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center, which connects AWS AI and ML experts with customers and partners, to implement and benchmark LLMs, and evaluate open-ended language tasks to create solutions to assist educators and expand student access to feedback.
After using LLMs on Amazon Bedrock, the MOE’s new evaluation solution is able to identify complex language errors and provide relevant feedback to students, exceeding the performance of its previous modelling techniques.
Taking local generative AI applications to the world
Gaming, entertainment, and ecommerce industries are rapidly adopting generative AI and cloud technologies to keep up with the demand for accelerated content development. Leading South Korean game developer, NCSOFT launched a suite of LLMs, named “VARCO” (which stands for Via AI, Realize your Creativity and Originality), to make generative AI more widely available to developers and businesses with industry-specific, domain-relevant applications.
LLMs can power a broad range of generative AI applications, from text processing and summarization to question answering. While LLMs have the potential to transform industries, the process of building, training, and deploying them can take weeks, if not months, and cost millions of dollars, putting LLMs out of reach of many companies.
NCSOFT launched its VARCO LLM suite on Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, which provides pre-trained, open-source models to help customers get started with ML, making it easier for organizations to build specialized applications using native language. Game developers, for example, can use multiple VARCO LLMs for game production, visual content creation, and scriptwriting via text prompts.
Equipping students with in-demand generative AI skills
Generative AI skills are essential for the future workforce, and the skills open new opportunities in various sectors, such as healthcare, finance, and technology. In July, AWS announced new free low-cost trainings to help people understand, implement, and begin using generative AI—ranging from courses for those looking to get started with generative AI to engineers and data scientists who want to train and deploy FMs.
To help prepare students for the jobs of the future, RevoU, Indonesia’s largest live online learning community collaborated with AWS to conduct private generative AI training to the company’s 60+ members. During the training sessions, students gained new skills such as natural language processing, image generation, and data synthesis, which are vital for understanding and applying generative AI in real-world applications. RevoU highlighted the practicality of the training content, effectiveness of the instructors, and overall enhancement of students’ knowledge of generative AI.
Driving generative AI innovation in Asia-Pacific
Generative AI offers an unprecedented opportunity to revolutionize and transform businesses globally. AWS is committed to fostering the next wave of technological talent through tools, mentoring, and tailored support programs.
In Asia-Pacific, AWS is making investments in startup accelerators and LLM development programs designed to make it even easier for local organizations to build specialized generative AI applications. This includes initiatives such as the AWS Large Language Model Development Support Program in Japan to support startups, large enterprises, and research institutions in Japan to build their own LLMs, and accelerators in Australia and New Zealand, India, and Korea aimed at helping startups building generative AI applications to scale.
We are in the early stages of a technological revolution that will continue for decades to come, and we are excited to see how our customers put this technology in action. At AWS, we will continue to help shape the future of this technology—guided by the needs of our customers—toward the most promising, beneficial, sustainable, and responsible AI applications.
Need a quick primer about generative AI? Learn more from Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Data and Machine Learning at AWS. And check out AWS’s recent generative AI service launches.
