Australia is an attractive market for GenAI and AWS wants to grab it

At the recent Amazon Web Services (AWS) Summit in Sydney Australia, the company revealed that Australia was an important market for AWS and that it was optimistic about the potential of GenAI adoption in the country.

At the event, AWS also discussed its GenAI strategy. Rivals Microsoft and Google Cloud have been actively promoting their GenAI development through OpenAI and Google Gemini, respectively, as well as building foundational models to help customers tap GenAI capabilities without building their own. While AWS has its models under the umbrella of Amazon Titan, it emphasises giving customers their model of choice, including its own and partner models hosted within its cloud environment. This is through Amazon Bedrock, which is a fully managed service. It gives customers the ability to choose from a range of models based on their needs and preferences. They can develop GenAI capabilities and use cases without leaving the AWS environment.

So far, AWS has agreements with several AI companies, natural language processing (NLP), and large language model (LLM) specialists, including AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Mistral AI, and Stability AI. The advancement of LLM is happening by leaps and bounds, with new startups entering the fray and new versions being announced at an ever-faster pace.

AWS strategy and announcements

With a variety of models designed for different needs, AWS’ strategy is to offer Amazon Bedrock as a way for customers to access the latest models on its platform and build AI applications with guardrails to meet their responsible AI framework.

The solution also enables users to customise their models with retrieval augmented generation by using their own systems and data. Instead of competing with others to develop models for different needs, AWS is therefore playing to its strength by developing an AI ecosystem within its cloud and offering customers the tools and infrastructure to achieve their business objectives.

At AWS Summit Sydney, the company announced the launch of AWS Bedrock in the Sydney region. This is crucial to drive the adoption of AWS’ GenAI solutions locally by addressing the requirements around latency, data security, and industry-specific regulations. GlobalData believes that GenAI model training will either be performed in the cloud or in a hybrid environment since it is very costly to operate a dedicated AI infrastructure in-house.

AWS is therefore well-positioned to capture the GenAI opportunities, particularly with its ability to support computing resources at scale. Australia is also an important market for AWS to prove its GenAI solutions. Australian enterprises have been early adopters of technology and it was ahead of many countries in cloud and mobile adoption more than a decade ago.

AWS has, for several years, been supporting many startups and cloud-native firms in Australia; and these digital businesses are more ready to explore and implement GenAI-enabled solutions. For example, at AWS Summit, Leonardo AI shared its experience working with AWS to power its AI image generator, allowing it to scale its business quickly – since the launch in December 2022, the company’s users (in excess of 14.7 million) from 189 countries have generated more than one billion images for gaming, media, entertainment, and marketing use cases.