AWS’ Brian Bohan Talks Decision-Making, GenAI, and What He is Looking Forward to at re:Invent 2024

I was thrilled to sit down with Brian Bohan , Amazon Web Services (AWS) ’s global lead?at its Consulting Partner Center of Excellence, for a fun conversation on leadership, the state of Generative AI (GenAI) in cloud computing, and the power of 德勤 and AWS’s decade-long relationship.

AWS re:Invent is happening at such an exciting time. Last month, Deloitte Digital , Salesforce , AWS, and Anthropic announced a new initiative to accelerate Agentforce across highly regulated industries like retail banking, life sciences, and health care, building on our work together in AI, such as empowering organizations to accelerate GenAI solutions across their specific industries.

Check out more on the progress we’re sparking together in my conversation with Brian.?

Dounia: Thanks for joining me! If you could swap lives with anyone for a day, who would it be? ?

Brian: My wife. We've known each other for 31 years and been married 26, and she'll be my partner for the rest of my life. I figure it'd be really good to be in her shoes for a day and really understand what it's like.

Dounia: Congratulations! I love that. That's definitely the best answer I've ever gotten to this question!

Dounia: How has your leadership style evolved over your career journey?

Brian: When I was first starting to build teams, I felt like I had to be the one to arrive at the answer or provide the answer. As I've gotten a little bit more experience and as the teams have grown, I’ve learned you can’t be the one who always has the answer. What's more important is to create the space and the frameworks for others to arrive at the right answers and the way forward.

Dounia: Yes! The magic and power of showing up as a team and seeing your teams create their own platform for change is so special—it’s the payback of investment in leadership.

Dounia: What emerging trends in cloud computing and real-time analytics are going to continue to shape the future of the industry?

Brian: GenAI is a huge one. We are focused on it, Deloitte's very much focused on it, we're focused on it together. In the last 12 to 18 months, there has been brand new technology, lots of promise, and a lot of experimentation pilots and proofs of concept. One of the many reasons I'm so excited about this alliance is that we've got some really good hypotheses, and we've got some great examples of where it's being applied in real business process transformation within industry.

I think increasingly, it's going to become less about “doing GenAI projects” and more about transforming clinical trials or finding new ways of mortgage lending or claims processing. One of the things that we're doing together is getting persona-focused.

We built a set of GenAI tools that are very focused on the challenges the CFO goes through, breaking down that value chain and applying GenAI to make it more optimized and efficient. So now you've got a CFO who is a customer but is also an incredibly important stakeholder in this whole GenAI process, and now they have a much deeper understanding because they become a user of it.

GenAI applied to industry-aware, domain-specific business process transformation is something that we are really leading the way in.

Dounia: Agreed. The impact on clients’ ability to actually reinvent their customer experiences is profound. We've been talking about it for years, but the time is now. The technology has the ability to make it real. We've been talking about generative AI, human plus technology, and impact. Now, we’re talking about agent journeys, which are so different, and we're interacting with technology in a completely different way than we ever have before.

Brian: Yeah, 100%. I think this year, agentic becomes kind of more mainstream. At the end of the day, that's why we're here, to make the lives of our customers’ customers better, and CX is an area that's ripe for transformation through GenAI.

Dounia: What’s one word that sums up our alliance?

Brian: “Trust,” if I had to name one. I feel super privileged and lucky this year because I've taken on this role, and I've gotten to get closer to working with Nishita Henry , John Byron Thomas McGinnis , and Michael Cullen .

There's this strong cultural fabric that's developed over the years. Those two things go hand in hand: the right amount of information-sharing you mentioned before and assuming good intentions. Because there's that trust and that shared culture, we find our way to a shared understanding and a path forward much faster.

Dounia: I'm excited to close out the year with re:Invent! What are you most excited about and what insights do you hope attendees take away?

Brian: The thing I love about re:Invent is that we’ll learn about a bunch of new announcements and new capabilities that AWS is going to launch, so I’m super excited.

The biggest thing for me is the people and the ability to meet with so many customers and partners together. You really get a sense of the challenges our customers are facing and the opportunities they see where we can combine forces and solve together. In the past, I've been at dinners where clients lean across the table and ask, “How did you migrate and modernize SAP on AWS? Tell me more about that!” They trust us but hearing directly from each other is so valuable.