Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced at AWS Summit Bengaluru that Amazon Bedrock, which offers customers the easiest, fastest, and most secure way to build and scale generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications and experiences, is generally available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region.
To help customers globally take advantage of this new technology, Amazon Bedrock became generally available to all customers worldwide through select regions in 2023. The general availability of Amazon Bedrock in AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region will support customers across the country, including public sector organisations and companies in regulated industries, to innovate with generative AI and to have further choices on where they can run and store generative AI applications. Deploying generative AI workloads closer to end users will also help customers with low latency needs. Low latency is especially important for generative AI applications in delivering faster processing and response times, which are essential for AI tasks like on-the-fly content generation, interactive user experiences, and real-time conversational insights.
“AWS is committed to helping customers accelerate their generative AI journey from experimentation to production in an efficient and secure way. Our customers value choice; some prefer to build from scratch, while others prefer models tailored for specific use cases. We want to provide organisations in India with the performant, cost-effective infrastructure they need to build with generative AI,” said Shalini Kapoor, Chief Technologist–APJ Public Sector, Director–AWS India and South Asia. “The availability of Amazon Bedrock in India will further spur innovation that large enterprises, startups, independent software vendors, and public sector organisations are building in India, and complement their efforts to upskill their talent in generative AI.”
Organisations across India are using generative AI for a wide variety of use cases, including driving productivity gains, creating innovative user experiences, and reimagining work. Amazon Bedrock is a fully managed service which offers customers a selection of best-in-class models and powerful model customisation capabilities, built with enterprise-grade security and privacy. Additionally, AWS provides customers with the tools, resources, and training they need to advance responsible and secure innovation in generative AI. Customers can access the latest generation of models, including Amazon Titan (Text Lite, Text Express, Multi-modal Embeddings, Image Generator), Cohere (Embeddings English, Embeddings Multi-lingual), Anthropic (Claude 3 Haiku, Claude 3 Sonnet), Meta (Llama 3 8B, Llama 3 70B), and Mistral (Mistral Large, Mistral 7B, Mistral 8x7B).
“We are excited about helping customers accelerate generative AI innovation across all industries with Amazon Bedrock. Take the financial services industry, for example, trading firms could supercharge their trading algorithms with generative AI to continually optimise trading strategies based on real-time portfolio performance and evolving market conditions. Or in the healthcare industry, hospitals could use virtual care assistants to alleviate resource constraints by using conversational language capabilities to assist with patient queries,” said V.G. Sundar Ram, Head of Business Development, AWS India and South Asia.
AWS customers and partners innovating using generative AI
Max Life Insurance is India’s leading private life insurer. “We are excited about the possibilities that emerging technologies like generative AI offer in terms of driving innovation and enhancing our customer experience,” said Sanjay Thawakar, SVP-AI Works at Max Life Insurance. “Through our collaboration with AWS, we anticipate a considerable enhancement in the efficiency of our field agents. This will enable swift responses to customer queries or gaining deeper market insights, thereby elevating the overall customer experience. With the launch of Amazon Bedrock in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region, we are thrilled to embrace this revolutionising technology and look forward to exploring additional cutting-edge generative AI use cases to enhance efficiencies across all divisions.”
Shellkode is an AWS Partner and a leading IT solutions firm that helps customers harness the power of change, speed, and innovation to create all-round business value by putting data and cloud at the core of business solutions. “As a Born-in-the-Cloud Partner and among the first generative AI Competency Partners in India, we’re excited by AWS’s continued innovation and democratisation of cutting-edge generative AI capabilities. With AWS, we have been able to create purpose-built solutions that harness generative AI such as negotiation assistant, invoice management, email assistant with multi-lingual support, customer interaction analysis, and smart assistants,” said Arun Kumar Selvaraj, CEO of Shellkode. “Through continued collaboration between Shellkode and AWS, and now with the availability of Amazon Bedrock in Mumbai, we look forward to helping customers in the country maximise the power of generative AI to increase their business process capabilities multi-fold.”
Supporting upskilling and entrepreneurship in generative AI
Across India, AWS is making investments in partner support programs, startup accelerators, and Large Language Model (LLM) development programs designed to make it even easier for local organisations to build specialised generative AI applications. This includes initiatives such as the AWS ML Elevate program, aimed at helping startups build generative AI applications for scale.
Based on the recent AWS-commissioned study, titled “Accelerating AI Skills: Preparing the Asia-Pacific Workforce for Jobs of the Future”, AI skills could boost salaries of workers in India by more than 54% and accelerate career growth as AI adoption ramps up. AWS has trained 5.5 million people across India in cloud skills since 2017. However, with the rapid adoption of cloud-enabled technologies like AI, more needs to be done to upskill the workforce at scale so organisations can innovate and grow in an AI-driven future. In November 2023, Amazon launched the AI Ready initiative that complements AWS’s commitment to provide free cloud computing skills training to 29 million individuals globally by 2025. Through AI Ready, AWS now offers a suite of free AI and generative AI training courses, aligned to both technical and non-technical roles, so that anyone can acquire AI skills.
AWS has a long-term commitment to customers and local communities in India. In 2023, AWS announced plans to invest US $12.7 billion in India by 2030 into local cloud infrastructure. This brings AWS’s total investment in India to INR 1,36,500 crores (US $16.4 billion) by 2030. This investment will contribute US $23.3 billion to India’s GDP by 2030, and support approximately 131,700 full-time jobs annually at local businesses.
