Last week, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced that it is investing US$100 million in a program it calls the Generative AI Innovation Center that will connect AWS artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) experts with customers to help them build and deploy generative AI products and services.

Chief executive officer Adam Selipsky said that this new program will help customers “get real with AI, get beyond the talk.”

The investment might be seen as a way to catch up to Microsoft’s Azure and Google, which have taken an early lead in the generative AI market, a report from Bloomberg noted. The company, nonetheless touts its 25 years of AI experience and 100,000+ customers using AWS AI and ML services.

“The Generative AI Innovation Center is part of our goal to help every organization leverage AI by providing flexible and cost-effective generative AI services for the enterprise, alongside our team of generative AI experts, to take advantage of all this new technology has to offer,” said Matt Garman, senior vice president of sales, marketing, and global services at AWS.

Healthcare and life science companies, for instance, will pursue ways to accelerate drug discovery, while manufacturers can build solutions to reinvent industrial design and processes, the release noted.

With the help  of generative AI experts from AWS and the AWS Partner Network, the company will offer training and help customers select the right models, navigate technical and business challenges, develop proofs of concept, and create plans for launching solutions at scale. The Generative AI Innovation Center team will also provide guidance on responsible AI practices and optimizing ML operations to reduce costs.

Customers can learn to use AWS generative AI services including Amazon CodeWhisperer, Amazon Bedrock and Amazon’s own family of foundation models (FMs), Amazon Titan, which are accessible via an API. They can also train, run and deploy their models using AWS infrastructure, including Amazon SageMaker or use Amazon SageMaker Jumpstart to deploy some of today’s most popular FMs.

“The big questions are, ‘What does generative AI mean for my industry? And for my business?’ That’s what we’ve heard from a lot of customers,” said Uwem Ukpong, vice president of global services at AWS said in a blog post. “It’s been a groundswell.”

To help businesses get started with generative AI today, he shared the following three recommendations:

Understand the foundations of AI/ML models, how traditional AI led to genAI, and what responsible AI looks like.
Review the data they have and understand the potential that generative AI can unlock from that data.
Identify use cases of how genAI can create new and valuable experiences for customers or improve the company’s bottom line. Ukpong added, “move some of those use cases from ‘art of the possible’ to ‘art of the practical.’ Get strategic and be specific.”

Early users of the program include Twilio, Highspot, Lonely Planet, and Ryanair.

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