Deep Diving into AI for Every Business at AWS TechFest 2024
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Recognising the transformative power of AI in supercharging business operations, Amazon Web Services (AWS) brought the ‘AWS TechFest: AI for Every Business’ back to Hong Kong once again on September 3rd, 2024, welcoming over 1000 AI enthusiasts, trained over 300 and 20 partners for a full-day event of immersive learning, with the goal to assist companies to cut down unnecessary and manual tasks to refocus efforts and double down on growth.
Apart from expert-led keynote speeches sharing latest trends on business transformation through accelerated AI adoption, there were three different tracks with interactive sessions and self-paced labs for participants to attend based on their expertise or interests. The builder track was aimed at solution builders for pretraining large language models (LLMs) and enhancing productivity, empowering talented individuals in the rapidly evolving AI field. Start-ups and independent software vendors were given the opportunity to connect with investors through tailored matchmaking sessions, while addressing industry challenges such as fundraising and regulations. There were dedicated sessions for marketers, developers, as well as PR and HR practitioners, with an industry-specific guided tour to learn real-world applications. More importantly, participants experienced one-of-a-kind demos for Amazon SageMaker, Agentic LLM and more next-generation applications, while receiving tips for AWS Certification Exams through training sessions and workshops.
AWS TechFest not only served as a testing playground for ambitious AI novices and goal-oriented companies looking to venture into the AI world, shining a light on cutting-edge solutions while granting space for trial and experimentation, client success stories also took centre stage to showcase the effectiveness of AI adoption in all aspects and stages of business. First-hand experiences from partners revealed invaluable insights and demonstrated best practices for companies of different scales to start embracing change and reimagine operations with the help of technology. For example, etnet, a leading local financial publication, achieved significant digital transformation goals, particularly in news research and production, with the implementation of Amazon Bedrock.
Furthermore, experienced AI experts echoed the benefits of integrating AWS GenAI solutions in respective business operations. Datax Limited, a local provider of over 30 automation solutions in relation to speech recognition, NLP and OCR, highlighted that in collaboration with AWS helped its subsidiary AI subtitling platform Subanana cut down overall IT infrastructure costs by 10 to 20%. The pay-as-you-go model was particularly welcomed as it eliminated the need for upfront hardware investments and reduced maintenance costs, whilst providing extra cost management tools to identify inefficiencies and further optimise budgeting and spending.
Mr. Aric Fung, Co-founder and Account Director, Datax AI Solutions, remarked, “It is no surprise that Amazon SageMaker JumpStart worked well with our company’s existing models. The comprehensive ecosystem of AWS has provided us a secure infrastructure with scalability and reliability, allowing our team to extend our solutions to corporate clients across industries such as media, finance and property management, making AI truly accessible and usable to everyone. We are always happy to experiment with new features and appreciate the agility that comes with our collaboration to adapt to changing market conditions.”
On the other hand, Butler Asia, an AI-powered real estate solution provider, believed AWS to be crucial to the company’s growth. Emerging as an undeniable driving force in spurring its growth trajectory and shaping the future of real estate automation solutions, GenAI solutions have enabled the platform to scale its infrastructure dynamically and transform digitally. With increasing client demands from top property developers, uninterrupted service delivery and flexibility became paramount to guarantee efficient stakeholder interactions for their CRM solution.
Mr. Jonathan Lam, Co-Founder of Butler Asia, said, “AWS stood out amongst competitors given its global reach, along with extensive artificial intelligence and machine learning services, as well as industry-leading security features. More importantly, the technical support we have received from the back-end operations team has been excellent, and I believe the potential for future partnership is endless. As we continue to expand into new markets and sectors, we look forward to deepening usage of Amazon Bedrock as well as exploring IoT services for data management in smart buildings.”
The AWS TechFest is all but a peek into industry-leading foundation models and generative AI-powered applications, yet it is clear to see that generative AI solutions can be easily built and scaled with a flexible and personalised touch to add to every field of business. AI is no longer just a trending buzzword found in the news, maturing and progressing as an inestimable tool applied widely to revolutionise the world. It is definitely worth looking into automation solutions that help streamline traditional work processes and reduce operation cost, a certain step that will take businesses to the next level and gain an all-round competitive edge in the ever-changing market.