Business Momentum Very Strong In India, Say AWS Execs

Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Wednesday launched its fully managed generative AI service Amazon Bedrock in the Mumbai region on the back of burgeoning customer demand in India and fast-evolving set of GenAI use cases across sectors such as BFSI, Healthcare, Retail and IT. 

The general availability of Amazon Bedrock from the region will offer GenAI services at lower latency, which will help its customers create GenAI applications faster and in a more secure environment. The service is anticipated to benefit businesses across the country, including public sector organisations and companies in regulated industries.

“GenAI is one of the most transformative technologies which we have seen in the recent times and it is going to transform the industries in an impactful manner, especially because it is going to change productivity, human-computer interaction, as well as business models, which can emerge in various industries,” Shalini Kapoor, Chief Technologist, APJ, Public Sector, Amazon Web Services said during a press conference during AWS Summit in Bengaluru.

Amazon Bedrock offers a diverse range of latest models for its customers, including the latest generation such as Amazon Titan (featuring Text Lite, Text Express, Multi-modal Embeddings, and Image Generator) as well as partner models like Cohere (offering Embeddings English and Embeddings Multi-lingual), Anthropic (including Claude 3 Haiku and Claude 3 Sonnet), Meta (comprising Llama 3 8B and Llama 3 70B), and Mistral (featuring Mistral Large, Mistral 7B, and Mistral 8x7B).Top of Form

Commenting on traction for AWS in India, Kapoor said, “India itself is going to be a USD 5 trillion digital economy. With that, customers’ needs are also increasing and what can go on the cloud from an organisation as well as in terms of migration of existing applications, plus the newer applications is only increasing. Momentum is definitely very high.” 

Last year, AWS announced that it would invest USD 12.7 billion in India’s local cloud infrastructure by 2030. This is in addition to AWS’s overall investment in India, amounting to Rs 1,36,500 crore (equivalent to USD 16.4 billion) by the same timeframe. This investment is projected to bolster India’s GDP by USD 23.3 billion by 2030 and sustain approximately 1.3 lakh full-time jobs annually within local businesses.

Fast Evolving GenAI Use Cases

As per an EY report, GenAI may add a cumulative USD 1.2-1.5 trillion to Indian economy by 2030. This will be supported exponential growth of GenAI use cases across industries. 

Speaking on GenAI use cases, V.G. Sundar Ram, head of business development, AWS India and South Asia said that they have been evolving and growing in sophistication exponentially. “We have seen that the very nature of use cases has evolved. In 2023, it was all about chatbots and assistance and so on in finance. Now, it has gone towards AI generated portfolios, underwriting assistance, intelligent advisory, increasing business value of unstructured content and much more in 2024,” he added.

Amazon Bedrock’s Mumbai region presence is expected to benefit its Indian customers such as Tata Consultancy Sevices (TCS), Max Life Insurance, Shellkode and Healthify.

Cost: A Significant Driver For AWS Growth

AWS said it has been observing the decreasing size of services and products, akin to sachet sizes, is driving the shift towards cloud technology in the country. This trend is evident across various sectors, from UPI transactions to smaller loan sizes, and even in connected products where transactions occur frequently in real-time. The increasing volume of data collected in shorter timeframes, along with the reduction in product and service sizes, shows the need for cost-effective technology solutions.

Sundar Ram stressed upon the critical role of cost in this scenario. “With higher transaction volumes and decreasing unit costs, it’s imperative for IT costs to decrease proportionately; otherwise, the economics won’t add up. AWS aims to address this challenge by continuously lowering prices, having done so 129 times since its inception. For AWS, assisting Indian customers in transitioning to the digital economy with effective, innovative and cost-effective technology solutions is essential for success,” he said.

AWS operates on a subscription-based model for its services. When engaging with customers, the company’s focus is on understanding the desired outcomes they seek to achieve. For instance, if a customer might be looking to reduce human intervention in underwriting processes by a certain percentage while retaining it for complex cases. The discussion then revolves around the business benefits of such outcomes. Subsequently, AWS collaborates with the customer to determine the most suitable technology solutions, which could entail a combination of AWS services and third-party models like Claude-3. 

These arrangements typically follow a subscription-based pricing structure. However, Sundar Ram noted that some customers may negotiate custom deals involving larger commitments. Despite potential variations in agreements, AWS maintains a standard practice of public pricing through subscription models.

Rohit Chintapali

BW Reporters The author is Regional Editor (Technology & South) at BW Businessworld.