With generative AI already changing industries and businesses across the world, the race is on for the next big engagement with the technology.
Having played a leading role in helping build and establish the systems behind many enterprise use cases for generative AI, Amazon Web Services was keen to push its credentials at the recent AWS re:Invent 2024 event, with a host of upgrades and new releases alike.
TechRadar Pro got to sit down with one of the company’s leading AI minds to find out more, and how the future of work is extremely likely to be heavily AI-focused.
More powerful, with more choice
“What Amazon does really well is take technologies like generative AI and apply it at scale to real-world business problems,” Vasi Philomin, VP of Generative AI at AWS, told us in a group briefing at re:Invent.
“We don’t indulge in just taking technology and doing technology for the sake of technology – we want to apply the real problems, and do it at scale.”
Philomin notes how Code Whisperer, which he helped create, and is now known as Amazon Q Developer, was created at a time of high hype around generative AI, and has now helped kickstart a major push within AWS for building truly helpful and intuitive services.
“We could have just built another chatbot and put it out there,” he recalls of the launch, “that would have been the easiest thing to do – but we did something else, which is to step back and think through, what do companies need? This is not just about a chatbot, this is much more powerful.”
Philomin outlines how AWS’ AI customers are typically builders or developers, so they want to build products, and crave new services and tools that will allow them to create something completely new.
“We want to bring it all together so that our customers have the choice,” he says, adding that choice is another crucial factor, with AWS looking to provide access to more models than any other provider.
“Having a model doesn’t help you build applications – you need workflows that work across the models that help you build applications,” he adds, highlighting the role of guardrails to set policies across the company about what apps built with AWS’ Bedrock platform can do or not do, for example discuss competitors, or mention politics.
Forward-looking agents
AI-powered agents are set to play a major role in the next generation of enterprise technology, and Philomin describes AWS’ work in multi-agent collaboration as, “probably the most forward-looking launch” of recent times.
“I think generative AI in general is going to go in that direction, where the abstraction that companies are going to choose to expose their business logic, that is powered by generative AI, they’re going to expose it as agents.”
“For me, an agent is a digital worker, given a bunch of resources, and that worker can go and solve a problem that you give it,” he notes, “an agent automates work, not just chats with you, but actually does something behind that.”
“It’s mirroring the real world, where humans work together in a certain way to accomplish things,” he adds, noting it is similar to hiring a new employee, and then bringing them up to speed with your company’s culture, principles, leadership, and teaching them about the tools you use to get the job done – just a digital version.
Philomin also outlines a greater vision, where a general supervisor, or “super-agent” will sit above specialized sub-agents, as, “the idea is that the supervisor is going to co-ordinate across them…and solve a much bigger problem, not simply by using them independently, but by having them collaborate with each other.”
“You can imagine now, in the future, where this is going – you can set up different kinds of org structures, with agents, and then see how they perform as a group.”
So with agents taking on even these organizational positions, where does that leave the human worker? Philomin notes that, “The question that keeps coming back again and again is, does generative AI replace people? I strongly don’t believe so.”
“What’s going to happen in my opinion is, you’re going to leave the boring, undifferentiated mundane work to AI, and what you’re going to be focused more on is doing the work that truly crave to do – it’s true across industries.”
This includes making software developers more productive by leaving menial code (“the boring stuff” as Philomin calls it) to an AI, as well as highlighting how Kiva robots in Amazon fulfilment centers have taken on “menial, undifferentiated work” such as lifting heavy shelving stacks – but not replacing human workers, who moved to other tasks, with an end result of actually increasing overall human recruitment.
“It’s just a great starting point,” Philomin states, “humans are not going to compete against AI – they’re going to compete against other humans that use AI…you’re going to be at a disadvantage if you don’t want to use a tool, it’s the same as if you said I don’t want to use a smartphone – you’re going to be less productive than somebody else.”
As generative AI seeps into more of our everyday tasks, what are the concerns? As with any new technology, an initial hype cycle will likely be followed by widespread adoption, which in turn requires regulation and scrutiny.
“We have to find the balance between not stifling innovation and at the same time, tackling the challenges,” Philomin notes.
“Responsible AI is a challenge that we’ve been doing a lot of work on – AI regulation should be done right, it is absolutely needed, but if every country does its own regulation, and there’s nothing in common, you’re going to stifle innovation.”
“We’re working with regulators to make sure that they at least talk to each other, and make sure that there’s a common agreement.”
“It’s not that the challenges are difficult to overcome – it’s just that we need time to overcome them…it’s a pretty new technology, and it’s evolving as well – there’s so much research happening behind the scenes”
So AWS has struck its place firmly at the forefront of the enterprise AI age, and Philomin concludes by noting that the company is well-set to keep this place going forward.
“Everything has a reason why we launched it,” he notes, “Amazon thinks through the entire stack – we think end-to-end, that’s the reason it takes us time…and that’s how we’re different from everybody else, who’s thinking about one thing, and not the whole thing.”
“When a technology of this magnitude, it’s once in a lifetime – I think this could be as big, if not bigger than the Internet…I think the potential is there, now we have to execute.”