Some have compared generative AI (GenAI) to the advent of electricity, automobiles, the internet and smartphones – i.e,  a transformative, once-in-a-generation technology. However, because it is still so nascent, many enterprises are grappling with just how it works and the best ways to leverage it.

To help bridge that gap between exploration and realization, Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center. The company is investing $100 million in the program that will help guide businesses through the process of developing, building and deploying generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools.

“Generative AI is one of those technological shifts that we are in the early stages of that will impact all organizations across the globe in some form of fashion,” Sri Elaprolu, senior leader of generative AI at AWS told SDxCentral. “We have the goal of helping as many customers as we can, and as we need to, in accelerating their journey with generative AI.”

Generative AI Innovation Center: Moving to the art of the practical

The new Generative AI Innovation Center’s team of strategists, data scientists, engineers and architects will work closely with customers to help them envision, design and launch new GenAI products, services and processes, Elaprolu said.

The first step will connect enterprise customers with experts from AWS and the AWS partner network to go over business priorities and vision, then “work backwards” to create a list of potential use cases for AI, he said. From there, they will build a proof of concept based on different use cases and customer requirements and data, select the right models and define paths to navigate technical or business challenges. They will also provide guidance on best practices for applying tools responsibly and optimize machine learning (ML) operations to reduce costs.

“It’s going from the art of the possible to the art of the practical,” Elaprolu said. “They can touch, feel, see it, start thinking about other ways of enhancing it.”

Finally, the center will help organizations scale models into production. Customers will have access to AWS services including the AI-powered coding tool Amazon CodeWhisperer and Amazon Bedrock, which creates foundational models (FMs) from AI21 Labs, Anthropic and Stability AI along with Amazon Titan, Amazon’s family of FMs.

They can build, train and deploy models with Amazon SageMaker or deploy popular FMs including Cohere’s large language models, Technology Innovation Institute’s Falcon 40B and Hugging Face's BLOOM.

“We have this massive value in front of us that customers are starting to understand and think about ways of leveraging,” Elaprolu said. “We want to help organizations move from the vision to taking advantage of the technology in a practical way to help solutions become real so that they can get the business impact and value they want.”

Fox Sports, Twilio, Highspot among first customers

AWS has already begun working with hundreds of customers on generative AI products, Elaprolu said.

For one, it has collaborated with Fox Sports on natural language processing (NLP) tools to generate content for broadcasters to use while on the air (such as statistics on players and games).

Other high-profile enterprise customers include programmable communications company Twilio and sales-enablement platform Highspot.

Meanwhile, healthcare and life sciences companies can pursue ways to accelerate drug research and discovery, while manufacturers can build tools to reinvent industrial design and processes, Elaprolu said. Financial services companies can also develop ways to provide customers with more personalized information and advice.

Furthermore, generative AI can be used to help increase productivity, improve internal business processes and perform summarization tasks (such as taking unstructured data and making it concise and structured) or intelligent search, Elaprolu pointed out.

“It’s being able to use natural language to ask a question,” he said, then have that model go off and search a wide spectrum of data sources and bring back a “consumable response.”

And in the media industry, the possibilities are “immense.” AI can generate entirely new artifacts, “whether book, video, audio.”

Focus on practical AI not the possibilities

Indeed, generative AI can be used across industries and the possibilities are seemingly endless — but Elaprolu pointed out that enterprises should remain practical. While looking to the future is always important, organizations should pick use cases that will most quickly deliver the most value.

AWS hopes to help organizations strike this delicate balance. “We want to drive value in the near term,” he explained, “while also looking to the long term.”

Ultimately, Elaprolu said, “we’re super excited for the future and what the Innovation Center is going to be able to do in democratizing and making this technology real.”