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WPCG: What are some of the most common use cases you’re seeing for generative AI?

Vachhrajani: The most common use cases are the ones that increase human productivity and supercharge human creativity. We can put them in three broad buckets.

First is enhancing customer experiences like better personalization, improved customer support or making it easier for customers to find insights into a product they’re looking for. For example, Amazon has our own generative AI-powered shopping assistant called Rufus. Rufus is designed to help customers save time and make more informed purchase decisions by answering questions on a variety of shopping needs and products right in the Amazon Shopping app.

The second use case area is increasing the productivity of your employees so that they can spend more time on work that requires their expertise. For example, generative AI can automate repetitive tasks like foundational software upgrades. With a generative AI assistant like Amazon Q, companies can reduce their development time from weeks and months to hours. That means those developers can spend more time building features and products that are meaningful to your customers.

The final area, which I find interesting, is net new capabilities that would not be possible without the power of AI. For example, accelerating drug research by being able to process and synthesize millions of data points, or using generative AI to come up with the design for a new part in the manufacturing process.

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WPCG: What impact is generative AI having on the workplace?

Ishit Vachhrajani: There’s a lot of excitement about it. Our research shows hiring AI-skilled talent is a priority for about 73 percent of companies. If you talk to employees, the majority are excited about integrating AI in their day-to-day job. This excitement and opportunity goes well beyond the technical roles. The ability to effectively use AI will become a core competency across every function within a company whether it is finance, HR, marketing or customer support.

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WPCG: What type of organizational culture is required to thrive in this era?

Vachhrajani: Many of the foundational principles that apply with any new technological evolution still matter. You need a culture that is eager and curious to learn and adopt new changes, a culture that prioritizes intentional and calculated risk taking and a culture that prioritizes experimentation over certainty. This space is moving so fast that you want to be able to test different ideas and double down if they work and move on if they don’t.

When I say calculated risk taking, it’s about thinking big and giving a shot to ideas that might not be fully proven but have a lot of potential.

Finally, you need a culture that prioritizes learning and investment into training, and not just for the employees but also executives and senior leaders. The overall digital fluency of the entire organization plays a big role in companies that are successful with any technological transformation, including AI.

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WPCG: What internal skillsets do organizations need to thrive in the generative AI era?

Vachhrajani: There are skills like domain expertise, deeply understanding your customers’ lifecycle and how they interact with your company and product, that are timeless. They will become even more important in the era of generative AI.

There’s an opportunity to enhance that deep company and product knowledge with data analytics. Data is the fuel that is going to differentiate companies that are using AI from those that are not. Also, a basic understanding of how these models work, how to interact with them through prompts and how to validate their outputs are going to be critical new skills. These will enable you to use the right approach when interacting with them.

These are the skills that are going to be not just important for core AI and machine learning teams, but everyone, including marketing analysts, financial analysts, your customer support and service agents.

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WPCG: How can businesses find the AI talent they need?

Vachhrajani: There is tremendous demand for AI skills today. While companies should hire people with the right skillsets, they’ll also need to build the right skillsets internally. So companies are following a dual strategy. They’re looking to augment and hire some specific skills, but they’re also largely investing in upskilling their existing employees.

It’s not just about making an investment in training, but also being intentional about making time for training. How do you make training part of someone’s job? And once they get trained, how do you reduce the time between when they get trained and when they have an opportunity to go and try and implement that?

Creating an inventory of the skills you have, skills you need by roles, creating a formalized training plan and investment plan can all help companies bridge this gap.

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WPCG: What is AWS doing to ensure a steady supply of AI talent for your customers?

Vachhrajani: AWS has made a commitment with an initiative called AI Ready, where we are going to train 2 million people with AI skills by the year 2025. That’s on top of about 31 million learners and counting that AWS is training for free on cloud computing – exceeding our goals. There are about 80 free courses that are available through AWS training and certification. Many of these are for all different roles, including senior executives, that anybody can take advantage of.

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WPCG: How does AWS engage with customers to help them succeed with generative AI?

Vachhrajani: Overall, AWS is committed to enabling organizations of all sizes, skills and maturity to be able to use generative AI. We innovate at every layer of our generative AI technology stack to provide better price performance and scale for those who want to build their own models, choice and flexibility for those who want to build generative AI applications with leading foundation models and access to a generative AI powered assistant so that anyone can start using generative AI in their day to day work today.

We are doing all of this with the same trusted foundation of security, privacy and responsible AI that millions of our customers have come to expect from AWS. We know it’s not just about technology, which is why we’re also investing in skills and bringing our own expertise through the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center – a $100M investment from AWS to help bring your ideas to life. Our Enterprise Strategy team, composed of former C-suite executives who have led major transformations, provides peer-level guidance to executives.

– Q –

WPCG: How will AI and generative AI impact the overall number of workers required in the workforce?

Vachhrajani: I love history, and these questions have been asked every time there is a major technological evolution, whether it was the steam engine, electricity, the internet or the cloud. This is where generative AI has the potential to make the proverbial pie much larger. There are going to be new opportunities, skills, jobs, products, ideas and solutions to problems that we can’t even fathom today.

I believe that while it will change how we all work, it is a net benefit to the overall economy, the jobs, the companies, employees and customers and to the productivity and outcomes that we are all able to achieve. It is still early days and we have just started to scratch the surface of what is possible.

AWS stands ready to help your business make the most of generative AI.