Amazon Web Services: ‘AI is a marathon, not a race’

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the global leader in public cloud, has trailed its big cloud rival Microsoft in the development of generative artificial intelligence (genAI), but it believes the situation will change in the long run, thanks to the strength of its cloud footprint and its partnerships with established customers.

“AI is a marathon, not a race,” Cleber Morais, head of AWS enterprise sales for Latin America, told BNamericas.

“It’s often like that. If we take the advent of the web browser, the first one to come out was Netscape. Then, several others emerged. Now you have one or two that are predominant,” the executive underscored.

Microsoft's own Internet Explorer, which was the leading web browser for a time, lost importance over the years until it was dethroned by Google's Chrome. 

Morais is betting that the same will happen with genAI.

MULTI AND HYBRID AI

In cloud, AWS remains ahead of the pack, but Microsoft Azure is edging closer.

According to estimates from Synergy Research Group, Amazon’s market share in the world cloud infrastructure market was 31% in the first quarter of 2024, down from 32% a year earlier.

Meanwhile, Microsoft Azure grew to an all-time high 25% market share by the end of 1Q24.

The figures can be deceptive, however. Increasingly, the scenario for large companies is to use more than one cloud provider depending on the type of application and workloads it wants to virtualize. In many cases, they use as many as three providers.

It is this multiple and hybrid scenario that will likely materialize over time for generative AI too, since the "basis of AI is the cloud," Morais said.

AWS currently works with more than 11 LLMs (large language models) to offer its corporate customers different possibilities, said the executive. Globally, the company has a partnership with Nvidia for AI GPU chipsets and, among other initiatives on this front, has announced US$250mn in funding for AI-focused startups.

"IA is diversifying. It's becoming something for different flavors. To transform voice into image, a certain tool might be more useful; to transform image into voice, another, and so on," Morais told BNamericas on the sidelines of the Febraban Tech event in São Paulo.

Coding, credit analysis and customer relationship services are three of the main use cases Morais is seeing for genAI in the Latin American financing sector. 

He said AWS is working on AI with the major banks and financial institutions in the region. The company's existing customers in this vertical include Santander, Itaú, Nubank and C6 Bank.

"Brazil drives the region, but Colombia is doing very well too. Several banks in Colombia are making important digital moves. Argentina is accelerating too, it has its unicorns, etc. Mexico now with the new government and new regulations is changing the scenario for the financial sector as well," he said.

BEDROCK

AWS also aims to position itself also as an AI 'orchestrator' through Amazon Bedrock, which provides guardrails so that the use of genAI is secure and has encrypted data, indicating the best LLM according to the sector and demands, Morais said.

Fully managed, Bedrock offers capabilities for building and scaling genAI applications and makes it easier for customers to find and access high-performance foundational models for their specific use case, according to AWS.

Amazon Bedrock was launched in selected global regions in 2023. Earlier this month, the company announced that Bedrock was available in its South America cloud region in Brazil (São Paulo). This region is the company's only one in Latin America.

AWS operates that region with three availability zones (unique datacenters). The São Paulo cloud region went live in 2011 as one of the first for a public cloud player in Latin America. AWS is now working on a Mexican region.