• The cloud division of Amazon will be leading a programme to get generative AI products to enterprise customers.
• Amazon will reportedly invest $100 million into establishing the AWS Generative AI Innovation Centre.
• Similar to firms like Salesforce, AWS will target enterprise companies in manufacturing, media, financial services industries, among others, with its AI innovations.

In its own bid to keep up with the rest of the tech world, ecommerce giant Amazon says it is investing $100 million into the same technology that powers ChatGPT.

This is generative artificial intelligence, which took the world by storm after the quiet public launch of OpenAI’s chatbot in November last year.

Since then, the world’s largest technology firms rushed to capture some of the public fervour that ChatGPT has generated.

In line with this, Amazon is set to build an “AWS Generative AI Innovation Centre,” which will be the headquarters of its programme into researching and innovating on its version of the technology.

The company will have its cloud arm, Amazon Web Services (AWS), head the charge in this regard, with the centre connecting AWS data scientists, engineers and solutions architects with customers and partners.

“Through free workshops, engagements and training, AWS will help customers imagine and scope the use cases that will create the greatest value for their businesses, based on best practices and industry expertise,” Amazon indicated in a press release seen by TechCrunch.

Leading the Generative AI Centre for AWS will be Sri Elaprulo, a senior data scientist manager for Amazon, who details that the $100 million investment will be used to fund “people, technology and processes” around its generative AI initiatives.

It seems the larger AWS customers have been asking Amazon about AI products. The technology has become so pervasive, even business-focused companies like CRM provider Salesforce have launched a ChatGPT-like product.

“We’ve been hearing from our enterprise customers that they’re very interested in generative AI — and they’re looking to AWS for help and guidance,” Elaprolu said.

“The Innovation Center will help them build their plan for generative AI, identify and prioritize generative AI use cases that are aligned to business value, and develop proof-of-concept solutions and a path to bring solutions to a production-ready state, along with steps to scale.”

In May, a report from Insider highlighted that Amazon was working on a way to get generative AI into its Astro home “robot.” This would make the little gadget more useful than what it is, an uber-expensive camera on wheels.

The company said adding generative AI would let Astro “understand — in the same way a human understands — the thousands of things that happen within a home every day without having to explicitly code for each one because that ‘common-sense’ knowledge is implicit in the data the language model was trained on.”

However, this latest move from its Cloud wing seems to be more geared to enterprise customers, instead of the everyday consumer.

As TechCrunch writes, the AWS generative AI programme will seek out customers in the financial services, healthcare, life sciences, media, entertainment, automotive, manufacturing, energy, telecommunications and utilities industries.

“Generative AI will be one of the most transformational technologies of our generation, tackling some of humanity’s most challenging problems, augmenting human performance and maximizing productivity,” Elaprolu said.

“Our customers have always been at the forefront of innovation, and there are nearly endless possibilities and use cases for generative AI. It’s only just beginning.”

[Image – Photo by Hatice Baran on Pexels]