Amazon just made a big play into the generative AI space, making them another serious contender in the AI arms race.
The play came in the form of several major announcements about new generative AI capabilities baked right into Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Amazon Bedrock was the star of the show here.
Bedrock makes foundational text and image models accessible to AWS customers. These include some of Amazon’s own models and models from companies like Anthropic and Stability AI.
Using Bedrock, customers can customize models securely with their own data and integrate those models into their applications, sometimes using only a few labeled examples to fine-tune models.
AWS gives the following marketing-focused example of Bedrock’s value:
“Imagine a content marketing manager who works at a leading fashion retailer and needs to develop fresh, targeted ad and campaign copy for an upcoming new line of handbags. To do this, they provide Bedrock a few labeled examples of their best performing taglines from past campaigns, along with the associated product descriptions, and Bedrock will automatically start generating effective social media, display ad, and web copy for the new handbags.”
In addition to Bedrock, Amazon also announced advancements in the AI infrastructure it provides to customers and the general availability of its CodeWhisperer tool, which generates code snippets for developers.
What does Bedrock mean for marketers and business leaders?
In Episode 43 of the Marketing AI Show, Marketing AI Institute founder/CEO Paul Roetzer broke it down for me. Here’s what you need to know.
- Bedrock matters first and foremost because, well, it’s Amazon. Enterprises already using—or considering—AWS now have a ready-made large language model (LLM) solution in their tech they already use.
- This matters because LLMs are the new CRM. “The large language model is the new CRM,” says Roetzer. Not in terms of replacing your CRM, but rather in its importance to your tech stack. The LLM will be as fundamental to your tech stack as the CRM has been for the last 15 years. So having much easier access to a range of models through AWS is a win for many enterprises.
- This isn’t just a marketing priority. You will soon need to solve for LLMs across not only marketing, but your sales, service, finance, HR, and other business operations, says Roetzer. That’s how fundamental the technology will be to building a smarter business in the age of AI.
- Bedrock’s ability to safely and securely customize models is a big deal. Customer models are the “future of how every organization will use these models” says Roetzer. To do that, enterprises will fundamentally need to trust they can use their proprietary data to securely train these models. Bedrock gives them a reliable way to do that.
- Not to mention, having AWS as a guide helps. Every business is trying to—or needs to—figure out language models. Do you build your own? Do you use someone else’s? Do you build on top of an existing model? There are so many options, but far too few people in organizations—even on top-notch teams—who know what to do about this, says Roetzer. “It’s going to be a really tricky period right now moving forward for people in the buying seats at organizations to figure this stuff out,” he says. Being able to go to AWS as one option this messy process at least a little bit easier.
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