In a year where artificial intelligence (AI) has taken the world by storm, the world’s largest cloud provider has just had its chance to chime in. This week, Amazon Web Services (AWS) took center stage discussing the current and future state of information technology (IT) at its annual conference, AWS re:Invent. While AI was a consistent theme, so were the new and unique challenges AI introduced, especially around security.
If you’re like most people in health IT, you want to stay in the know on the biggest announcements and trends that took place at AWS re:Invent this week, but you may not have the time on your calendar to allocate to watching all the sessions.
That’s why we’ve compiled a summary of the biggest takeaways from AWS re:Invent this year, so you can stay in the loop without diverting too much time away from your day job.
Here are the top takeaways from AWS re:Invent 2023 for healthcare.
Key Announcements Overview
The first keynote covered all the major announcements, while the later sessions dove deeper into individual concepts. Here’s a quick summary of what was announced:
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S3 is introducing S3 Express One Zone:
The very first announcement from CEO Adam Selipsky was about a new offering from S3 called S3 Express One Zone, which focuses on storage that needs high performance and low latency for tasks such as machine learning models and fraud detection systems. Whereas their 2019 announcement of S3 Glacier offered a cheaper storage option for Deep Archive content, S3 Express One Zone will address the high-performance space delivering single-digit millisecond data access.
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Introducing Graviton 4:
Graviton 4 will be a significant step up from Graviton 3. It increases computing power by 40% over its predecessor, which delivers better price performance and energy efficiency. In addition, a new initiative with NVIDIA will increase the GPU cluster capacity from 3,200 potential GPUs to up to 20,000, allowing for the provisioning of the computing power of a supercomputer.
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What's New with Amazon Q:
Amazon unveiled its new AI virtual assistant called Amazon Q (Star Trek inspired?), which will apply AI models to various work activities. The functionality of Amazon Q is focused on four functional areas:
- Developers and Builders - Simple language prompts the ability to have an AWS expert by your side at all times, with extensive knowledge of all AWS native services.
- Sales and Marketing - Information from across your corporate echo system, such as regional client reporting, is at your fingertips, and in deep collaboration with Salesforce, sales decisions can be made quickly utilizing customer data.
- Business Intelligence - Amazon Q allows for real-time evaluation of business intelligence which can produce reports at the click of a button that can be customized with a drag-and-drop interface.
- Customer Service - Information can be relayed in real-time to customer service representatives, allowing them to quickly answer questions with data based on client history and needs.
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Amazon Q Code Transformation:
Amazon Q also has a code transformation tool for upgrading older Java scripts. It was announced that a small AWS team upgraded 1,000 different applications in two days using this tool, which sounds impressive at face value.
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Enter Project Kuiper:
Creating a satellite network that will provide high-speed internet access to people around the world, and remote access to AWS resources, the first two satellites of what will become a network of thousands have officially launched.
Key Themes
Along with some key product and feature announcements, various speakers were beating the drum on some consistent themes that tied the whole event together.
AI Means Nothing Without Security
AWS made security a prime and ongoing theme throughout the conference. All AI models are based on internal company data only, with no access to the outside world. This means the risk of sensitive information escaping the company is greatly reduced since the AI model lives within a given AWS account. Significant safeguards also exist in all AWS AI tools regarding access management, ensuring that people can only see information that aligns with their role and access level. For example, a salesperson would never see in-depth accounting information.
Build a Strong Foundation
Although the conference was AI-centric, there was a significant effort to consider the need for more robust resources to take on these projects. From the focus on latency-sensitive storage options to significantly increased computing power, AWS focused heavily on providing the infrastructure needed to reach the high bar that AI needs. Additionally, many of the AI tools presented are designed to ease the creation of AWS resources needed to achieve the greater goals of organizations.
Use AI in Your Business Today
AWS demoed real-time business intelligence reporting with a high level of customization on the fly. This could have a lot of potential for healthcare tech teams who need to quickly generate reports for non-technical teams. Finally, they spoke about the real-time capabilities of serving up information for customer support teams so that they can answer questions in real time and have more intuitive tools.
Final Take
This year’s re:Invent was full of exciting news that will shape the future of healthcare and computing. Now is the beginning of a path that will lead to better and more effective way to improve health outcomes in the future. For more updates like this one, subscribe to our blog below.
