[The content of this article has been produced by our advertising partner.]
Recognising the transformative power of AI in supercharging business operations, Amazon Web Services (AWS) brought the ‘AWS TechFest: AI for Every Business’ back to Hong Kong once again on September 3rd, 2024, welcoming over 1000 AI enthusiasts, trained over 300 and 20 partners for a full-day event of immersive learning, with the goal to assist companies to cut down unnecessary and manual tasks to refocus efforts and double down on growth.
Apart from expert-led keynote speeches sharing latest trends on business transformation through accelerated AI adoption, there were three different tracks with interactive sessions and self-paced labs for participants to attend based on their expertise or interests. The builder track was aimed at solution builders for pretraining large language models (LLMs) and enhancing productivity, empowering talented individuals in the rapidly evolving AI field. Start-ups and independent software vendors were given the opportunity to connect with investors through tailored matchmaking sessions, while addressing industry challenges such as fundraising and regulations. There were dedicated sessions for marketers, developers, as well as PR and HR practitioners, with an industry-specific guided tour to learn real-world applications. More importantly, participants experienced one-of-a-kind demos for Amazon SageMaker, Agentic LLM and more next-generation applications, while receiving tips for AWS Certification Exams through training sessions and workshops.
AWS TechFest not only served as a testing playground for ambitious AI novices and goal-oriented companies looking to venture into the AI world, shining a light on cutting-edge solutions while granting space for trial and experimentation, client success stories also took centre stage to showcase the effectiveness of AI adoption in all aspects and stages of business. First-hand experiences from partners revealed invaluable insights and demonstrated best practices for companies of different scales to start embracing change and reimagine operations with the help of technology. For example, etnet, a leading local financial publication, achieved significant digital transformation goals, particularly in news research and production, with the implementation of Amazon Bedrock.
“Following direct integration into our company’s existing content management system, leading AI models could be accessed in a single API call with high-volume, on-demand requests completed in seconds. Amazon Bedrock’s powerful AI-driven information extraction and summarisation capabilities resulted in heightened accuracy, enhanced data quality and close to a 70% jump in productivity all at once. By processing hundreds and thousands of documents per month to extract and present key information based on user requirement, our team delivered faster turnaround, which is essential to any news publication. The fully managed service also offered a broad range of models for us to hand pick the best suited variant, while retaining the option to fine-tune specific language models for financial terminology and nuances, truly proving itself as the easiest way to build and scale generative AI applications with LLMs,” noted Mr. Andrew Lai, Product Director of etnet.
Furthermore, experienced AI experts echoed the benefits of integrating AWS GenAI solutions in respective business operations. Datax Limited, a local provider of over 30 automation solutions in relation to speech recognition, NLP and OCR, highlighted that in collaboration with AWS helped its subsidiary AI subtitling platform Subanana cut down overall IT infrastructure costs by 10 to 20%. The pay-as-you-go model was particularly welcomed as it eliminated the need for upfront hardware investments and reduced maintenance costs, whilst providing extra cost management tools to identify inefficiencies and further optimise budgeting and spending.