GenAI to help streamline unstructured public sector data in India: Top AWS executive

Generative AI, with a right selection of Cloud, has the true potential to streamline a lot of unstructured data that's sitting in silos in public sector organisations globally, including India, a top AWS executive said here on Tuesday.

Dave Levy, Vice President of AWS Worldwide Public Sector, told IANS during the AWS re:Invent 2023 conference that there are early days for GenAI, particularly with the public sector, as organisations start to think about what are the use cases while some are already doing a few things with respect to GenAI that are very promising and very exciting.

“We are trying to understand what are going to be various applications of generative AI -- How is it going to benefit citizens, how can we help improve research, how can decision makers make better decisions with data with respect to GenAI," Levy said.

Stressing that there are a lot of opportunities in the Indian public sector, particularly with healthcare, where generative AI can help deliver results to patients faster.

“We have examples of customers that are able to produce discharge reports faster to free up physicians, to allow them to work with patients and care for patients and do things so that they're not bogged down in the administrative work,” Levy told IANS.

AI healthtech startup Hoppr has just announced the launch of Grace, a multi-modal foundation model for medical imaging, powered by AWS.

Grace is a first-of-its-kind B2B foundation model that enables image-to-image and text-to-image learning across all medical imaging modalities, including X-rays, CTs, MRIs, and echocardiograms.

According to Levy, GenAI has the potential to transform citizen experiences, create new applications never seen before, and help organisations and people reach new levels of productivity and more.

On the education front, he said that AWS has a big ed-tech business in India.

“The country has a great foundation for us to serve the customers globally. The Indian industry continues to innovate which is a great opportunity for us,” said Levy, who worked for Apple for 12 years and led teams that helped federal, state and local governments adopt innovative mobile technologies.

Today, AWS serves over 7,500 government agencies, over 14,000 academic institutions and over 85,000 nonprofit organisations worldwide.

“They can run their own foundational model or they can run a model that Amazon has, or they can have access to third-party models. And so we heard that loud and clear from customers as they're moving into this generative AI world that those are things that are interesting to them and they want a partner who has security in mind first,” Levy explained.

According to him, if governments globally are going to get to the promise of generative AI, they're going to have to move to the cloud.

“Every country is at a different stage of digital transformation. The innovation that's happened in India and the Indian government has been really at a good pace,” Levy told IANS.

AWS, the Cloud arm of e-commerce giant Amazon, in May this year announced plans to invest Rs 1,05,600 crore ($12.7 billion) into cloud infrastructure in India by 2030 to meet growing customer demand for cloud services in the country.

“The theme of having unstructured data sitting in silos, and governments wanting to bring that data to a place where it's usable for them, where they can get insights from it, where they can use the data to help provide better services for their citizens, is going to be the key factor for their digital transformation,” the AWS executive noted.