‘Amazon Bedrock brings Gen AI capabilities closer to Indian businesses’: Guru Bala from AWS | Technology News

During the wide-ranging interview, Bala explained that Amazon Bedrock is bringing the power of large language models (LLMs) and generative AI closer to customers in India. According to him, this localised availability means faster processing times and lower latency for applications built on the platform.

“What this means for our customers is that they will be able to access Amazon Bedrock as a platform from our Mumbai region, which will help them with faster processing time of these generative AI applications, as well as helping them get outputs at a much faster pace,” Bala said. “So increasing the responsiveness of generative AI applications – this is what it means to our customers.”

Indian companies and Amazon Bedrock

During the interview, Bala underscored some examples of how Indian businesses across industries such as media, insurance, technology services, automotive, and health/wellness were already using the Amazon Bedrock platform to enhance customer experience and boost productivity.

He cited Happyfox, an enterprise help desk solution provider, that was able to automatically answer over 40 per cent of customer queries after integrating generative AI models from Amazon Bedrock. Bala said the integration led to faster response times and better customer satisfaction along with a 20 per cent increase in agent productivity. This is because the AI assisted in providing better answers.  

Another example he cited is L&T Technology Services offering engineering services to automotive manufacturers as they transition to software-backed vehicles. Bala said that by building applications on Amazon Bedrock, L&T was able to accelerate application development cycles and create virtual testing environments in the cloud, ultimately reducing the time-to-market. “Companies are innovatively adopting generative AI for better customer experience, better productivity, and reimagining how they work by leveraging AI-assisted tools and technologies,” Bala said.

Democratising AI

Bala asserted that AWS is committed to democratising AI and making generative AI applicable across businesses of all sizes – from enterprises to startups. According to him, the Amazon Bedrock platform aims to simplify what is at present a complex technology by offering LLMs through easy-to-navigate APIs (Application Programming Interface).

“We offered these LLMs as an API to our customers – that’s the easiest and fastest way where they don’t need to worry about taking an LLM, deploying it on a GPU, and then exposing it as an API. All of this heavy lifting, we take away from our customers,” Bala explained.

When asked about adoption trends in the Indian market, Bala said that generative AI has become a boardroom conversation, with leadership teams across companies actively exploring how to integrate these capabilities into their products and services.

“Every organisation is now looking to innovate with generative AI so that they are able to offer better customer experience,” he said. “And when they have to do this, everyone is in the race to adopt generative AI.”

Support from AWS

To support businesses on this adoption journey, AWS offers resources like the AI Ready programme to upskill professionals, partnerships with companies like Shellkode to provide solution-building expertise, and innovation workshops to help identify relevant use cases.

Bala said that AWS provides standard support mechanisms for all its IT services, including generative AI services such as Amazon Bedrock, Amazon SageMaker, and Amazon Q. These services all fall under the usual umbrella of AWS support.

When asked if AI will take away jobs, Bala reassured that concerns around AI replacing human workers are unfounded, stating “AI will always be a great assistant to humans.” He shared an example from a fintech customer where AI drafts email responses by fetching data from internal systems, but human agents still review and approve the outputs, leading to significant productivity gains.