AWS Summit London 2024: All the news and updates live

Crowds are pouring into the ExCel now, and there's certainly a real buzz around the conference center ahead of the opening keynote session. 

Key talking points to look out for today will likely be ongoing infrastructure expansion for AWS in the UK. The cloud computing giant has invested heavily in the country over the last two years alongside counterparts such as Microsoft and Google Cloud. 

There's not been much movement on this front over the last few months, however, so attendees and customers will no doubt be keen to hear about any developments during the opening session. 

It's an impressive-looking stage for AWS Summit London 2024, fit with booming speakers and festival-style lighting, and the crowds are flooding in eagerly ahead of the day’s keynotes. 

While we wait, why not check out some of our recent coverage on AWS here: 

• AWS ups its cost-visibility game with free-to-use offering for Kubernetes clusters

• AWS fined $525 million after US court rules Amazon S3 storage, DynamoDB services infringed patents

AWS has gone all out for London this year with this keynote banner! 

AWS Summit is kicking off with a bang and an exciting visual display, chocked full of forward-looking taglines - “let’s build what’s next” is the video's parting message. First up is Tanuja Randery, Managing Director of EMEA at AWS as…a digital avatar? 

The real Randery eventually makes an appearance to spirited claps and cheers, going on to talk about what’s in store for the day. The pace of innovation is key for Randery it seems, and she also takes a moment to shout out the UK: 

“We have invested 3 billion to build and operate data centers in the UK” Tandery said proudly. 

Amazon Bedrock is coming to the London region

The first big announcement is that Amazon Bedrock is coming to the London region with the promise of unlocking great benefits for UK businesses. Tandery says she wants every UK business to have the opportunity to compete on the world stage as part of this latest announcement. 

Climate and digital skills

Tandery touches on issues of climate, talking up the benefits of the cloud for any business that wants to go green. Similarly, she references the importance of digital skills, speaking about how AWS is helping train IT workers. 

AWS Restart, for example, is a twelve-week training program that Tandery refers it, citing a particular student who excelled as part of the program. 

AWS looks like it wants to make its mark in the UK as a cloud provider for the future. 

Next up is Francessca Vasquez, Vice President of Professional Services at the firm. She takes us back in time, going over some of the most revolutionary inventions of human history, building to the current advents of cloud and generative AI. 

Mention of Amazon's origins as an online retailer is a welcome reminder of how far the company has come, with Vasquez describing AWS as a “pioneer of the cloud”.

We have enabled customers to “transform the world around us,” she says, referring to some of the big household names reliant on AWS like Netflix and Moderna.

“We are on the precipice of another tectonic change”

Generative AI had to get a mention of course, as Vasquez moves on to talking about how the new technology will shape a new world. 

She mentions the cost savings of Lonely Planet, which has been using Anthropic on Amazon Bedrock for its itinerary processing, and some of the scientific applications of AWS’ products in other companies. 

Vasquez now invites Philip Belamant, Co-Founder and CEO of Zilch, to the stage to talk about the company's journey with AWS, who begins by talking about all the money wasted when paying with credit. 

This is the world’s first “AD-Subsidized-Payments-Network”

He talks about Zilch’s mission, to free up money for customers through credit purchases. By connecting lending with ad networks, customers can find companies that are willing to offer better credit in terms of purchases.

“The customer has taken out a line of credit and has paid zero interest and zero fees,” he says. 

This is the world’s first “AD-Subsidized-Payments-Network” the Zilch co-founder says. 

And, if you hadn’t guessed, this platform is built on AWS, though Zilch is planning to deepen its relationship with AWS in the pursuit of new AI use cases, such as “buyer-intent prediction”. 

Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Bedrock are at the heart of this announcement.

Now Vasquez is back on the stage, again talking about generative AI and some of the pain points that AWS customers have had in adopting the technology. She talks about the “generative AI stack” at the firm and the provisions AWS has for customers to start taking advantage of AI. 

While many in the room may not be building foundation models, she says, AWS is making sure that access to the power of these models is possible. AWS is also, apparently, the “best place to run GPUs in the cloud”. 

“We’re investing the middle layer of the stack”

AWS has been investing in Bedrock to provide users with an effective middle ground for AI use and deployment. Bedrock, as a fully managed service, provides users with ease and consistency of access to generative AI. 

“No one model will rule them all,” Vasquez says, explaining why AWS’ mission is so important in terms of bringing all the generative AI possibilities to anyone who needs them. 

Good data = Good AI

This is key, Vasquez says, as effective generative AI tools rely on huge and well organized pools of data to be fully utilized. 

To illustrate this point, Vasquez plays a video about Adobe, which apparently has an excellent understanding of its data as a company. The key to transformation is data, Vasquez reiterates. 

“You can now use generative on AWS” to have a transformative effect, Vasquez says.

Next up, it's Pieter Jordaan, CIO at TUI, up on the stage to talk about how AWS helped the travel firm up its generative AI game. 

“The travel industry is incredibly dynamic,” Jordaan says. It requires firms to be adaptive - during COVID-19, for example, companies need to turn down their operations.

TUI was different, though. During COVID-19, Jordaan says, TUI went all-in on AWS in an overhaul of a cloud-native platform, amongst other things. 

“We increased our model deployment on Amazon SageMaker by 1000% in one year,” he says. 

AWS was TUI’s backbone for generative AI adoption

Using Bedrock to manage foundation models, TUI was able to use generative AI to create effective, SEO-focused content for personalized customer experiences. Amazon Bedrock gave us the “enterprise-ready” platform we needed to scale generative AI, Jordaan says. 

Jordaan says TUI is also rolling out Amazon Q to its developers to increase efficiency. 

Back to Vasquez who’s got a bit more to say about generative AI. She talks about how customers want AI with speed and ease and without machine learning expertise.

Que Amazon Q, AWS’ generative AI-powered assistant specifically designed to help out at every stage of the development lifecycle.

Vasquez talks the audience through some practical use cases, demonstrating via a visual representation on the on-stage screen. 

It provides a good balance between “speed and efficiency”, she says, making generative AI use simple for even those who lack training in the technology. Amazon certainly seems focused on giving Github Copilot a run for its money, as well as Gemini Code Assist.

Q is designed to deliver “more accurate and relevant results” and, with a few lines of code, retrieval augmented generation (RAG) knowledge bases can be easily accessed. A customer such as BT Group is seeing notable improvements from the use of Amazon Q already, according to Vasquez. 

“There has never been a better time to be a builder”

This is a breakthrough moment in technology, Vasquez reiterates, and those building on AWS are part of the exciting future that all this new technology promises. She finishes the keynote with an inspiring question: 

“What magic will you go off and build?”

And on that note, the keynote is over and crowds mill out of the auditorium to go and soak up the rest of AWS Summit London 2024.