AWS Summit highlights AI transformation and accelerating innovation [VIDEO]
Artificial Intelligence (AI) was a key topic, driving industry transformation and accelerating innovation, while building capabilities that create long-term value for Africa and South Africa’s economies, among several discussions at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Summit in Johannesburg.
The event at the Sandton Convention Centre was packed to capacity with at least 10,000 people in attendance listening to industry experts and CEO of some of South Africa’s top companies about how they use technology to make their business tick like a fine-tuned Swiss watch.
Exhibition
Visitors also got the opportunity to sharpen their technical skills during workshops and learning how to turn innovative ideas into enterprise-ready solutions and drive productivity gains with generative AI on AWS.
There were also about 40 AWS partners exhibiting at the event.
Partnerships
During the keynote address, Willem Visser, Vice President of Amazon EC2, spoke about how AWS has the largest private network, has a partnership with Nvidia, is building a custom CPU, Graviton and an Amazon Bedrock, managed GenAI service.
“We have the building blocks to build anything you can imagine. With these building blocks, we’ve seen you build remarkable things. Improving how we heal people and the planet, transforming finance, even helping the blind see.
“Inventions made possible because of these AWS building blocks. This idea of building blocks is fundamental to how we invent a database. We build services that do our job really well, and then we make it easy for you to combine them. But there are some things that are so fundamental that have to be part of anything that you do, and for us, that’s security and internet access,” Visser said.
Faizel Patel
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Willem Visser, Vice President of Amazon EC2, Dr. Leila Fourier, Group CEO of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and Azhar Said, Chief Data Officer at Capitec shared valuable insights about how AWS and their partnership. #AWSSummitJohannesburg @TheCitizen_News pic.twitter.com/no3BkRr50y
JSE
Dr. Leila Fourier, Group CEO of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) said the stock exchange uses AWS and that they are working on becoming an infrastructure provider with other African markets
Fourier added that the JSE boasts a 99.4% uptime.
“We are tackling generative AI with a couple of very interesting use cases. We are using generative AI to narrow generic financial statements and translate those very rapidly, and to pair them to our listing requirements and determine whether there are any gaps between listing requirements.”
Capitec
Azhar Said, Chief Data Officer at Capitec, said they run a hybrid infrastructure on local servers and AWS.
“On a monthly basis, we generate over one million AI views. Today, we have AI systems that analysts can chat with to get insight from our data.”
Said rattled off some of the bank’s stats, saying they record 1.5 terabytes of records per month, process 595 million card transactions and 3.8 billion electronic payments a year and 15,000 card payments per minute.
AI
After the keynote addresses, visitors experience the AWS Gen AI Zone with hands-on live demos showcasing how generative AI can transform businesses, including exploring the latest AI innovations to boost productivity with AWS solutions.
Overall, the AWS summit was a huge success and a highly informative tech space to highlight innovation and technology that is forever evolving at a furious pace.
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