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AWS touts AI building blocks as key to customer innovation
At the recent AWS Summit in Singapore, company executives and customers showcased how cloud and artificial intelligence are enabling organisations to scale, transform and tackle business challenges
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is betting on cloud “building blocks” to empower the next wave of digital transformation, with generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) positioned as a foundational component as crucial as compute and storage.
During a keynote at the recent AWS Summit in Singapore, Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, vice-president of technology at AWS, laid out a vision where accessible, scalable and secure cloud services enable developers and businesses to turn imagination into reality.
“What if you could build anything that you imagine?” said Bukovec. “At AWS, we give you the building blocks to build anything … and with them, we’ve seen you build remarkable things.”
A significant part of Bukovec’s address was focused on the suite of tools designed to make GenAI more powerful and accessible. These include EC2 p6 instances featuring Nvidia’s Blackwell chips and AWS’s custom silicon, including the fourth-generation Graviton processor and the Trainium 2 AI chip, which she claimed offers up to four times faster performance for training AI models compared to its predecessor.
These advancements, she noted, are already “changing the economics of AI”, with partners like Anthropic using the hardware to drastically cut training costs for its Claude foundation models.
The centrepiece of AWS’s strategy is Amazon Bedrock, a platform designed to make it easier to develop GenAI applications. Bukovec said the platform not only offers a choice of AI models, but also the ability to customise models with proprietary data using retrieval augmented generation (RAG), along with the integration of automated reasoning into Bedrock Guardrails.
Customers put AI building blocks to the test
To underscore the real-world impact of this strategy, AWS highlighted several high-profile customers on stage. Australia-based global design platform Canva, which serves over 220 million people monthly, relies on AWS to power its global infrastructure and ambitious AI-driven features as it aims for one billion users.
“We can’t empower the world to design if our platform and our tool isn’t reliable,” Canva noted in a video message. “Using AWS ensures that we’ve got all of the right baseline capabilities available that are secure, reliable, available when we need it.”
Singapore-based gaming hardware giant Razer is also leveraging AWS as it pivots towards AI-powered gaming services. Li Meng Lee, Razer’s chief strategy officer, introduced a new AI developer ecosystem, highlighting tools like the Razer Game Assistant – first shown as Project Ava at CES 2025 – which offers real-time coaching to gamers.
Another tool, Quality Assurance (QA) Companion, uses AI to detect bugs, performance issues and other QA work that can consume up to 30% of a game’s development budget. “QA companion dramatically reduces time to market, improves game quality, reducing QA time by 50%,” said Lee, adding that the tool is being tested by major gaming studios and will be available in the AWS Marketplace.
In a local example, Ong Chen Hui, assistant chief executive at Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority, detailed a collaboration with the Singapore Academy of Law to create GPT-Legal. The AI tool tackles the monumental task of summarising over 15,000 court judgments to accelerate legal research. Ong said the model was fine-tuned on Singapore’s unique legal context and incorporates a suite of safety features to combat AI hallucinations, including a 90% fact-check score requirement.
“Our system uses similarity highlighting to show users exactly where each summary paragraph originates from and also flags weakly substantiated paragraphs and potentially hallucinated entities,” said Ong, who credited AWS’s infrastructure and GenAI expertise as instrumental in bringing the tool to life.
Read more about cloud in APAC
- Singapore’s FairPrice Group and Google Cloud team up to embed the latest cloud and AI technologies across its retail touchpoints, as part of efforts to improve customer experience and retail operations.
- Allianz PNB Life implements a cloud-based health insurance policy management system from DXC Technology to reduce policy issuance times and speed up product launches.
- Cyber security experts urge organisations to define clear objectives, understand shared security models and implement strong data governance when migrating workloads to the cloud.
- OCBC Bank rolls out a GenAI chatbot powered by Azure OpenAI to assist employees with writing, research and idea generation.
