Generative AI Service Amazon Bedrock Now Available in AWS Sydney Region
Amazon Bedrock gives organisations across Australia the ability to build and scale generative AI applications
Westpac, Lonely Planet, Swann, and Lawpath are among customers welcoming the launch
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA—APRIL 10, 2024— Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, today announced Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that makes it easy for customers to find and access high-performing models for their specific use case and delivers powerful capabilities to build and scale generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications, is now generally available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region.
To help customers globally to quickly take advantage of generative AI, Amazon Bedrock became generally available to all customers worldwide through select AWS Regions in 2023. The general availability of Amazon Bedrock in the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region will further support customers across the country, including public sector organisations and companies in regulated industries, to innovate with generative AI and provide more choice on where they can run and store generative AI applications. Deploying generative AI workloads closer to end users will also help customers with low latency needs. Low latency is especially important for generative AI applications in delivering faster processing and response times, which are essential for AI tasks like on-the-fly content generation, interactive user experiences, and real-time conversational insights.
Organisations across Australia are using generative AI for a wide variety of use cases, from driving productivity gains, creating innovative user experiences, to reimagining work. Amazon Bedrock is a fully managed service, which offers customers a selection of high-performing models and powerful model customisation capabilities, built with enterprise-grade security and privacy. Additionally, AWS provides customers with the tools, resources, and training they need to advance responsible and secure innovation in generative AI. Starting today, customers can now access the latest generation of models including Amazon Titan (Text Lite, Text Express, Multi-modal Embeddings), Cohere (Embeddings English, Embeddings Multi-lingual), Anthropic (Claude 3 Haiku, Claude 3 Sonnet), and Mistral (Mistral 7B, Mistral 8x7B, Mistral Large).
"We are in the midst of one of the biggest technology transformations since the invention of the cloud. This year, we will see customers and partners move from rapid generative AI experimentation to scalable, secure, and cost-effective production,” said Rianne Van Veldhuizen, managing director of Australia and New Zealand at AWS. “Our planned $13.2 billion investment in our infrastructure in the nation by 2027 will provide our customers with access to our generative AI services including Amazon Bedrock. With Amazon Bedrock now available in the AWS Sydney Region, we’re giving customers even greater choice in where they run and train their generative AI workloads, supporting customers in highly regulated industries and those with low latency preferences to accelerate innovation, address business challenges, and help strengthen the nation's digital economy through this transformative technology. For example, banks could deploy generative AI assistants to support customer service representatives with real-time responses and recommended actions, drawing on the individual customer’s financial goals and other contextual criteria, to empower bank staff to enhance the customer experience.”
AWS Customers and Partners innovating using generative AI
Westpac is Australia's oldest bank and company and one of four major banking organisations in Australia that provides a broad range of consumer, business, and institutional banking and wealth management services through a portfolio of financial services brands and businesses. “At Westpac, we are focused on being our customers' number one partner through life and transforming our technology for our people and our customers,” said David Walker, chief technology officer at Westpac. “To support this, we’re testing a range of generative AI services and capabilities, including Amazon Bedrock, and applying these to real world use cases that can significantly reduce paperwork, double-handling and deliver better, faster outcomes for customers. For example, we’re currently testing customer feedback analysis to improve service delivery and identifying ways to speed up lending processes. The work we’re doing with AWS is part of our plans to further drive generative AI-powered innovation safely and securely.”
Since starting in Australia nearly 50 years ago, Lonely Planet has been committed to helping people experience the joy of travel. “We are developing a generative AI solution using AWS to help customers plan epic trips and create life-changing experiences with personalised travel itineraries,” said Chris Whyde, Senior vice president of Engineering and Data Science at Lonely Planet. “By building with Claude on Amazon Bedrock, we reduced itinerary generation costs by nearly 80% percent when we quickly created a scalable, secure AI platform that can organise our book content in minutes to deliver cohesive, highly accurate travel recommendations. Now we can repackage and personalise our content in various ways on our digital platforms, based on customer preference, all while highlighting trusted local voices.”
Lawpath is an online legal platform that helps over 400,000 Australians create legal documents, manage compliance, and connect with lawyers on demand. “We already trust AWS as the foundation for our business, and wanted to explore generative AI as the next phase in our innovation,” said Dom Woolrych, Chief Executive Officer at Lawpath. “We recently launched Lawpath AI using Anthropic Claude on Amazon Bedrock to help small businesses understand complex legal documents with ease and empower them to make informed decisions for their business. With Amazon Bedrock, we have improved self-service options for our customers, driving a 25% reduction in the volume of questions directed to our customer service agents.”
Swann is a global leader in security monitoring, consumer electronics, and security-centric solutions for the smart homes and businesses of today and tomorrow. “Swann is committed to pushing the boundaries of innovation to deliver cutting-edge security solutions that prioritise customer safety and peace of mind,” said Alex Talevski, chief executive officer of Swann. “Next month, selected Swann products in Australia will be powered by Amazon Bedrock and Anthropic’s Claude 3 Haiku model through our upcoming Swann HomeShield service. The feature functions as an intelligent virtual housemate so when a visitor approaches the house, HomeShield can greet them in a way that emulates an interaction with a person residing in the home. When Claude 3 Haiku launched on Amazon Bedrock, we switched from Claude 2.1 in a couple of hours, and the speed of responses is 30% faster and significantly more accurate. We’re excited Amazon Bedrock is now available in the AWS Sydney Region as it will help reduce the latency of responses further to facilitate smoother and more natural conversation flows.”
Supporting upskilling and entrepreneurship in generative AI
Across Australia, AWS is making investments in partner support programs, startup accelerators, and Large Language Model (LLM) development programs designed to make it even easier for local organisations to build specialised generative AI applications. This includes initiatives such as the recently launched AWS Builder Studio in Melbourne to help customers across the Asia Pacific Japan region accelerate the development of industry-specific solutions, and the AWS Generative AI Accelerator, aimed at giving local startups support and resources needed to scale.
Based on the recent AWS-commissioned study, titled “Accelerating AI Skills: Preparing the Australia Workforce for Jobs of the Future”, 77% of workers in Australia indicated an interest in developing AI skills to accelerate their careers. AWS has trained 400,000 people across Australia on cloud skills since 2017. However, with the rapid adoption of cloud-enabled technologies like AI, more needs to be done to upskill the workforce at scale so organisations can innovate and grow in an AI-driven future. In November 2023, Amazon launched the AI Ready initiative that complements AWS’s commitment to provide free cloud computing skills training to 29 million individuals globally by 2025. Through AI Ready, AWS now offers a suite of free AI and generative AI training courses, aligned to both technical and non-technical roles, so that anyone can build AI skills.
AWS has a long-term commitment to customers and local communities in Australia. Since 2012, AWS has invested more than AU$9.1 billion in the country since the launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region. AWS launched the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region in 2023 and also announced plans to invest more than AU$13.2 billion in local infrastructure, supporting more than 11,000 jobs annually by 2027. These investments will accelerate innovation and drive economic growth and are estimated to contribute AU$35 billion to Australia’s gross domestic product by 2027. AWS infrastructure creates positive ripple effects across the economy, including in digital skills training and certification.
About Amazon Web Services
Since 2006, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud. AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any workload, and it now has more than 240 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, media, and application development, deployment, and management from 105 Availability Zones within 33 geographic regions, with announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.