Ben Schreiner, the head of business innovation for small and medium-size businesses (SMB) at Amazon Web Services (AWS), would like to point out that generative AI isn’t new.
“We’ve had generative AI services for a very long time,” Schreiner told IT Brew, pointing to Alexa, various Amazon chatbots, and a tool called Polly that uses AI to turn text into speech.
But just because generative AI has been around for a while, doesn’t mean Schreiner isn’t excited about its potential right now, especially for SMBs. “The reason this is disruptive,” says Schreiner, is that “it’s faster, it’s more accurate, and allows the companies and the providers to be more effective and efficient, and provides peace of mind on the compliance side of things.”
Schreiner recently spoke with IT Brew about current SMB cloud trends, including the impact of generative AI.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What are some of the trends you’re seeing right now with SMBs and the cloud?
The current economic uncertainty has led a lot of companies to look for ways to save money. And the cloud offers an alternative to where you only pay for what you use, and that’s very attractive to those that are tight on budget or aren’t clear [about] what the future holds.
Most companies start with just disaster recovery. And backing up is the common starting point. But once they get confidence and see what can be done, we see them accelerating and starting to transition more and more of their business applications and critical functions to the cloud. It provides them more peace of mind.
And so we see a trend in adoption of the cloud for cost, better security and [better] agility. [Agility] is probably the one I’m most interested in. Because I think it’s the one that gives proprietors that competitive edge or the ability to innovate and respond to their customers’ changing needs. And that’s been, again harder in the old paradigm for small and medium businesses to do.
What do you hear most from customers?
Many of the organizations that I’ve talked to know they have a lot of data, but admit that they’re not leveraging it in the way they wish they could either because it’s difficult (the data is spread out all over the place), they don’t have real good controls over it, or they don’t know how to do it.
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We did a survey that has some really good data nuggets for you. The one I like is 90% of the respondents said that they’re modernizing their approach to data management, which is great, right? But only 42% (less than half ) are using it to drive growth. To me, that screams a huge opportunity, obviously, for the other 58% to take the data that they have, and use it to their advantage.
The other trend is obviously Gen AI—everybody and their dog wants to talk about that. And I’ll just be super honest. For me in the SMB space, I love the excitement, I’m glad it opened people’s eyes to what’s possible. But we need to kind of take a cautious step backward and go, all right, it actually all starts with your data. And if you don’t have your data in order; if you don’t have a data strategy that the models can leverage, then it’s the old adage: garbage in, garbage out, and nobody wants that.
Regarding generative AI, so you’re saying lots of customers are coming to you now saying, I want this? What are some of the biggest misconceptions that they have about the power of generative AI?
That it’s magic. Let’s just start with that. It’s not magic. It’s math. And a lot of math. I’m super excited about what AWS is able to do at our scale. I’m super excited about our history with AI and machine learning. And I’m excited about the interest in generative AI. And what I encourage people to do is to think about what problem do you want to solve. And if we can zero in on a use case, that is the easiest way to make sure you solve that problem.