If there is one thing that Tanuja Randery is proud of, it is helping boost economic growth. AWS EMEA’s Vice President and Managing Director has big numbers at the tip of her tongue; the €15.7 (£13.3) billion investment in Spain to 2033 that will help support over 17,500 full-time equivalent jobs annually; the €7.8 billion for a European Sovereign Cloud in Germany; the £8 billion investment planned for the UK over the next five years; and the 31 million people that AWS has upskilled, for free, globally.
These are mighty numbers befitting the $105 billion by run rate colossus that AWS has grown to become. Sitting down with The Stack, Randery – who joined the hyperscaler in 2021 from McKinsey – has reduction as well as expansion on her mind however; that of AWS customers’ cloud bills.
Efficiency remains a big priority for her stakeholders; and asked about how customers are identifying when they have struck the right balance between investing for innovation and ensuring fiscal discipline, she smiles.
“They see it in their EBITDA, and they see it in their OPEX savings. They see it in their run rate costs. They see it in the fact that they're not spending as much CAPEX; because we're doing that for them in our data centers. There is a direct result on the operating margin of companies.”
Companies making the shift to the cloud also “see it [the benefits] in employee productivity; they see it in customer satisfaction; they see it in employee satisfaction; they're able to attract more talent because if you're more digitally ambitious and you've created a more digital-first strategy, you're going to attract new talent,” she says to The Stack.
Randery firmly believes in tech’s ability to fuel economic growth, with AI turbocharging this: “A study commissioned by AWS has shown a 32% increase in adoption [of AI] with European businesses in the past year alone. If that continues, AI adoption could unlock €600 billion in gross value added.
“That would bring the total value to Europe, from cloud and digital and AI technologies to almost €3.4 trillion by 2030,” she says, citing recent AWS research conducted for the company by consultancy Strand Partners.
That’s across sectors and across company sizes. But it also spans the public sector - she notes the potential for AI to transform healthcare and education for example. But how do individual leaders realise that potential for their own organisations? Randery is acutely aware of CEOs’ concerns over what the dizzying rise of technology means for them, and how they can reap the benefits. Based on her regular conversations with customers, she breaks down their concerns into three key questions.
Firstly, they ask themselves: “How do I accelerate the transformation of my business and enable my strategy with technology?”. The second, related, issue is whether they have the digital skills to achieve that technology and business transformation – and “the final big one on their mind is how do we address sustainability issues and their net zero carbon ambitions?”.
AWS can help across all three fronts, she says – and momentum here is being helped by the fact that, in her words, “we're at this fantastic time where the business and technology are working more closely together.”
Giving customers choice
A big focus of many leaders, of course, is exploring the formidable opportunities afforded by generative AI – and doing so efficiently.
Highlighting the investment that AWS has made in its own custom silicon to improve AI performance, Randery emphasises a key component of AWS’s approach to AI: “Our solutions are absolutely rooted in choice.
“We believe choice is critical, which means we make it possible for our customers to leverage any one of those large language models that you have out there. For instance, our customers can use Amazon Bedrock, one of our fully managed services, to access a choice of high-performing foundation models from leading AI companies like AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Mistral AI, Stability AI, and Amazon through a single API.
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“We provide these models on a managed service, secure infrastructure so that their data, which is really critical, does not leave their environment.
“Our investment in training and inference chips allows customers to lower their cost of technology – AND the performance improves,” she adds.
Randery adds: “In fact, across AWS’s services, we've reduced our prices 134 times since AWS launched in 2006, and the reason for that is we believe the cloud should be a more cost effective way for our customers to operate.”
(AWS has also released innovations like its open source Karpenter platform, designed to help users reduce their Kubernetes services costs.)
Building the future sustainably
When it comes to sustainability (environmental as well as financial) Randery points to research from Accenture that shows AWS’s cloud is “up to 4.1 times more energy efficient than an average on-prem data centre.”
That’s a critical difference when the European Energy Directive is going to require many data centre operators to report key efficiency indicators from September. AWS says that it has reached its own goal of matching 100% renewable energy across its operations in 2023 – well ahead of its original plan of 2030 and is also on track to be water positive by 2030, whilst its AWS Graviton chips are 60% more energy efficient than the competition.
Away from emissions, or the balance sheet, she points again to increased customer satisfaction and improved employee productivity and retention of letting them work with the colossal range of unique capabilities AWS now offers. These are critical, given the skills crisis facing all businesses. The EU, after all, is clear that a lack of digital skills is one of the biggest potential brakes on its Digital Decade strategy. SMEs in particular are struggling to find the skilled workers necessary for them to innovate.
See also: The future of Kubernetes at AWS: Slack, Anthropic lead a "Karpenter" love-in
So AWS has committed to train 29 million people around the world by 2025. More than a year ahead of schedule, AWS has surpassed this ambitious goal, having helped more than 31 million learners across 200 countries and territories build their cloud skills through its free training initiatives. “These are free through various programs, through our online programs, through working with universities, through working with young children in school, through our AWS re/Start workforce development training program for unemployed and underemployed people.”
“We're working a lot with our customers to train up their engineers and certify them” she adds, because while “top down leadership” is critical to realising that €3.4 trillion opportunity, it is not enough: “You need talent that's hungry, that wants to build, that wants to reinvent” and to give them “tools and mechanisms that allow them to be empowered.”
“I am super committed to this, by the way” she says passionately, “and there's more to do. This (a lack of skills) is the biggest blocker to delivering innovation and growth. We'll continue to invest in those things in order for us to be able to deliver for our customers and partners.”
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