AWS AI Services: Everything You Need to Know
With Artificial intelligence (AI) stories being all over the news these days, you may wonder where AWS AI fits in (if at all) within your organization’s tech stack. AI’s meteoric rise in popularity and use doesn’t mean everyone has adopted this technology though. In fact, many people do not have a full understanding of AI technology or how it can benefit them and their businesses.
Companies in many industries are applying AI technologies to everything from helping doctors diagnose diseases to helping banks and credit card companies identify fraudulent transactions. AI even helps email systems filter out spam and phishing emails. That said, any specific AI application today can do only the thing it was designed for, and nothing else.
In this article, we discuss what AI is, various ways that the technology is being used in the enterprise, and how ERPA (an AWS Advanced Consulting partner) leverages the AWS AI support tools to help our clients realize a competitive edge.
Let’s take a closer look at what AI is (and isn’t), and how it’s helping businesses enhance their analytics and other digital capabilities.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) Explained
At a high level, AI is any technology that is designed to emulate, at some scale, the workings of a biological brain. Most modern AI technologies are based on artificial neural networks (ANNs), whose principle of operation resembles that of biological neurons.
In an ANN, the “neurons” (which are objects modeled in code) are connected to other neurons. Neurons are commonly organized into “layers,” with one or more neurons in each layer. An ANN will typically have an input layer, which ingests the data the ANN is designed to analyze; an output layer, which presents the results of the ANN’s analysis; and any number of intermediate (or “hidden”) layers.
Signals propagate from the input layer to the output layer according to mathematical relationships. Each neuron “fires” a signal to one or more neurons in the next layer (or previous one, in some designs) according to a specific rule regarding its inputs.
These rules are what determines how an ANN comes up with its answer (for example, whether a given image contains a dog). ANNs “learn” by being fed immense amounts of annotated data. The rules are tweaked during the iterations of this training phase until the ANN can reliably get the “right” answer for a given input.
Tweaking the rules by hand would be a tedious task that would take close to forever, so most ANNs contain logic to tweak their own rules. That is, they “learn” on their own. Thus, computer scientists call it “machine learning.”
AWS AI Machine Learning for Your Business
Several high-profile AI applications have made news headlines; these include IBM’s Watson computer, which defeated human competitors in the Jeopardy! game show; however, most AI applications work behind the scenes to perform various tasks.
The same goes for AWS AI, which is used in multiple fields and industries with multiple capabilities. Some examples include:
AWS AI for Healthcare and Life Sciences
Analytical tools are increasingly using AI to analyze unstructured text data, such as online reviews, blog posts, and other text content to understand market trends, customer sentiment, and other important metrics. AI-based data analysis is one of the most common uses of the technology for ERPA clients.
AWS AI in Education
In education, a growing body of education technology solutions are using AI to streamline the education process with personalized learning plans, chatbot-based tutors, and automation of tasks such as grading papers, quizzes, and tests.
Streaming Services
Online services such as Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon use AI to make recommendations on the basis of what you viewed, listened to, or purchased in the past.
Social Media
Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms use AI to target advertising messages to those users most likely to be interested.
Customer Service
Customer service teams use AI applications such as chatbots for first contact with customers. These bots can often help customers with common questions or issues without involving human agents at all. This reduces the call volume for the human agents and eliminates waiting on hold for the customers.
AWS AI Services Provided by ERPA
Tens of thousands of companies around the world are leveraging AWS AI solutions with its range of products that help their customers design, build, train, test, and deploy AI-based solutions for a wide range of business applications. With help from partners like ERPA, AI-based solutions can be applied to your company too, such as:
Amazon Comprehend
AWS Comprehend can automatically extract targeted text from electronic documents, scanned images, and even handwriting, and derive meaning from unstructured text using natural-language processing.
Amazon Comprehend Medical
AWS Comprehend Medical is a Software As a Service (SaaS) HIPAA compliant natural language processing (NLP) service for healthcare providers. Using AI it can extract health information data like prescriptions, medical bills, medical reports, and more.
Amazon Lex for AI Chatbots
AWS Lex allows you to build chatbots with conversational AI that reduces your overhead costs while delivering a smart automated live chat experience.
Amazon Polly
AWS Polly is an AI-powered cloud service text to speech conversion service available in over thirty one different languages and accents.
Amazon Rekognition
AWS Rekognition enables applications to analyze images and videos and automate manufacturing quality inspections.
Amazon Textract
AWS Textract can automatically extract targeted text from electronic documents, scanned images, and even handwriting, and derive meaning from unstructured text using natural-language processing.
Getting Started with ERPA + AWS AI
As you might imagine, developing and training an AI algorithm requires two resources that are often tightly limited in on-premise IT infrastructure: computing and data storage. The vast amounts of data and high computational demands of algorithm training mean that cloud-based services such as AWS are much better suited to the job.
ERPA has been innovating with AWS for many years, helping our clients address their AI needs by using AWS tools so they can reap the benefits of the resulting competitive advantage. If you have a business problem that might be addressed by an appropriate AI-based solution, contact ERPA today.
Our AWS AI service experts can work with you to understand the problem and recommend the best mix of AWS services and AI support products to bring your AI ideas to life.
