AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog

AWS re:Invent 2024 Recap: New Generative AI Competency Partners and Updated Resources in the Generative AI Center of Excellence

By Chris Dally, WW Head, Generative AI & ML Specialized Partners – AWS
By Jacob Newton-Gladstein, WW Head, Generative AI Center of Excellence – AWS

With re:Invent 2024 in the books, one thing is clear: generative AI remains top of mind for AWS Partners and customers and the pace of innovation is only accelerating. From announcing new Nova foundation models for Amazon Bedrock to the next generation of Amazon SageMaker, there were was no shortage of new services and features for AWS Partners to learn about.

In this blog, we’ll cover key announcements from re:Invent and how AWS Partners can prepare themselves to talk to customers about these announcements. We’ll also highlight the latest wave of AWS Generative AI Competency Partners and how they’re leveraging AI to deliver for their customers.

During their respective keynotes, Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Matt Garman, AWS Vice President of Data and AI Swami Sivasubramanian, and special guest Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced a range of generative AI innovations. Announcements also included the availability of Trainium2 instances, the launch of Trainium3, new capabilities for Amazon Q, and more. In case you missed it, watch the AWS re:Invent 2024 recap.

“As always, re:Invent brought a flood of exciting announcements, particularly in Data & AI,” said Maarten Bruntink, Global AWS Solutions Lead at Crayon. “AWS has done an impressive job providing developers the building blocks to create production-ready generative AI applications natively on AWS.”

Empowering Partners to Build AI Expertise with the AWS Generative AI Center of Excellence

Staying competitive in today’s rapidly evolving generative AI landscape requires AWS Partners to develop a robust strategy for keeping pace with technological changes. The Generative AI Center of Excellence for AWS Partners (CoE) serves as an essential resource in this journey, helping organizations effectively build and scale their generative AI practices on AWS.

For Partners looking to enhance their generative AI capabilities, the refreshed Generative AI Partner Playbook (AWS Partner Central login required) offers comprehensive guidance updated for re:Invent 2024. This resource has already proven invaluable, with the original version being utilized over 28,000 times by more than 900 AWS Partners throughout 2023. The latest version provides even more detailed insights into leveraging generative AI Partner programs across the build, market, sell, and grow stages of practice development on AWS.

To ensure your workforce remains current with the latest generative AI developments from AWS, including updates from re:Invent 2024, the CoE provides access to over 300 generative AI resources. These materials span a wide range of topics, from the latest AWS generative AI service announcements to cutting-edge market research and industry-specific use cases across more than 20 sectors. With monthly content updates, organizations should implement a regular review schedule to disseminate this valuable information throughout their teams. By actively engaging with these resources, AWS Partners can maintain their competitive edge and continue delivering innovative generative AI solutions to their clients.

Generative AI Competency Expands Offering Customers More Choices

Along with a multitude of new generative AI service based announcements, re:Invent 2024 highlighted the success and growth of established AWS Partners, including the latest wave of generative AI Competency Partners. Since our July update, the Competency has more than doubled in size, with the addition of over 70 AWS Partners, which now includes more than 20 startups.

Innovative, generative AI-focused independent software vendors (ISVs) like Anyscale, Bria, deepset, Glean, Karini AI, Local Measure, Pinecone Systems, and Writer all now have validated solutions in the competency. We also added industry-specific generative AI solutions from global system integrators like DXC Technology, Eviden (an ATOS business), Genpact, and Wipro. The Competency now boasts regional Partners based out of 25 countries around the globe.

One of those partners, Monks, was “proud to achieve the AWS Generative AI Competency, underscoring our proficiency in applying generative AI to address complex business challenges for our clients,” said Christina Bender, Senior Director, Partnerships at Monks. “This is an important milestone for us as we continue to iterate and put the best AI tools together to design bespoke AI workflows that meet client demand with increased speed, quality, and value.”

“Obtaining the AWS Generative AI and Data and Analytics Competencies demonstrate our team’s deep knowledge and ability to empower Presidio’s customers with innovative solutions at scale,” said Chris Cagnazzi, Chief Innovation Officer at Presidio.

Customers can browse the Generative AI Competency website to locate a Partner by category, read customer case studies, watch Partners dive deep into the key aspects of generative AI, and explore validated solutions from Competency Partners in AWS Marketplace. No matter where customers are based and what they are looking to accomplish with generative AI, they now have a wide choice validated, trusted AWS Partners that can deliver solutions for them to choose.

Our Generative AI Competency Partners are delivering for customers. One of Presidio’s long standing customer is Greenway Health, whose Chief Product and Technology Officer, David Cohen noted that with Presidio’s extensive AWS experience, they were able to fully modernize their Data Insight platform while making it more secure and scalable.

In an interview with ARN, Ruba Borno, AWS VP of Global Specialists and Partners highlights the value of the AWS Competency Program. “Competency is a way for customers to identify which Partners have successfully delivered impact in a particular area,” said Borno. “Three-fourths of customers consider a Partner’s competencies before deciding to work with them.”

In the same article, Borno cited a 2024 Gartner study that showed only 21 percent of AI proofs of concept convert to production. “That means 79 percent is just wasted work and, in a resource constrained world, that just makes no sense for anybody,” states Borno. “When we look at our Generative AI Competency Partners, they’re having conversion rates of 50, 70, 80 percent in some cases. Why? Because they have demonstrated impact already with other customers, and so they have a higher likelihood of having that success with additional customers.”

Strengthening Customer Trust: New AI Security Category for Competency Partners

To further drive value from generative AI, AWS places a major emphasis on security. To help customers easily identify Partners with deep experience in securing AI environments and defending workloads against advanced threats and attacks, the Generative AI Competency and Security Competency joined forces to launch a new category at re:Invent: AI Security.

Security remains a cornerstone of AWS’s approach to generative AI. At re:Invent, the collaboration between the Generative AI Competency and Security Competency programs culminated in the launch of a new AI Security category. This initiative addresses the growing need for specialized security expertise in AI environments.

Partners who achieve this dual certification demonstrate proven capabilities in critical security domains, including protection against sensitive data exposure and injection attacks, comprehensive security posture management, and implementation of responsible AI filtering systems. The validation process ensures that these partners can help organizations build and maintain secure AI environments while defending against sophisticated threats.

This new category provides customers with a trusted resource for identifying partners who excel in both AI innovation and security implementation, streamlining the process of building secure generative AI solutions. More details about the AI Security category and its requirements can be found in the official launch announcement.

Say Hello to the New Generative AI Competency Partners

As we expand the AWS Generative AI Competency to over 140 AWS Partners, we’re pleased to welcome the following AWS Services and Software Partners to the program:

AWS Services Partners

These AWS Partners have demonstrated their expertise in implementing generative AI solutions for businesses. They have a proven track record of assisting companies in adopting generative AI technologies, assessing and choosing foundation models, developing and testing generative AI applications, and training and customizing foundation models.

Additionally, they can implement and support generative AI workloads in real-world production environments while adhering to responsible AI principles and frameworks, including security and compliance controls.

AWS Software Partners

These AWS Partners use foundation models and related technologies to automate industry-specific tasks, enhancing customer differentiation across all sectors, business units, and operations. Their comprehensive offerings include deployable FMs for private environments, accessible via APIs or Amazon Bedrock.

They also provide tools and platforms that impact the foundation model operations (FMOPs) lifecycle and the generative AI application development lifecycle, AI hardware for customizing, training, and deploying generative AI models, as well as platforms for data storage and retrieval of vectorized data, and solutions for generating synthetic data.

Customers: Work with an AWS Generative AI Specialization Partner

AWS Generative AI Competency Partners play a crucial role in driving customer innovation. They offer enterprise-grade security and privacy, foundation models, generative AI-powered applications, a data-first approach, and a high-performance, low-cost infrastructure.

By working with an AWS Generative AI Competency Partner, customers can expect to accelerate their AI initiatives, reduce time to market, and ensure the quality and reliability of their AI solutions. Explore the AWS Generative AI Partners page to learn more.

Partners: Become an AWS Generative AI Competency Partner

AWS Partners with generative AI offerings can learn more about becoming an AWS Competency Partner.

AWS Specialization Partners gain access to strategic and confidential content, including product roadmaps, feature release previews, and demos as part of the AWS PartnerEquip event series. To attend live events in your region or tune in virtually, register for an upcoming session.

In addition to AWS Specialization benefits, AWS Generative AI Competency Partners receive unique benefits such as market development funds (MDF) and marketing activations to aid joint sales motions. To learn more, review the AWS Specialization Program Benefits Guide in AWS Partner Central (login required).

AWS Partners looking to get their generative AI offering validated through the AWS Competency Program must be validated or differentiated members of the Software or Services Path prior to applying.

To apply, review the Program Guide and access the application in AWS Partner Central.