AWS will increase its investment in SA, focusing on strengthening the capacity of its private network, developing sought-after technology skills and positioning its agentic AI technology to support local digital transformation.
This is according to company executives who presented at the seventh AWS Summit in Africa, hosted in Johannesburg on 20 August.
They underlined the significance of AWS building blocks in the context of AI. According to AWS, these are pre-built managed AI and ML services that enable developers to infuse AI capabilities into their applications without having to build AI models from scratch.
Willem Visser, VP at Amazon EC2, stressed the company’s value proposition in developing these building blocks – components like compute, storage, networking and databases used to construct applications – to empower the transformation of key sectors.
The company concentrates on helping users streamline the application of these building blocks to quickly address multiple requirements, rather than just zero in on one speciality or functionality. The emphasis is on flexibility, AI capability and integration of agents to streamline operations.
AWS stressed the significance of solutions like AWS Bedrock AgentCore and AWS SageMaker.
AWS defines Bedrock AgentCore as an offering that enables users to deploy and operate highly capable AI agents securely, at scale. The value proposition is that it removes “the undifferentiated heavy lifting of building specialised agent infrastructure”.
AWS SageMaker combines AWS Machine Learning and analytics capabilities, designed to deliver an integrated experience for analytics and AI with unified access to data.
Along with these technologies, AWS stated it will also build on driving capacity through to the South African market, leveraging what it describes as the largest global private fibre-optic network.
The company used the summit platform to underline the value of its global network, incorporating over 6 million kilometres of terrestrial and sub-sea fibre cabling.
Visser said the company has applied an 80% increase in AWS network capacity over the past 12 months.
According to AWS, 96% of all network events are automatically remediated or mitigated without human intervention.
Deepened cloud adoption
Visser added that while there is both short-term and long-term value to these features and technologies, users must be in the cloud.
He acknowledged that with the pressure to embrace emerging technologies and guide migration to the cloud, businesses do experience challenges.
Visser assured delegates the company has over 19 years’ experience in helping customers overcome challenges linked to modernising decades-old infrastructure. “We have integrated AI capabilities to help make modernisation easier.”
Continued investment
Jyoti Ball, GM of AWS sub-Saharan Africa, said the company is building on the 2020 launch of the AWS Africa Region availability zone in Cape Town, with a focus on empowering people to drive digital transformation and AI adoption.
Ball said as an example of progress, five years ago the company made 50 services available and today there are more than 140 services.
The AWS executive said while technology is at the core of transformation, people play a crucial role in Africa’s digital transformation, underpinned by the increasing adoption of AI.
“It’s people that drive digital transformation and AI adoption. The availability of technology skills is crucial to Africa’s digital transformation,” said Ball.
The company’s Cape Digital Skills Centre, established three years ago, has trained over 51 000 people, Ball continued, underlying the contribution of this and other initiatives, including the AWS Restart Program and the AWS Think Big Program.
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