From cloud to ecosystem: Aws pushes Italy into the Gen AI era

The message has long been clear: the cloud is the enabling technology par excellence for digital transformation, and it is for companies of all sizes and sectors. Amazon Web Services reiterated this once again at the Italian leg of the AWS Summit 2024, the Seattle giant's main annual event dedicated to services in the cloud, adding an absolutely expected detail to the now familiar 'refrain': generative artificial intelligence will also play an important and decisive role in the game of innovation. At the Allianz MiCo Convention Centre in Milan, more than 7,000 professionals attended the 100-plus scheduled sessions, and Julien Groues, Vice President South Europe of AWS, welcomed them with the opening keynote. "Our goal," said the manager, after the customary pleasantries, "is to help all Italian companies, from start-ups to enterprises, to realise the full potential of this transformative technology to simplify processes, drive innovation and unlock new possibilities for growth. This Summit is a platform for us to showcase real-world examples, share best practices, and provide Italian leaders with the tools and skills they need to succeed in the era of generative AI".

AI in Italy: one in five companies has already adopted it.

To give substance to this promise, Groues illustrated to the audience the most significant data of a research conducted in Italy by Public First on behalf of AWS, interviewing one thousand business figures and as many citizens. A survey that in fact confirms the great enthusiasm of Italian businesses for the potential of new algorithmic technologies - in fact, 23% of companies have confirmed that they will have adopted an AI-based solution by 2023, compared to 18% the previous year - although there is, as the VP of AWS herself remarked, 'still room for acceleration'. The scenario in which artificial intelligence will be able to give an important impulse to the economy takes shape first of all in relation to the objectives set by the European Commission for the 'Digital Decade', according to which by 2030 75% of companies will be operational with cloud computing, big data and, precisely, AI. In Italy, the number of companies that have bet on this technology has grown in number by 28% between 2022 and 2023 (32% in Europe) and if the Belpaese will be able to maintain this level of digital adoption until 2030, 329 billion euros could be added to the value of the economy. All projections to be confirmed, of course, while the benefits associated with the use of artificial intelligence in the company are tangibly felt in terms of increased efficiency (88% of the companies sampled said so) and improved customer experience. There is therefore one last piece of data that the AWS manager brought to the attention of those present, and it is as follows: 67% of Italian companies believe that AI (and Gen AI in particular) will substantially transform their sector within the next five years (the European average stands at 63%), a sign that attention to the opportunities offered by machine learning and LLM models is at the highest level. And this is why AWS, as Groues confirmed at the end of the speech, 'is deeply committed to investing in Italy and supporting the digital transformation of Italian companies through our generative AI services, our infrastructure and our ecosystem of partners to show how our infrastructure, our services and our ecosystem of partners can support the digital transformation process'.

Data centre investments and LLM alliances

Cloud computing, for AWS, is the mantra and the indispensable basis for the adoption of digital technology and artificial intelligence, and the rumours that the company is in talks with the National Strategic Pole to become the fourth supplier of the infrastructure to which public bodies and organisations are called to migrate their most sensitive data should come as no surprise. Just how important it is in the economy of the North American giant's business is shown by the numbers - Amazon Web Services' turnover is close to 100 billion dollars a year and accounts for more than 50% of the company's operating income - and by the opportunities for further development of the company's 'war machine' in Europe in terms of offering infrastructure services in the cloud, a market in which AWS is a global leader with a market share of more than 30%. In short, there is still room for growth in the cloud, and this is also why Amazon is sparing no effort to strengthen its battery of server farms throughout Europe. In Spain, for example, the announcement has just been made of a 15.7 billion euro investment for a new data centre that will be built over ten years in the north-eastern region of Aragon, creating about 7,000 local jobs and contributing with this project (according to the company's calculations) 12.9 billion to the Spanish national GDP by 2033. Returning to Italy, however, the latest bang arrived at the Milan Summit and bears the signature of Fastweb. The Milanese company has in fact announced that it will leverage Amazon Web Services' generative artificial intelligence services to make its Large Language Model 'Mistral 7B' natively trained in Italian available to third parties (via the open source Hugging Face platform). In the future, as stated in the note, Fastweb plans to make its model available on Amazon Bedrock, so that it can easily scale new Gen AI solutions for its corporate customers and, not least, accelerate the digital transformation of enterprises and public administrations.