LogiCast AWS News: AI Agents, Responsible AI Adoption, and Cloud Hyperscaler Earnings

In the latest episode of LogiCast, the AWS News podcast, host Karl Robinson and co-host Jon Goodall of Logicata were joined by special guest Rob Pankow, co-founder and CEO of Simply Block, to discuss the latest developments in AWS and the broader cloud computing landscape. The conversation covered a range of topics, from AI agents and responsible AI adoption to the recent earnings reports of major cloud providers.

AI Agents: The Future of Automation

The discussion kicked off with an exploration of AI agents, a hot topic in the tech world. Jon explained that AI agents are essentially empowered versions of foundation models, capable of performing more complex tasks. He noted, “If you look back a couple of years ago, everything had to be ML and then it was LLMs and now everything has to be agenttic.”

Rob added his perspective, stating, “I think, you know, we still don’t know how the future is going to look like, but obviously these days, everyone thinks that there’s going to be an agent for everything, and then those agents will eventually start maybe communicating to each other, transferring knowledge between agents, and then this really lead to this to the concept of AGI which is artificial general intelligence.”

However, both Jon and Rob acknowledged that while AI agents show great promise, there are still challenges to overcome. Paka pointed out, “There’s a lot of things agents can do already, but it’s, it’s most of the time not like production ready if you know what I mean, in, in other words, it’s the output is not reliable enough for someone to fully rely on an agent.”

Responsible AI Adoption in Financial Services

The conversation then shifted to the topic of responsible AI adoption, particularly within the financial services industry. The team discussed a recently published AWS Security blog post about a new guide for governance, risk, and compliance for responsible AI adoption in financial services.

While the article itself was no longer accessible, Karl noted that the guide was still available through AWS Artifacts. Jon expressed his frustration with the inconsistency, stating, “I’ve no idea why it was taken off of the internet. Nothing is ever off of the internet because all it’s actually talking about it’s full paragraphs saying that here’s a guide and you can get it from AWS artifact within your own account.”

The team agreed that such guidance is crucial for financial institutions looking to adopt AI technologies responsibly. Rob added, “I think it’s still just very early days of regulation and in terms of the AI usage within financial services sector and those things will be coming, but I think it’s not gonna be those kind of guides that eventually will regulate the AI in the financial services industry.”

Amazon Q Business and AWS Trusted Advisor

The podcast then delved into a discussion about Amazon Q Business and its integration with AWS Trusted Advisor. Jon expressed his frustration with Trusted Advisor’s tie to support tiers, stating, “Trust advisor is fine. I just have real, real ideologic problems with it as a service because it’s one of the only services that’s tied up with your support tier.”

The team explored how Amazon Q Business could potentially streamline the process of getting insights from Trusted Advisor and creating actionable tasks in Jira. However, Jon noted that the setup process seemed quite involved, saying, “This is a lot of work for something that should just exist, I’d think.”

Rob added, “I think it, it sounds like it’s not AI native experience here. You would want to just have it done, right? Like just put a prompt and just the ticket is created and it sounds like there’s a lot of setup, a lot of manual intervention.”

Cloud Hyperscaler Earnings

The final topic of discussion centered around the recent earnings announcements from major cloud providers. Rob provided a detailed analysis of the impressive growth numbers, particularly focusing on AWS. He noted, “AWS is, is a business now with ARR so that, that the revenue run rate, yearly revenue run rate of around $120 billion. So that’s more than Tesla.”

Rob also highlighted the impressive profit margins of AWS, stating, “They’re operated at 40% gross margin. So in other words, every dollar of revenue they’re getting, their kind of operating costs are only 60% of that, right?”

Jon added his perspective on the inconsistent reporting methods of different cloud providers, making it difficult to make direct comparisons. He noted, “The revenue sources is incredibly inconsistent from them and that’s immensely frustrating, um, particularly for someone outside of that sphere, if you like.”

Conclusion

As the cloud computing landscape continues to evolve, with AI and machine learning playing an increasingly significant role, it’s clear that there are both exciting opportunities and challenges ahead. From the development of more sophisticated AI agents to the need for responsible AI adoption in regulated industries, and the ongoing growth of major cloud providers, the future of cloud computing promises to be dynamic and transformative.

This is an AI generated piece of content, based on the Logicast Podcast Season 4 Episode 19.