Innovation in APAC, Japan on rise; govt driving digital transformation: AWS

The Asia Pacific and Japan region is emerging as a hotbed for innovation, and various governments are driving digital transformation projects, a senior AWS official has said.

Initiatives like Digital India have successfully showcased how technology can be used to address citizen needs at scale, said Rahul Sharma, Managing Director, Worldwide Public Sector - APAC and Japan at Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Sharma outlined a positive outlook for government-led tech spending in the region for 2024.

Spending around mission projects, driven by various governments, is expected to have a bigger component of technology, he said.

"According to IMF, Asia Pacific is the growth engine for the world...also it is really where a lot of innovation is happening...one of the things we are seeing, specifically, is the wave of government-led digital transformation in Asia Pacific and Japan," Sharma told PTI on the sidelines of AWS re: Invent 2023.

According to Sharma, Digital India and the rise of digital public infrastructure over the past years have demonstrated how technology can be leveraged to impact citizens' outcomes at scale.

Six of the 12 India Stack applications are running on the AWS cloud.

"We are really, really excited about how digital public infrastructure and digital public goods from this region will be taken to the world because there's a lot of innovation happening. And we are certainly looking to partner with both the government as well as other non-profit governmental agencies that are really interested in this," Sharma said.

Multiple discussions are going on, and global perspectives are coming together on this, the senior executive of Amazon's cloud computing unit said, adding that "we are really excited about this opportunity".

Sharma said the Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) region is seeing an acceleration of citizen services through tech-led innovation and projects.

"I think, there would be continued growth as there are so many new paradigms that are emerging in technology... generative AI and machine learning. Those budgets didn't exist in the past," he said.

Singapore and Japan continue to be "major growth areas", while Australia is a "big market".

"...same for India as well. There are announcements that are being made on the AI capability for India. There are more and more new mission projects that are coming up that are using technology significantly," he noted.

The demand, he said, is coming from across markets within the APJ region as governments lead the adoption of technology at scale.

"And I think, the landscape is going to be quite interesting. I see a pivot in the direction next year in Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially as the government starts to adopt Generative AI," he added.

AWS has invested USD 3.7 billion (about Rs 30,900 crore) in India between 2016 and 2022. Further, it plans to invest USD 12.7 billion in India by 2030 in local cloud infrastructure, taking the total investment here to USD 16.4 billion (Rs 1,36,500 crore) by 2030.

According to AWS, these investments are a catalyst to accelerate innovation and drive productivity, which will contribute an estimated USD 23.3 billion (Rs 1,94,700 crore) to India's total gross domestic product by 2030.

AWS has also trained more than four million individuals in India with cloud skills since 2017.

"We are seeing across-the-board adoption of cloud...whether it is central government, state governments, local governments, or areas like education, healthcare, utilities, agriculture...Moving to the cloud is driving efficiency," Sharma said, adding that citizen-facing applications have gained major traction over the past years.