Indian firms, SMBs go for digital transformation, AWS seizes opportunity

Amazon Web Services plans to invest $16.4 billion in India by 2030 as businesses adopt Cloud and AI technologies

An increasing number of enterprises and small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) in India are swiftly adopting advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and Cloud computing to enhance efficiency and productivity, say industry experts. This is also boosting their global competitiveness.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the Cloud computing division of the e-commerce behemoth, is capitalising on this trend by intensifying its efforts to attract these businesses with its Cloud, AI, and machine learning technologies.

Factors driving digital adoption

Experts attribute the rapid digitalisation of Indian enterprises and SMBs to several factors, including technological advancements, expanding broadband access, affordable data costs, and the government's focus on digital infrastructure. The Covid-19 pandemic has further expedited the adoption of digital technologies.

"Our global CEO Adam Selipsky visited India earlier this year and was astonished by the rate of digital innovation and adoption in the country," said Vaishali Kasture, Director (Commercial Sales) of AWS India and South Asia at Amazon Web Services India Pvt. Ltd. "The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of technologies like Cloud computing, moving enterprises from the experimentation phase to modernisation."
 

AWS's investment strategy

AWS has announced plans to invest $12.7 billion in Cloud infrastructure in India by 2030 to meet the growing demand for its technologies and services. This follows its previous investment of $3.7 billion from 2016 to 2022, bringing AWS's total projected investment in India to $16.4 billion by 2030.

Technological impact on businesses

With over 200 fully-featured Cloud services, AWS is spearheading the adoption of emerging technologies like AI, generative AI, machine learning, custom chips, and quantum computing. This is enabling organisations to improve productivity, boost sales and revenue, enhance customer experience, and optimise costs.

"Businesses are keen to integrate AI into various sectors, from factories and smart cars to lending platforms, to better serve their clients," said Kasture. "India is among the fastest adopters of machine learning and a global hub for AWS in this domain."

Case studies: Nandu's and Havmor

Nandu’s is a 60-year-old family business that runs a farm-to-table chicken business in India. They get real-time visibility into their complex supply chain. This includes feed milling through breeding operations, and retailing,  to deliver fresh and chemical-free food directly to consumers. After migrating to AWS, the company improved uptimes on ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems from 70 per cent to 99 per cent of the time. They also reduced the tech infrastructure budget by 40 per cent. Nandu’s is working with AWS to apply data analytics and predictive analytics to improve the efficiency of the business.

Small business like ice cream maker Havmor has turned to AWS to meet rapid expansion and focus on business growth. Havmor was established as a family business in India in 1945 and is present across 18 states and five union territories in India, with a network of 72,000 retail outlets and over 200 flagship stores. By running on AWS, Havmor has moved away from managing data centres to focusing on business expansion and growth. It is taking a cloud-first approach for its core IT systems, such as CRM (customer relationship management) and point of sale. It is doing this by leveraging AWS Managed Services and building an AWS-powered scalable data lake for generating deeper consumer insights.

Innovations in Generative AI
 

AWS is also gaining traction for its generative AI technology, which can create new content and ideas, including conversations, stories, images, videos, and music. For example, messaging platform GupShup has leveraged Amazon SageMaker to fine-tune large language models, reducing experimentation time from weeks to days.

Collaboration with Persistent Systems

Tech firm Persistent Systems is strengthening its collaboration with AWS to utilise its latest generative AI services. Persistent aims to equip its 16,000-plus engineering organisation to use Amazon CodeWhisperer, thereby accelerating the development of new solutions.

"Generative AI offers customers a wide array of choices to experiment with and fine-tune models suitable for their business," said Kasture. "Our own hardware powers these models, which I believe is a key differentiator for us in India and globally."