In an exclusive interaction with CRN India, Sunil PP, Lead—Channels and Alliances, Public Sector, AWS India Private Limited delved into plans and strategies AWS is implementing to build competencies of their partners in AI solutions for the public sector. He opens up on partner training programmes and the value that these will add to the channel business.
How do you envision the impact of GenAI penetration on India’s public sector? What role is AWS India playing in enabling the sector?
In a brief about AWS public sector, we primarily have two large businesses: the government business and the education business. The government business covers state, central, and public healthcare and the education business covers edtech, K-12, higher education, scaling, non-profit, and the entire education ecosystem. We have a strong channel ecosystem to support both streams.
Considering our approach in the last 18 months, we have had multiple schemes to aid our partners and make them comfortable talking about GenAI deployments. We have reached out to our partners and tried to help them understand the application of GenAI in the public sector through a bunch of training sessions. We have a targeted transformation module that we have landed with many of these partners to build a go-to-market strategy on GenAI.
One of the major outcomes of this activity was Red.AI from Redington. Redington worked with AWS to build a Red.AI to build an AI partner ecosystem. The Red.AI was launched a couple of weeks back, and the solution is live in the market at present. The solution helps partners build capacity in terms of upskilling. The success story of Digii, one of our Bengaluru-based partners, is a great example of the program’s effectiveness. After undergoing a training program, Digii identified solutions for various institutions like DigiiAi, which allowed them to automate examination paper creation leveraging our GenAI stack. The startup has implemented the solution in six universities to date including VIT. These universities are automating the entire question paper creation module on campus through the GenAI model.
Shellkode, another partner from Bengaluru, is one of the first GenAI competency partners in the country. The company is one of the partners who brought GenAI competency and AWS competency to India. Shellkode has launched a program to get a hundred thousand women students empowered with GenAI.
If I have to mention the effectiveness of the solution and accuracy of the AI model, the solution by Digii has recorded an accuracy of about 91 percent. As I mentioned before, a few renowned universities have already deployed the solution as a pilot and the solution is being upgraded as per feedback to make it market-ready.
How AWS is democratising access to foundational models (FMs) and GenAI to make it easy for AWS partners in India to deliver meaningful innovation for their customers?
The approach to GenAI can be a three-layered one. The fundamental layer are the chips, like AWS Inferentia, the chips you use to build GenAI capabilities on top of it. Now, the second layer is like the Bedrock which has multiple choices on AI models for enterprises to select the ones suitable for their infrastructure and business requirements. This layer also ensures that you are not stuck to one model compulsorily but can choose from FMs available in the market. The third one is the application layer. This translates in a way that you can create an application like Amazon Q, something you can primarily take and land as a solution immediately.
The problem is GenAI has become the talk of the town and despite enterprises being desperate to deploy GenAI, many of them need to learn how to use or begin their GenAI journey. In this regard, Amazon Q becomes an easy way to start. So you use that for web crawl, create a Q&A model, and a chatbot. The user-friendliness of the application even makes it easy for government customers to comfortably test out the application. No customer is deploying it live, but they are testing and happy doing it. We see that as a change coming in and the entire model is getting adopted that way gradually.
It is a similar story for one of our customers GeM. Amazon Q primarily has two modules – one is the builder and the other one is the business application. The builder module is primarily for people to build applications on top of that, which is what they are leveraging.
Can you shed light on a few use cases wherein GenAI-aided AWS partners address public sector challenges across sectors including the government, education, and healthcare?
Today, everyone wants to have some sort of GenAI intervention that they can get in. And, I’m hinting towards even the state governments. As an example, the Government of Kerala is testing out AI models in school education.
Though there is enthusiasm among customers be it the government or the public sector, we see that still there is a skill gap. Therefore, creating and effectively deploying a GenAI solution right away seems a bit difficult. Hence, we are investing a lot of time to ensure we have more people skilled in GenAI. An example of this is Shellkode, as mentioned above. Another example could be Nuvepro Technologies, which is again trying to train 100,000 people on GenAI to create a future-ready and skilled workforce. One of the challenges here is the novelty of GenAI. We do not have partners skilled to do an effective deployment at full scale. This is why an approach like Amazon Q makes it easier because it is a ready-made solution they can land, learn from, and build on top of that as they move forward.
India is a more cost-centric market. How do you mobilise your channel to address this concern and how the partner ecosystem helps you in further expanding your presence?
India is a cost-centric and conservative market, no second thoughts on it. However, we have been through that for many years now. Earlier the readiness to adopt the cloud was a challenge. We went through this journey between 2018 and the post-pandemic era. During this period we saw the implementation of the CoWin application, a cloud-based application that is highly scalable. This opened doors for similar implementations. This learning is what made governments comfortable, and accepting the cloud. Following the success of the CoWin application, we saw the rollout of DigiLocker, DigiYatra, Samarth e-Gov (a learning platform of Delhi University), and Skill India Digital Hub (SIDH) Platform. All of them have been pure cloud play.
Today, we see that people are very comfortable with cloud models. Now, there are state government projects coming in for GenAI-based agents for state government departments and public tenders. In my view, things have changed radically on the other end right now. We are looking at enabling partners on how to make a representation towards creating architecture a particular way. What are the skills required for them to identify the right FM models that solve the requirement of the customer? How do we make it convenient for the partners to land conversations easily? Therefore, we are conducting a training program for a whole bunch of partners so they can try and land deals. It is called the Partner Transformation Program that is currently underway.
Can you elaborate on your partner programs to help partners advance their capabilities and better address customer needs in India’s public sector?
We have two big programs which are unique to the Indian public sector. The first is the Partner Transformation Program (PTP). Under this, partners go through a 100-day transformation journey. We have a consultant that comes in and designs an entire organised structure on ‘How to sell cloud services?’, ‘How to sell other services?’, ‘What is the model of optimisation?’, ‘How to make sure one has a business model that supports the cloud business?’ and more. A majority of the partners sell hardware and software and that business is different compared to the cloud. Hence, the journey of 100-day transformation is what we do for all our partners. Most of our partners have gone through the training programmes to build a cloud business.
The second one is something called the Targeted Transformation Module (TTM). It is a short intervention wherein we try and get partners to build GenAI capabilities. We do a 24-hour workshop with them, wherein we identify people in the organisation that can talk GenAI, can build Gen AI, and can identify apt markets for GenAI.
These initiatives are specifically for India and all the examples shared above are the outcomes from these workshops. As of now, we have done about 12 of them right now and all of them have come back with use cases, scenarios, and go-to markets different from what we expected and this is building an interesting profile of customers whether it is healthcare, education, or government. Hence, these workshops are helping our partners to transform from just being box movers to solution-providers.
What are your further plans considering the dynamics of the Indian market? Can we expect any new launches?
The big launches and announcements will happen at the main event towards the end of the year. However, looking at India, we are trying to help partners to figure out creating industry business units within their organisations. Many partners service other industries as well and it is tough for them to manage because each industry is different. Hence, we are focusing on identifying partners that can build a healthcare competency as a focus and make sure they build only for that. Minfy is a great example of a company that went ahead and built an entire healthcare practice.
For large government mechanism vehicles, we look at GSIs to work with like Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Deloitte, and more. For the medium ones, we look at companies like Minfy. Hence, we are looking at identifying partners that can potentially build competencies around the target market.
