Australian investment in AI is expected to increase seven-fold to $27.5 billion annually between 2022-2030, according to Deloitte Access Economics (DAE). DAE also anticipates that 86% of all roles across the economy – and one quarter of all working hours – will be impacted by AI, with finance, technology, education, professional services, and wholesale trade seeing the biggest impact from generative AI.
With this technology top of mind for many businesses, experts at this week’s AWS Data & AI Day Roadshow including Ally Huchro, Head of Enterprise & Digital Native Business Programs at Anthropic; Kale Temple, Partner at Deloitte Strategy AI & Transformation; Dr Andrew McMullan, Chief Data & Analytics Officer at Commonwealth Bank of Australia; Rianne van Veldhuizen, Managing Director at AWS; and Rada Stanic, Chief Technologist at AWS, unpacked their key takeaways for this year.
The multifaceted role of AI in modern society
Today, AI is already helping to resolve customer queries more quickly, with personalised responses available 24/7. Since its launch in 2021, nibby, nib’s AI-powered voice and text AI assistant, has handled over four million member queries. When generative AI was added to the mix in 2024 using Amazon Bedrock, it unlocked the ability for nibby to better understand complex queries with multiple follow-up questions and to personalise its interactions with members, leading to faster resolution and higher customer satisfaction. For example, nibby can now help a member order a replacement card shipped to their home address, without needing to speak to an operator.
AI is also helping to solve problems that were previously really challenging, and driving profound transformation across industries, like helping doctors better diagnose and treat epilepsy patients, pushing boundaries of the human body in sports, and preserving endangered indigenous cultures and languages including the language of the 60,000-year-old Ngalia culture in the heart of Western Australia.
AWS empowers customers with cutting-edge AI models
AWS is leading the way through Amazon Bedrock, our service that offers a choice of foundation models from leading AI companies. This includes the upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet in the AWS Sydney Region so customers can leverage advanced capabilities while maintaining operational sovereignty and compliance with local regulations. nib is already leveraging Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet to automatically generate and summarise customer call interaction notes, reducing post-call work by up to 20%.
Today, we’re pleased to announce the ability for customers to access Amazon Nova models in the AWS Sydney Region through cross-region inference. With the ability to process text, image, and video as prompts, customers can use Amazon Nova to understand videos, charts, and documents, or generate videos and other multimedia content.
Finally, last week you may have seen Amazon’s announcement of Alexa+, our next-generation assistant powered by generative AI. More conversational, smarter, personalised, approachable, it is designed to take action, and works with tens of thousands of services and devices right out of the box through agentic AI. Powering Alexa+ are the Amazon Nova and Anthropic Claude models, helping Alexa+ personalise responses by detecting when it's being addressed, who is speaking, and what’s needed, so it can be the most natural AI assistant.
Investing in infrastructure, sustainability, and skills
Amazing innovation continues to come out of Australia and New Zealand, and we are committed to powering the region’s ambitions through offering the broadest set of cloud capabilities, as well as investing into infrastructure.
Over the past decade, we’ve invested more than $9 billion into our Australian infrastructure, and are committed to investing a further $13.2 billion by 2027. We are also on track to launch an AWS Region in New Zealand to support our customers and partners in Aotearoa.
As more customers embark on their AI journey, we need to also ensure our customers can use AI efficiently and sustainably, and that people are ready with the right skills to capitalise on the opportunities available.
That’s why we are designing our data centers in the most energy efficient ways, including renewable energy. This benefits our customers, who can reduce their carbon emissions by migrating compute-heavy AI workloads away from on-premise data centres to AWS. In fact, a 2024 study found that in Australia, this can reduce emissions by up to 94%.
To support our digital aspirations, we also need a skilled local workforce who can capitalise on the job opportunities and pace of innovation. AWS is collaborating with governments, educators, and the industry to help individuals build and deepen their digital skills, particularly in AI. We offer more than 600 free digital training courses and so far, AWS has trained over 400,000 people in Australia in cloud skills, and in New Zealand, we have a joint goal with the New Zealand government to train 100,000 Kiwis over five years.
Next up, how AWS artificial intelligence is helping to preserve indigenous culture and languages.
