The realities of enterprise AI deployments, with Amazon Web Services VP Francessca Vasquez
Vasquez shares insights from more than 1,000 customer engagements across industries, explaining how companies are moving from AI experiments to deployments. We discuss the rise of AI agents, the challenges businesses face in scaling AI initiatives, and why some industries are surprising everyone with their pace of innovation.
We also discuss specific examples including Yahoo Finance's multi-agent news analysis system, the PGA Tour's AI-powered real-time golf commentary, Formula 1's root cause analyzer for troubleshooting race-day issues, and Jabil's shop floor assistant for manufacturing employees.
Listen below, or subscribe in any podcast app, and keep reading for highlights.
On the rapid pace of AI evolution: 'The pace of innovation right now for generative and agentic AI is just a lot faster than what I've ever seen in my career. I couldn't tell you what are things going to look like in 12 to 18 months. That's how fast things are moving.'
Industries adopting AI faster than expected: 'If you had asked me 24 months ago, did I think one industry would really just be leading in adoption, I probably would have said, just look at all of your digital native companies… I would have been wrong. … We've seen a lot of innovation happening in financial services. We've seen a lot happening in manufacturing and healthcare.'
On moving from proof of concept to production: 'The only way you get to value is by actually putting things into production. … Of these same companies that were doing experiments or proof of concepts a year ago, only about 30% of them actually got into production. With the work that we do, we've been able to increase that well over 50%.'
What makes for successful enterprise AI deployments: 'These things still require having very good leadership conviction. The companies that may be progressing further, they've got a leadership team who believes in the pace of technology, or they've got senior technical thought leaders on their board. That makes a very big difference.'
Beyond the technology: 'How [companies] think about their culture and their people, that becomes a huge differentiator for both talent development and attraction. … It's more than just the technology of models and latency and tokens. It's also about the people and the culture and what experiences you want.'
On AI agents and the future of work: 'I expect that any organization that's offering consulting services, they will all have to have some level of generative AI and agentic AI in their workflows — all of them, every last one of them.'
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Audio editing by Curt Milton.
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