Summer is reaching its peak for some of us around the globe, and many are heading out to their favorite holiday destinations to enjoy some time off. I just came back from holidays myself and I couldn’t help thinking about the key role that artificial intelligence (AI) plays in our modern world to help us scale the operation of simple things like traveling. Passport and identity verifications were quick, and thanks to the new airport security system rolling out across the world, so were my bag checks. I watched my backpack with a smile as it rolled along the security check belt with my computer, tablet, and portable game consoles all nicely tucked inside without any fuss.

If it wasn’t for AI, we wouldn’t be able to scale operations to keep up with population growth or the enormous volumes of data we generate on a daily basis. The advent of generative AI took this even further by unlocking the ability to put all this data to use in all kinds of creative ways, driving a new wave of exciting innovations that continues to elevate modern products and services.

This new landscape can be challenging for companies that are learning how generative AI can help them grow or succeed, such as startups. This is why I’m so excited about the AWS GenAI Lofts taking place in the next months around the world.

The AWS GenAI Lofts are collaborative spaces available in different cities around the world for a number of weeks. Startups, developers, investors, and industry experts can meet here while having access to AWS AI experts, and attend talks, workshops, fireside chats, and Q&As with industry leaders. All lofts are free and are carefully curated to offer something for everyone to help you accelerate your journey with AI. There are lofts scheduled in Bengaluru (July 29-Aug 9), San Francisco (Aug 14-Sept 27), Sao Paulo (Sept 2-Nov 20), London (Sept 30-Oct 25), Paris (Oct 8-Nov 25), and Seoul (Nov, pending exact dates). I highly encourage you to have a look at the agendas of a loft near you and drop in to learn more about GenAI and connect with others.

Last week’s launches
Here are some launches that got my attention last week.

Amazon Q Business cross-Region IdC — Amazon Q Business is a generative AI-powered assistant that deeply understands your business by providing connectors that you can easily set up to unify data from various sources such as Amazon S3, Microsoft 365, and more. You can then generate content, answer questions, and even automate tasks that are relevant and specific to your business. Q Business integrates with AWS IAM Identity Center to ensure that data can only be accessed by those who are authorized to do so. Previously, the IAM Identity Center instance had to be located in the same Region as the Q Business application. Now, you can connect to one in a different Region.

Git sync status changes publish to Amazon EventBridge — AWS CloudFormation Git sync is a very handy feature that can help streamline your DevOps operations by allowing you to automatically update your AWS CloudFormation stacks whenever you commit changes to the template or deployment file in source control. As of last week, any sync status change is published in near real-time as an event to EventBridge. This enables you to take your GitOps workflow further and stay on top of your Git repositories or resource sync status changes.

Some AWS Pinpoint’s capabilities are now under AWS End User Messaging — AWS Pinpoint’s SMS, MMS, push, and text to voice capabilities have been shuffled and now are offered through their own service called AWS End User Messaging. There is no impact to existing applications and no changes to APIs, the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or IAM policies, however, the new name is now reflected on the AWS Management Console, AWS Billing console dashboard, documentation, and other places.

Amazon WorkSpaces updates — Microsoft Visual Studio Professional and Microsoft Visual Studio Enterprise 2022 are now added to the list of available license included applications on Workspaces Personal. Additionally, Amazon WorkSpaces Thin Client has received Carbon Trust verification. As verified by the Carbon Trust, the total lifecycle carbon emission is 77kg CO2e and 50% of the product is made from recycled materials.

GenAI for the Public Sector — There has been two significant launches that may interest those in the public sector looking into getting started with generative AI. Amazon Bedrock is now a FedRAMP High authorized service in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. Additionally, both Llama 3 8B and Lllama 3 70B are now also available in that Region making this a perfect opportunity to start experimenting with Bedrock and Llama 3 if you have workloads in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region.

Customers in Germany can now sign up for AWS using their bank account — That means no debit or credit card is needed to create AWS accounts if you have a billing address in Germany. This can help simplify payment of AWS invoices for some businesses, as well as make it easier for others to get started on AWS.

Learning Materials

These are my recommended learning materials for this week.

AWS Skill Builder — This is more of a broad recommendation, but I’m still surprised that so many people never heard of AWS Skill Builder or have not tried it yet. There is so much learning you can do for free including a lot of hands-on courses. In July alone, AWS Skill Builder has launched 25 new digital training products including AWS SimulLearn and AWS Cloud Quest: Generative AI which are game-based learning experiences. Speaking of that, did you know that if you need to renew your Cloud Practitioner certification you can do it simply by playing the AWS Cloud Quest: Recertify Cloud Practioner game?

Get started with agentic code interpreter — Earlier last month we released a new capability on Agents for Amazon Bedrock which allows agents to dynamically generate and execute code within a secure sandboxed environment. As usual, my colleague Mike Chambers has created a great video and blog post on community.aws showing how you can start using it today.

That’s it for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!