AWS VP says AI says its time for AI to get practical
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Francessca Vasquez — a VP at Amazon Web Services with a 27-year career in tech and the Department of Defense — says it's more important than ever for companies to build a strong business case for generative AI.
The big picture: Amid the hype cycle, businesses are still struggling to find practical and responsible uses for genAI that justify its high costs.
- Over half of Americans believe that AI has a "net neutral effect," according to a recent Gallup poll, and an overwhelming majority of respondents (79%) say they trust businesses "not much" or "not at all" to adopt AI responsibly.
Context: Vasquez currently leads the genAI innovation center for AWS, but she tells Axios that she's been interested in tech since the time she could speak.
- As a U.S. Air Force brat, Vasquez never stayed in one place for long, which she says taught her how to adapt to change in tech and in business.
- After formally studying computer science, Vasquez worked at the Pentagon and then Sun Microsystems, Oracle and Salesforce before starting at Amazon in 2017.
Like many successful women who've stuck it out in a male-dominated industry for decades, Vasquez remembers a time when she was the only woman in the room.
- That experience taught her the importance of having women in tech in different roles at all levels, she says. "People need to be able to see it in order to believe that they can be in that domain."
- Vasquez also encourages tech managers to think about hiring people from diverse backgrounds.
- "There can be a bias in having what I would consider to be a more traditional background in tech," Vasquez says.
- She says she's found that some of the most creative people in tech, IT, cloud and AI "have very diversified backgrounds, meaning they don't always come up through computer science. They come up in other avenues that I think bring levels of creativity."
Vasquez says her current goal is to try to translate some of the AI hype into real impact for companies.
- Using genAI to summarize documents or to write poetry, Vasquez says, is "nice, but I think there's just so much more potential."
- "Artificial intelligence for some companies feels very abstract," she says. Companies come to Vasquez and her teams at AWS to find out how to make genAI more meaningful.
- "Companies that have very tailored use cases... that they can tie back to business value" are succeeding, Vazquez says.
What's next: A number of companies are quickly moving from experimenting with AI to implementing it, Vasquez tells Axios.
- Improving customer experiences, enhancing productivity, extracting insights from data, automating manual tasks and accelerating research and development specifically with drug development are all ways Vasquez says she's seen not just genAI's potential, but its reality.
The bottom line: Vasquez sees that genAI is at an inflection point, but she doesn't think it's a bubble that's about to burst.
Editor's note: This story was corrected to reflect that part of Vasquez's career was spent at the Department of Defense (not in the military).
