Season 7, Post 17: Disco in the Docklands
It feels more like a pilgrimage than a work event. Almost every year since 2019, your author and some 20,000 other people (a number which has expanded by more than 50% in the last five years) trek to ExCel, London’s premium conference venue in its Docklands, for the AWS Summit. Hosted by Amazon, amidst lasers, pumping beats and dancers, it is a chance to see the business showcase its technology.
Beyond the entertainment and a trade fair for its partner ecosystem, attendees can listen to senior executives from Amazon. Present this year were the Head of AWS for the UK and Ireland and a VP within Compute Services at AWS. They were joined on stage by leaders from businesses leveraging Amazon’s capabilities including NatWest and Untold Studios (a UK bank and a creative content company) among others. If there were one clear message then it is that businesses are no longer talking about the potential of AI; rather, we are seeing clear breakthroughs with the technology.
Alison Kay, the local Head of AWS noted that at least one new business in the UK was adopting AI every minute of the day. As a result, more than half of UK companies are now using AI, according to Amazon. More impressively, over 90% are seeing an increase in revenue because of the technology. Beyond the corporate case studies that were presented, Amazon called out tangible progress within the healthcare space – where error rates in drug discovery were falling by over 50% when the technology was deployed – and in agriculture.
Although these data are encouraging, as Amazon noted, “we are just scratching the surface.” What might be the bottlenecks? In our own work, we have acknowledged that no technological development is ever linear. Lack of robust grid infrastructure and power supply may be a major gating factor, we believe. Amazon called out three other considerations: cost, trust and training. It is addressing all three. New automated reasoning tools showcased at the Summit are designed to reduce ‘hallucination’ risks in large language models. Model distillation and intelligent prompt reasoning innovation should help lower inference costs, according to Amazon. And good news for UK students: AWS has said it aims to provide at least 100,000 people with advanced AI, cyber and big data skills by 2030.
7 May 2025
The above does not constitute investment advice and is the sole opinion of the author at the time of publication. Past performance is no guide to future performance and the value of investments and income from them can fall as well as rise.
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Alex Gunz, Fund Manager
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