From cost management to practical implementation, Sage's Amaya Souarez shares invaluable insights on building AI-powered business tools that deliver measurable value to customers.

Topics Include:

• Amaya Souarez introduced as EVP Cloud Services at Sage
• Overview of Sage: offers accounting, finance, HR and payroll tech for small businesses
• Company emphasizes human values alongside technology development
• Amaya oversees core cloud services and operations across 200+ products
• Sage Co-Pilot announced as new AI assistant – helping automate invoicing and cash flow management
• Common misconceptions with Generative AI
• AI solutions aren’t always solution to every problem
• Compares AI hype to previous blockchain enthusiasm
• Emphasizes starting with clear use cases before implementation
• Difference between task-based and reporting-based use cases
• Partnering with AWS to build accounting-specific language models
• Different accounting terminology varies by country
• Using AWS Bedrock and Lex for a domain-specific language model development
• Multiple AI models may be needed for single solution
• Customer feedback drives project funding decisions
• AI development integrated into regular product roadmaps
• Focus on reducing cost per user for AI features
• Success story: reducing 20-hour task to 5 minutes
• Tracks AI usage costs per customer interaction
• Early Gen AI hype caused confusion in the market
• Plans to make domain-specific models available via API
• Will offer language models on AWS Marketplace
• Emphasizes practical AI application over blind implementation

Participants:

• Amaya Souarez - EVP Cloud Services and Operations, Sage

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Box's Chief Product Officer Diego Dugatkin discusses how the enterprise content management platform is leveraging AI through partnerships with AWS Bedrock and continuing to innovate for their customers.

Topics Include:

• Introduction of Diego Dugatkin as Box's Chief Product Officer
• Box provides cloud content management for enterprise customers
• Focus on Intelligent Content Management
• Box serves 115,000 customers including 70% of Fortune 500
• Company manages approximately one exabyte of enterprise data
• Box expanding product portfolio to offer more customer value
• Partnership with AWS Bedrock for AI implementation announced
• Collaboration with Anthropic for LLM technology integration
• Box offers neutral approach letting customers choose preferred LLMs
• Common misconceptions about generative AI capabilities and limitations
• Generative AI helps accelerate contract analysis and classification processes
• Box Hubs enables content curation and multi-document queries
• Success measured through hub creation and query accuracy metrics
• Long-term AWS partnership continues expanding with new technologies
• Amazon is major Box customer while Box uses AWS
• API integration important for third-party developer implementations
• AI development exceeding speed expectations in efficiency improvements
• Challenges remain in defining AI agent roles and capabilities
• Content strategy crucial for deploying intelligent content management
• Companies must prepare for AI agents in workplace
• Flexibility in tech stack recommended over single-vendor approach
• Next 12-24 months will see accelerated industry changes
• Box maintains innovative culture through intrapreneurship approach
• Company regularly hosts internal and external hackathons
• Focus on maintaining integrated platform while acquiring companies
• Partnership between Box and AWS continues growing stronger

Participants:

• Diego Dugatkin – Chief Product Officer, Box

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Through case studies of Graviton implementation and GPU integration, Justin Fitzhugh, Snowflake’s VP of Engineering, demonstrates how cloud-native architecture combined with strategic partnerships can drive technical innovation and build business value.

Topics Include:

• Cloud engineering and AWS partnership
• Traditional databases had fixed hardware ratios for compute/storage
• Snowflake built cloud-native with separated storage and compute
• Company has never owned physical infrastructure
• Applications must be cloud-optimized to leverage elastic scaling
• Snowflake uses credit system for customer billing
• Credits loosely based on compute resources provided
• Company maintains cloud-agnostic approach across providers
• Initially aimed for identical pricing across cloud providers
• Now allows price variation while maintaining consistent experience
• Consumption-based revenue model ties to actual usage
• Performance improvements can actually decrease revenue
• Company tracked ARM's move to data centers
• Initially skeptical of Graviton performance claims
• Porting to ARM required complete pipeline reconstruction
• Discovered floating point rounding differences between architectures
• Amazon partnership crucial for library optimization
• Graviton migration took two years instead of one
• Achieved 25% performance gain with 20% cost reduction
• Team requested thousands of GPUs within two months
• GPU infrastructure was new territory for Snowflake
• Needed flexible pricing for uncertain future needs
• Signed three to five-year contracts with flexibility
• Team pivoted from building to fine-tuning models
• Partnership allowed adaptation to business changes
• Emphasizes importance of leveraging provider expertise
• Recommends early engagement with cloud providers
• Build relationships before infrastructure needs arise
• Maintain personal connections with provider executives

Participants:

• Justin Fitzhugh – VP of Engineering, Snowflake

See how Amazon Web Services gives you the freedom to migrate, innovate, and scale your software company at https://aws.amazon/isv/

In this AWS panel discussion, Naveen Rao, VP of AI of Databricks and Vijay Karunamurthy, Field CTO of Scale AI share practical insights on implementing generative AI in enterprises, leveraging private data effectively, and building reliable production systems.

Topics Include:

• Sherry Marcus introduces panel discussion on generative AI adoption
• Scale AI helps make AI models more reliable
• Databricks focuses on customizing AI with company data
• Companies often stressed about where to start with AI
• Board-level pressure driving many enterprise AI initiatives
• Start by defining specific goals and success metrics
• Build evaluations first before implementing AI solutions
• Avoid rushing into demos without proper planning
• Enterprise data vastly exceeds public training data volume
• Customer support histories valuable for AI training
• Models learning to anticipate customer follow-up questions
• Production concerns: cost, latency, and accuracy trade-offs
• Good telemetry crucial for diagnosing AI application issues
• Speed matters more for prose, accuracy for legal documents
• Cost becomes important once systems begin scaling up
• Organizations struggle with poor quality existing data
• Privacy crucial when leveraging internal business data
• Role-based access control essential for regulated industries
• AI can help locate relevant data across legacy systems
• Models need organizational awareness to find data effectively
• Private data behind firewalls most valuable for AI
• Customization gives competitive advantage over generic models
• Current AI models primarily do flexible data recall
• Next few years: focus on deriving business value
• Future developments in causal inference expected post-5 years
• Complex multi-agent systems becoming more important
• Scale AI developing "humanity's last exam" evaluation metric
• Discussion of responsibility and liability in AI decisions
• Companies must stand behind their AI system outputs
• Existing compliance frameworks can be adapted for AI

Participants:

• Naveen Rao – VP of AI, Databricks
• Vijay Karunamurthy – Field CTO, Scale AI
• Sherry Marcus Ph.D. - Director, Applied Science, AWS

See how Amazon Web Services gives you the freedom to migrate, innovate, and scale your software company at https://aws.amazon/isv/

Suresh Vasudevan, CEO of Sysdig, discusses the evolving challenges of cloud security incident response and the need for new approaches to mitigate organizational risk.

Topics Include:

• Cybersecurity regulations mandate incident response reporting.
• Challenges of cloud breach detection and response.
• Complex cloud attack patterns: reconnaissance, lateral movement, exploit.
• Rapid exploitation - minutes vs. days for on-prem.
• Importance of runtime, identity, and control plane monitoring.
• Limitations of EDR and SIEM tools for cloud.
• Coordinated incident response across security, DevOps, executives.
• Criticality of pre-defined incident response plans.
• Increased CISO personal liability risk and mitigation.
• Documenting security team's diligence to demonstrate due care.
• Establishing strong partnerships with legal and audit teams.
• Covering defensive steps in internal communications.
• Sysdig's cloud-native security approach and Falco project.
• Balancing prevention, detection, and response capabilities.
• Integrating security tooling with customer workflows and SOCs.
• Providing 24/7 monitoring and rapid response services.
• Correlating workload, identity, and control plane activities.
• Detecting unusual reconnaissance and lateral movement behaviors.
• Daisy-chaining events to identify potential compromise chains.
• Tracking historical identity activity patterns for anomaly detection.
• Aligning security with business impact assessment and reporting.
• Adapting SOC team skills for cloud-native environments.
• Resource and disruption cost concerns for cloud agents.
• Importance of "do no harm" philosophy for response.
• Enhancing existing security data sources with cloud context.
• Challenges of post-incident forensics vs. real-time response.
• Bridging security, DevOps, and executive domains.
• Establishing pre-approved incident response stakeholder roles.
• Maintaining documentation to demonstrate proper investigation.
• Evolving CISO role and personal liability considerations.
• Proactive management of cyber risk at board level.
• Developing strong general counsel and audit relationships.
• Transparency in internal communications to avoid discovery risks.
• Security teams as business partners, not just technicians.
• Sysdig's cloud security expertise and open-source contributions.

Participants:

· Suresh Vasudevan – CEO, Sysdig

See how Amazon Web Services gives you the freedom to migrate, innovate, and scale your software company at https://aws.amazon/isv/

AWS executive Giancarlo Casella explains how organizations can navigate global privacy regulations and achieve compliant international expansion using AWS's privacy reference architecture.

Topics Include:

• Welcome to executive forum on security and Gen AI
• Introduction of Giancarlo Casella from AWS Security Assurance Services
• AWS helps organizations with compliance and audit readiness
• Global expansion requires understanding local privacy laws
• Germany and France interpret GDPR differently
• Germany has Federal Data Protection Act (BDSG)
• France focuses on consumer privacy through CENIL
• Risk of non-compliance includes fines and reputation damage
• Privacy laws existed in only 10 countries in 2000
• EU Privacy Directive of 1990 was prominent
• By 2010, forty countries had privacy laws
• HIPAA and GLBA introduced in United States
• Now over 150 countries have privacy regulations
• 75% of world population under privacy laws soon
• Regulations are vague and open to interpretation
• GDPR example: encryption requirements lack specificity
• Need right stakeholders for privacy compliance
• Legal team must lead privacy interpretation
• Engineering implements technical privacy aspects
• Risk and compliance teams coordinate evidence gathering
• Data Protection Officer oversees entire program
• CIO, CTO, CISO alignment creates strong foundation
• Security transforms from bureaucratic to revenue enabler
• AWS develops cloud-specific privacy reference architecture
• Industry standards provide guidance frameworks
• AWS privacy reference architecture focuses on cloud specifics
• Data minimization and individual autonomy are key
• Case study: Middle Eastern AI company expands to Canada
• Company used CCTV at gas stations
• Created privacy baseline and roadmap
• Data flow documentation essential for compliance
• Continuous compliance strategy helps enable success
• Aligning stakeholders across different organizational lines
• Future of US federal privacy regulation discussed
• Discussion of responsible AI usage requirements

Participants:

• Giancarlo Casella - Head of Business Development and Growth Strategies, AWS Security Assurance Services

See how Amazon Web Services gives you the freedom to migrate, innovate, and scale your software company at https://aws.amazon/isv/