AI and Generative AI (Gen AI) can help public sector, healthcare and educational organisations overcome key challenges, fundamentally revolutionising the way they operate and serve citizens.
This is according to Rashika Ramlal, public sector country manager at AWS South Africa, who was speaking ahead of this week’s ITWeb AI Summit. AWS is the lead sponsor of this event.
“We know public sector organisations face unique challenges. They have to improve service delivery and citizen experiences, streamline complex operations, embolden both physical and cyber security, optimise costs and boost employee productivity, and to drive innovation. They can leverage GenAI to achieve all these objectives,” she says.
By integrating GenAI technologies, Ramlal says South Africa’s public sector can become more efficient, proactive, and responsive to the needs of its citizens, ultimately driving significant innovation and improvement in public service delivery.
Despite its immense potential, there is some hesitance among local public sector organisations when it comes to GenAI, Ramlal says. “AWS is working to dispel any uncertainties and apprehensions regarding AI technologies. We are helping address the AI skills shortage, offering POCs [proof of concept] and workshops on AI, and taking customers to our GenAI Innovation Centres to make them more comfortable and see how GenAI can work for their organisations,” she says.
GenAI opportunities for SA public sector
“We are seeing many public sector organisations worldwide, as well as within South Africa, keen on adopting Gen AI for the opportunities it presents," Ramlal says.
Key sectors where Gen AI can revolutionise services include:
Healthcare – GenAI can be used to assist with diagnosis, treatment planning and patient management. AI driven analytics can also help with predicting outbreaks and managing public health crises.
Education – GenAI can be used for personal and individualised learning experiences, providing real time feedback and assisting in creation of educational content.
Public safety – GenAI can be used in predicting crime patterns and optimising emergency responses.
Government services – GenAI can streamline bureaucratic processes such as document processing and public inquiries through chatbots and automated systems that improve response times and accessibility.
Transportation – GenAI can optimise traffic management systems, predict maintenance needs and enhance public transportation systems through predictive analysis and real time data processing.
Environmental management – GenAI can monitor environmental conditions, predict changes and manage natural resources, aiding in conservation efforts and disaster response planning
Policy making – GenAI can help by analysing large volumes of data and help in evidence-based policy making, enabling better informed decision making and better outcomes for public initiatives.
Cybersecurity in Government– GenAI can ensure security of government databases and networks by detecting anomalies and potential threats faster and efficiently.
Driving innovation in the public sector – GenAI can propose novel solutions to longstanding problems by simulating scenario analysis and predicting outcomes.
Success stories
Numerous AI and GenAI success stories are emerging locally and abroad, Ramlal says.
Among these is Aerobotics, an agri-tech startup from Cape Town, which uses Amazon SageMaker to improve the training speed of its Tree Insights product, helping farmers to project crop yields from drone photography.
Seamonster, an impact gaming company, has leveraged the power of AI to position itself as a leader in the intersection of gaming, learning, and marketing for its clients – who make up a long list of top African and global brands like Nedbank, AlexForbes, Capitec, Takealot, National Geographic, and many more.
Ramlal says even government departments are experimenting with Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Lex and Amazon Kendra to provide GenAI Chatbot experiences integrated into their online portals to summarise information and search through large volumes of data, improving citizen experiences.
AWS builds AI skills
As South African organisations begin their journey with GenAI, one of the main challenges to innovating with the new technology is a lack of specialised AI skills.
Ramlal says AWS is committed to next generation skills development. In line with this, it has already pledged to train 29 million people globally in cloud skills by 2025 and has now extended its free training to cover AI courses for two million people globally.
“We are removing cost as a barrier to accessing these critical skills,” says Ramlal. “These Cloud and AI courses can be accessed in person through our AWS Skills centre in South Africa or online through SkillsBuilder. There are tailored courses suitable for business decision makers and non-tech audiences, as well as courses for developers and technical audiences.”
Tools to support GenAI innovation
Ramlal notes that AWS also offers a range of tools to help organisations innovate with GenAI:
- Amazon Bedrock provides customers with access to a broad range of 3rd party foundation models such as AI 21Lab, Anthropic, Stability AI and Amazon’s Titan foundation models. Bedrock provides maximum flexibility to choose the best foundation model for a particular use case, addressing complex security and data privacy requirements, and optimising for cost, scalability and reliability.
- Claude 3 Opus, is also available on Bedrock. Opus can manage complex tasks and can navigate open-ended scenarios with human-like understanding. Claude 3 Opus is outperforming peers including GPT-4 in reasoning, math logic and expert knowledge
- Amazon CodeWhisperer is a machine learning-powered service that helps developers by providing coding recommendations in real time. This is free for individual developers and helps speed up the development process and helps reduce errors.
- Amazon Q can help you get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, solve problems, generate content, and take actions using the data and expertise found in your company's information repositories, code, and enterprise systems. When you chat with Amazon Q, it provides immediate, relevant information and advice to help streamline tasks, speed decision-making, and help spark creativity and innovation at work.
Because public sector workloads are subject to strict privacy and security regulations, Ramlal says AWS AI and ML services inherit AWS’s enterprise-grade security and privacy best practices. These include implementing safeguards through Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock, combating disinformation by watermarking in Amazon Titan Image Generator, building trust by standing behind AWS models and applications with indemnification, and enhancing transparency through AWS AI Service Cards.
Ramlal says: “We consistently launch AI accelerators and mentorship programmes like the AWS Generative AI Innovation Centre to support organisations creating the next big solutions. At our international AWS Generative AI Innovation Centres, we have experts helping organisations ideate, identify, and implement Gen AI solutions securely, with expert guidance to prioritise use cases, estimate business value, assess feasibility and blockers, and define a clear path to success.”
The ITWeb AI Summit 2024 will be held at The Forum in Bryanston on 25 April. For more information, and to register for this event, visit https://www.itweb.co.za/event/itweb-ai-summit-2024/
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