This week Latest Sale team proudly reports from the Technology Business Directory and covers Vegas to London AWS ExecLeaders Summit 2024.
The 2023 AWS re-Invent livestream session was inaugurated immaculately in Las Vegas by current AWS CEO Adam Selipsky. Selipsky who remains AWS CEO until June 3rd 2024, spoke of cloud transformation and innovations in data infrastructure. @LatestSale Founder attended the energetic Las Vegas Selipsky keynote via her digital pass and whilst Selipsky focused his attention on how customers could achieve their goals faster by mining untapped potential, innovation talks from Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, AWS Vice President of Data & AI, highlighted differentiated Generative AI applications to accelerate employee productivity. Peter DeSantis, Senior AWS VP of Utility Computing explored deep dive strategies for best practice engineering.
DATA DRIVEN SUCCESS
On April 23rd 2024, the Latest Sale Founder with a steadfast commitment to transformation, embarked on a journey to unlock boundless possibilities and chart a course towards a future when innovation reigns supreme, propelling the company’s leadership team towards data-driven success. Latest Sale’s Founder was delighted to attend in-person the AWS ExecLeaders Summit 2024, held close to central London’s iconic financial district, featuring riveting speakers from AWS, Anthropic, Just Eat, Thomson Reuters, Muzz and Professor Margaret Heffernan of Bath University. The summit promised to ignite leaders with an inspiring agenda.
THE C-SUITE MINGLE
C-Suite executives mingled in the AWS ExecLeaders London Summit 2024 networking lounge throughout the day and were treated to a 5-course banquet, a veritable culinary journey of epic and deluxe proportions. The customary first-class AWS hospitality opened with power-infused early morning delights including a mouthwatering continental breakfast with vegan smoothies and an abundance of fresh exotic fruit platters. The extraordinary summit was buzzing with delegates who collaborated with rigour, exchanging ideas whilst simultaneously developing valuable connections in their quest to meet new business challenges head on. In the new digital era, we knew we were invited to explore the key question posed by the AWS leadership teams, specifically, “What can we do collectively as leaders in the era of AI?”
EXPLORE, IMAGINE, CREATE, SUCCEED
Enhancing customer experiences and improving operations was a focal point of the Keynote- “A New Era for Leadership: Explore, Imagine, Create, Succeed.” Attendees gained valuable perspectives from Jeff Johnson, AWS General Manager UK, who highlighted the UK ambition to become a tech superpower by 2028 by leveraging cloud AI to unlock the country’s digital potential. Bringing the importance of digital skills to the forefront, Johnson noted that the UK economy faces a £63 billion loss in potential GDP revenue due to the digital skills gap.
Phil Le-Brun, AWS Director-Enterprise Strategy, traced the evolution of AWS since its first product launch in 2006, emphasizing the company’s role in enabling rapid integration without limits. Le-Brun explained how AWS is geared up to facilitate new ways of working and increasing productivity by freeing up the imagination of creators and technical teams through advances in computing power and mathematics. Le-Brun further expressed the accelerated focus on Generative Al combined with Mission Learning via the AWS Skillbuilder, which offers qualitative leadership training and empowers executives to envision a new technological future.
Structural leadership opens a “new wave of opportunities” Le-Brun insisted, with business leaders continuously seeking answers to three core problems: IMAGINE- (a new future), EXPLORE- (new opportunities) and thirdly, CREATE, (pathways to scale, and facilitate the arrival of products and services into the hands of consumers more quickly). Reinventing the customer experience was earmarked as the central foundation model for Bedrock.
GROWTH POWERED BY TECHNOLOGY
Charlie Clacton, Vice President of Thomson Reuters contributed to the inaugural early morning keynote and emphasized the importance of customer centric innovation to meet the requirements of 1bn daily, worldwide consumers of Thomson Reuters content, whilst Jessica Hall, Chief Product Officer at Just Eat Takeaway offered an enthused insight into the company’s vision for growth powered by technology.
INVESTORS, VCs, INVESTORS, VCs…..
The second mid-morning ExecLeaders’ Keynote delivered by Startup Investor and Advisor, Author and Founder Azeem Azhar, centred on the economic transition of a generation of workers ever more exposed to the breathtaking speed of technological development. He further determined how female emancipation changed the organisational structure of the workplace. Azhar also touched upon the concept of the “super powered worker” as well as code churn dynamics, and attested that Courage, Customization, Action, Communication, and Leadership are critical to navigate a more productive path.
LONG TERM VALUE CREATION
Kate Jensen, Chief Revenue Officer of Anthropic, discussed ethical AI principles, exploring innovation and scaling responsibly while accelerating AI, hardware, and software to train models. This attested to Anthropic’s focus on AI concepts and their application in enterprise chatbots, with case studies including Zendesk using AI for customer support and Lonely Planet highlighted for the company’s use of AI to offer customized itineraries to passengers.
The early afternoon leadership session “A Leader’s Guide to Gen AI”, opened up once again with Phil Le-Brun, who maintained that leveraging AI technologies to sustain long-term value creation in the context of potential Gen AI (General Artificial Intelligence) was pivotal to helping businesses generate revenue, grow, and create value. He also attested to the concept of “collective intelligence,” and the need to trust AI systems. Le-Brun further highlighted the transfer of skills and responsible AI implementation.
Abhinav Saxena, Global Private Equity Principal Advisor, AWS shared his own insights on how best to engage with private equity investors in the UK by creating value more quickly, whilst Boardwave Founder Phil Robinson and Adrian Asher Chief Information Security Officer, (CISO) at Checkout.com alongside Sabby Gill, CEO at Dext discussed the next growth priorities for businesses, focusing on areas such as bookkeeping, compliance, and Applied AI, with the primary objective to transform labour at scale and deploy financial transactions more quickly. The summit further provided actionable insights and best practice solutions for navigating the challenges and opportunities potentially associated with Gen AI whilst driving long-term value creation within organisations.
THE ESSENCE OF COLLABORATION RISES TO THE TOP
An enigmatic Howard Wright, VP Global AWS Head of Startups delivered a long-awaited, rousing introduction to the next afternoon leadership session on the agenda: “Disruptive Leadership: Lessons learned for the UKI’s fastest growing startups.” Wright emphasized current opportunities for startups and the importance of collaboration in driving innovation.
Angie Ma, Co-Founder of Faculty AI shared her personal insights on the importance of developing enterprise-level AI solutions to unlock value and improve decision making, asserting with confidence, “We are experts at helping customers reap AI’s benefits whilst managing risk.”
Shahzad Yunus, founder and CEO of Muzz, entertained the crowd and provided interesting anecdotes about Muzz, probably the largest Muslim matrimonial app worldwide. As a Y Combinator alumni, he shared unique insights into how the app caters to the specific needs of Muslim communities, emphasizing the importance of marriage over dating.
Each of the two co-Founders invited to speak by Howard Wright put forward their own interpretation of leadership and lessons learned, offering valuable insights for startups aiming for rapid growth and innovation whilst responding to emerging trends and challenges in the startup ecosystem. An addition to the fireside panel, Daniel Verten- Partner and Strategy Leader at Synthesia, a synthetic media generation company that develops software used to create AI generated video content, held his own as delegates bombarded him with questions about data, voice cloning, AI legislation and intellectual property. Verten also attested to the importance of resilience and described Synthesia’s journey and fundraise call out to Shark Tank’s Mark Cuban as a last-ditch effort that paid off. $1m requested, a few sleepless nights, and then banked!
GEN AI MEETS THE INTERSECTION OF CULTURE AND CX
Prominent speakers at the “Data Strategy in the Era of GenAI” leadership session included Jules Marshall, Director of Product, BBC, Craig Suckling, Chief Data Officer, UK Government, Kate Jensen, Head of Revenue- Anthropic, Erik VanZetta, Data and AI GTM Lead, EMEA, AWS and Rick Sears, GM for Open Data Services at AWS. The panel explored data readiness principles in the era of Generative AI.
“The Intersection of Culture, Customer Experience and Generative AI in Innovative Businesses” session ran in conjunction with the “Data Strategy in the Era of GenAI” leadership fireside panel discussion. The brilliant minds of Siegfried Schallenmueller, EMEA Commercial Digital Innovation, Amazon Web Services and Brittany Anderson, Innovation and Transformation Delivery, Amazon Web Services developed at full speed. Both gave attendees an enlightening overview of how Amazon builds on its mission to be the most customer-centric company in the world through a combination of culture, mechanisms, tenets, and technology by extending customer experience (CX) solution portfolio principles to maximize the value of data.
COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE FOR TEAM COHERENCE
The closing Keynote by the remarkable Margaret Heffernan, Professor of Practice at Bath University, Author of Wilful Blindness and Columnist, highlighted the importance of leadership in fostering teamwork, stressing the need for leaders to develop skills in managing conflict and fostering collaboration across diverse tasks alongside the creative process, to best navigate an uncertain future. Heffernan referenced MIT research on “collective intelligence,” indicating that innovative solutions often emerge when diverse organisational factors come together to tackle complex challenges.
As the London AWS ExecLeaders Summit 2024 came to a close, the Latest Sale team took on board the conclusions of Heffernan, including factoring in the relevance of a high IQ over team interactions. Heffernan’s guidelines earmarked the following core facilitators to healthy team coherence;
Reciprocity
Generosity
Trust
Helpfulness
As trailblazers in the realm of organic technology™, Latest Sale remains dedicated to pushing the boundaries of innovation, driving meaningful change, and shaping a future that is not only technologically advanced but also sustainable and inclusive. By fostering a culture of creativity, collaboration, and experimentation, we aim to become the catalyst for transformative shifts that will revolutionize industries, elevate human experiences, and redefine the way we interact with technology.
Furthermore, we conclude by determining that the concept of “Social Interaction Capital” will remain at the heart of our endeavours as responsible AI business leaders.
Image credits: all images used to create AWS editorial content as published on the latestsale.com blog and X and Linkedin feeds between Monday 20th May and Friday 24th May 2024 inclusive are outlined as follows:
Bilal Ulker – stock.adobe.com
keBu.Medien – stock.adobe.com
Rafael Henrique – stock.adobe.com
photo for everything – stock.adobe.com X 2
Sundry Photography – stock.adobe.com