Local groups seek to grasp tech trends early

In Las Vegas to attend the AWS re:Invent 2024 conference, Tran Nhat Minh, deputy CEO of Vietnam International Bank (VIB), has been eager to explore cutting-edge technologies to integrate into the bank.

“VIB strives to be the most innovative and customer-centric bank, requires us to continuously adopt the most advanced and effectively-implemented technologies,” Minh told VIR. “This conference is one of the key events that helps us stay updated, so we can determine the right direction for our future growth.”

This is the third consecutive time Minh and the VIB team have attended the AWS event. Last year, VIB prioritised generative AI innovation and is now set to launch a cutting-edge virtual assistant, aiming to become the first bank in Vietnam to launch an AWS-powered GenAI virtual assistant to millions of customers.

VIB is also working with AWS on its core banking transformation programme. In November, the bank was one of the first banks in Vietnam to mitigate its website to AWS. Now, VIB is exploring new AWS technologies, expected to be announced shortly.

Together with VIB, dozens of other Vietnamese groups also joined the event. They were among tens of thousands of regional and global companies heading to Las Vegas on December 2-6 for re:Invent, where a number of new tech capabilities and features were announced, and new partnerships were made.

“We have entered an era of unprecedented societal challenges and rapid technological advancements. Harnessing technology for good has become both an ethical imperative and a profitable endeavour,” said Dr. Werner Vogels, chief technology officer at AWS.

“The workforce of tomorrow will not only be driven by financial success and career progression, but by a deeper desire to create positive change in the world. The organisations and businesses that acknowledge this shift and embrace purpose-driven work will be poised for long-term success,” he added.

AWS and Grab announced that the latter has selected the former as its preferred cloud provider. With AWS, Grab is pursuing a technology-led strategy to accelerate growth across its mobility, deliveries, and financial services verticals, including its new digibanks, while continuing to improve its operational efficiencies and reduce IT infrastructure costs.

Grab relies on the world’s leading cloud to serve 41.9 million monthly transacting users and over 13 million driver and delivery partners registered on its platform. Every second, Grab processes over a hundred transactions, receives over 500,000 GPS pings, and services over 50,000 e-travel authorisation requests.

By leveraging AWS’s resilient, secure, and elastic cloud, Grab can rapidly launch new services and scale efficiently across its eight-country footprint.

Meanwhile, Apple announced at the event one of the latest chapters of its collaboration with AWS in the form of Apple Intelligence, a powerful set of features integrated across iPhone, iPad, and Mac devices.

The personal intelligence system understands users and helps them work, communicate, and express themselves in new and exciting ways, the company said.

“AWS’ services have been instrumental in supporting our scale and growth and, most importantly, in delivering incredible experiences for our users,” said Benoit Dupin, senior director of machine learning and AI at Apple.

For over a decade, Apple has relied on AWS to power many of its cloud-based services. Now, this collaboration is fuelling the next generation of features for Apple users worldwide, Dupin added.

Similarly, digital operations management business PagerDuty is using AWS’ products to help its customers – including banks, media streaming services, and retailers – employ generative AI to help them better respond, recover, and learn from, service and operational incidents such as unplanned downtime.

PagerDuty chairperson and CEO Jennifer Tejada said that the company’s new advance features use AWS services including Q Business, Bedrock, and others to power AI-assisted incident response workflows such as intelligent chat-based context and answers.

“By integrating with Q Business, PagerDuty has been able to centralise data, reducing the need for responders to switch between multiple third-party application, while AWS responsible AI safeguards help to enforce accuracy,” said Tejada.

Tech expert Tien Hoang said that as advanced technology is making deeper and wider impacts on all industries and sectors, players need to make quick moves.

“VIB or any other company like Apple, Grab, and JPMorgan Chase are all aware about the trends. The sooner they adapt to new technologies, the more competitive edge they gain. I see more Vietnamese groups attend events like these online in recent years, and in the near future, more Vietnamese businesses will attend in-person to network.”