Ushering in new world of productivity for businesses with AWS App Studio

Campus Life & Style helps over 28,000 students across 50 locations find a room (and community) to call home for the school year. With App Studio, a team of two were able to build a complete application that streamlines data intake, management, and reporting for its 150-person team.

AWS App Studio, a generative AI-powered service that uses natural language to create enterprise-grade applications

Scott Puntenney, national revenue manager at Campus Life & Style, said, “Our market survey process gives us the data to determine the next locations to provide student housing, but this process is excruciatingly manual with more than 150 people involved in data collection, entry, and validation across multiple spreadsheets, forms, and dashboards. We expect that this data processing application will increase the efficiency of our market survey collection and distribution process by 20 per cent and cut down on 98 per cent of the human errors associated with manual data entry.”

“We now plan to roll out App Studio to modernise our financial and human resources data pipelines and use other AWS generative AI services to further improve how we manage our processes at scale,” Puntenney added.

Meanwhile, for Deloitte, a leading provider of auditing and assurance, consulting, financial advisory, risk advisory, tax, and related services, App Studio helps its technical employees build secure, scalable applications in minutes that streamline tasks and increase operational efficiency.

JB McGinnis, US AWS alliance leader at Deloitte Consulting LLP said, “As a global provider working with brands from all around the world across various industries, our teams need to operate across a diverse set of clients that all have distinct tasks and processes. With App Studio, our technical employees are able to take charge and easily go from idea to application in just a few sentences, streamlining these activities for the entire team. As teams grow and business goals change, App Studio applications can efficiently scale and shift to our employees’ needs, helping us better deliver for our clients.”

HealthVerity provides the largest ecosystem of healthcare and consumer data in the US to help build patient journeys and improve patient outcomes. App Studio has opened up low-code tools for the company for the first time, allowing it to leverage its many existing AWS investments while empowering employees to build applications in minutes, instead of days, with the help of its generative AI-powered assistant.

Jeremy Stewart, vice president of engineering at HealthVerity, said, “Historically, we built all of our internal tools from the ground up because existing low-code solutions did not meet our company’s strict security requirements. A small team of five developers had to manage this infrastructure on top of their day-to-day work, increasing our operational costs, and taking them away from their core responsibilities. With App Studio, every application is secure and fully managed by AWS, freeing our employees to focus on customer-facing projects.”

On July 10, at AWS Summit New York, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced AWS App Studio, opening up application development to technical professionals without software development skills (such as IT project managers, data engineers, and enterprise architects), empowering them to quickly build internal applications that are secure and fully managed by AWS, eliminating the need for operational expertise. This allows users to focus on building applications that help solve business problems and increase productivity in their roles, while removing the heavy lifting of building and running applications.

According to experts, every company has internal processes and activities that employees manage daily to keep their organisation running. Hospital procurement teams track medical supplies to understand what is in stock and to order more when low; account executives at advertising agencies follow a specific workflow when designing, reviewing, and approving advertisements; and property managers monitor their housing inventory and repairs needed on rentals. These processes are time-consuming and often managed through spreadsheets and documents that are difficult to maintain, error prone, insecure, and tough to scale to multiple users. Employees are much more effective when they can use a custom application tailored to these problems, making it easier to enter information, manage complex processes, and connect to their trusted systems, like Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) or Salesforce.

Despite this, development resources to build custom applications are scarce, and as a result, many internal applications do not get built. That is why employees with technical experience turn to low-code tools to build applications themselves. These tools, however, come with their own challenges.

Current low-code tools often have a steep learning curve, requiring platform-specific knowledge, and the applications users build often do not meet their company’s security requirements, leading to the IT department shutting them down.

These applications also struggle to scale as usage grows, forcing users to hand off hosting and running the application to their company’s development team. This leaves many employees stuck between low-code solutions that do not meet their needs, or continuing to painstakingly manage these processes manually through spreadsheets and documents.

With App Studio, users do not have to think about the underlying code at all — App Studio handles all the deployment, operations, and maintenance. Once an application is ready to deploy, App Studio generates a custom URL that end users can access using existing enterprise authentication tools and role-based access controls.

According to AWS, every application deployed via App Studio is highly secure, scalable, and performant, freeing technical professionals to focus on innovating rather than application management. It is free to build with App Studio, and customers only pay for the time employees spend using the published applications, saving up to 80 per cent compared to other low-code offerings. App Studio is available in preview today in US West (Oregon).

“AWS App Studio opens up application development to an entirely new set of builders, helping them create enterprise-grade applications in minutes,” said Dilip Kumar, vice president of Applications at AWS. “Designed to meet the needs of the largest enterprise customers and fastest growing startups, App Studio is a force multiplier for technical employees at any company. Now, using natural language, any user with some technical experience can simply describe the application they want to build, and App Studio takes care of the development process, delivering an application that employees can start using immediately. It has never been easier for technical professionals to build custom applications tailored to the unique needs of their business, ushering in a new world of productivity for businesses of all sizes.”

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