Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

Information about Amazon’s Cloud Innovation Center with Arizona State University is available at https://news.asu.edu/content/arizona-state-university-and-amazon-web-services-collaborate-introduce-smart-city-cloud.

You can learn more about Amazon Web Services’ services (we couldn’t resist!) at https://aws.amazon.com.

Our host, Maureen Metcalf, posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI. Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Books we’re reading for fun or personal development right now include:

• Everyday Ubuntu: Living Better Together, the African Way by Mungi Ngomane. Hardback (https://amzn.to/48Doh6j) and audiobook (https://amzn.to/48YCRF4)
• Nerve: Lessons on Leadership from Two Women Who Went First by Martha Piper & Indira Samarasekera. Paperback (https://amzn.to/3tOtzg4) and audiobook (https://amzn.to/41OYdT5)
• Jilly Truit murder mysteries by Beverley McLachlin:
  • Full Disclosure – https://amzn.to/46TxW6Q (paperback) https://amzn.to/46VDL3Q (audiobook)
  • Denial – https://amzn.to/46YCbhs (paperback) https://amzn.to/3GJc0AA (audiobook)
• Women and Leadership: Journey Toward Equity by Sherylle J. Tan & Lisa DeFrank-Cole

NOTE: As an Amazon partner, we may make a small commission from books you buy through these links.

Other episodes you’ll enjoy:

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Dave Levy is the Vice President of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Worldwide Public Sector (WWPS). In this role, Dave leads government, education, healthcare, aerospace and satellite, and nonprofit businesses globally. He and his teams help customers realize the potential of technology to transform their organizations and fulfill their missions. Previously, Dave served as the Vice President of AWS’s U.S. Government, Nonprofit and Global Healthcare businesses. Before joining AWS, Dave worked for Apple Inc. for 12 years and led the teams that helped the government adopt innovative mobile technologies. Dave serves on the M Health Fairview Health System board in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the Innovation and Research Board for Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, DC.

Transcript
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Maureen: [00:00:00] This is Innovating Leadership Co-Creating our Future. I’m your host, Maureen Metcalf. Founder and CEO of the Innovative Leadership Institute where we help leaders be future ready. Helping us in that mission today is Dave Levy, vice president of Amazon Web Services Worldwide Public Sector. We’ll be talking about how public sector customers are innovating with generative AI responsibly and securely.

Dave, we’re glad you’re with us today.

Dave: Happy to be here. Really a pleasure.

Maureen: Let’s start with talking about you as a leader. What’s your leadership philosophy?

Dave: Philosophy? Wow. [00:01:00] Well, I’ve been at Amazon for seven years, and before that worked for a number of companies. And I would say that it really starts with trying to identify and hire the best people that you can.

There’s a lot of fantastic people, a lot of fantastic leaders, a lot of talented people out there, but you really wanna figure out if you can, how to hire the best people that you can for your business or for your industry. Then for us in particular at Amazon, we like to think that we hire people who are missionaries.

They’re really here to have a major impact on customers. Customers are wonderfully dissatisfied a lot, and if you’re oriented towards being a missionary and you’re customer obsessed. You’re going to have to adapt to change, and you’re gonna have to react to customers changing needs and wants and conditions.

And so part of how I lead is through those sorts of [00:02:00] lenses of being a missionary, of being obsessed with customers. Constantly wanting to do better and deliver more for customers. The industry that we’re in is going to change. You have to accept that fact that it’s constantly changing and you have to grow and learn with it.

And the last thing I’ll say is one of our leadership principles at Amazon is learn and be curious. It’s a great opportunity to really continue to reinvent yourself as a leader. To reinvent yourself as someone who helps customers through their challenges is to constantly be learning and be curious about as much as you can, and so I try to lead by example in that way.

I also try to encourage my teams to lean into that.

Maureen: As you said, especially public sector, and this matters for all of us because it keeps us safe and our public sector with increasing sophistication with hackers. There were more ways to go after our government than there used to be. The services AWS provides to keep our platform safe are foundational to our society functioning [00:03:00] effectively?

Dave: Yeah, I think so. I think so. And the pace at which the world is changing today, the amount of things that are happening around us is accelerating. We have a saying at Amazon. Speed matters disproportionately so, and the speed at which you solve problems, the speed you’re able to scale, all of these things matter in delivery.

Delivery of citizen services delivery of protecting your citizens and protecting your stakeholders, all of the speed really, really matters, and Cloud enables that flexibility to go at speed.

Maureen: Back to your comment about curiosity, that ability, when things seem upended, I can either be cranky or I can be curious.

It seems like those are my options, right? Like this thing happened again, or I wonder why this thing happened again. What are my opportunities here?

Dave: Sometimes I feel myself being both cranky. I, I allow myself to be cranky and curious.

Maureen: It is often a both.

Dave: Yeah.

Maureen: What are some of the biggest challenges your customers [00:04:00] face and how is technology like AI helping to solve those problems?

Dave: In my organization we have. Tens of thousands of public sector customers across the world. Those public sector customers are governments, they’re education institutions, they’re nonprofits of all types and sizes and missions. They are also healthcare organizations across the world, and those organizations are looking to be secure.

They’re looking to be resilient. They’re looking for flexibility. They’re looking to move faster. In some cases, in the frame of the government, they’re looking to create experiences for their citizens that they can deliver on. We are all consumers of what public sector organizations deliver, whether it’s education or whether it’s a service from government.

And our customers are looking to do that and increasingly do that at scale. Better experience that you would have with your government organization or with your educational institution. And so [00:05:00] they’re looking to do that, and they’re also looking to take advantage of newer technologies in a safe and responsible way.

Generative AI and AI in general. They’re really powerful tools. But I will say all of this really starts with cloud because the cloud offers. A high degree of automation. It can reduce cost, it can improve efficiency. You can collaborate across your organization, you can share data. All of that leads to things like improved decision making, innovation and adaptability.

And so artificial intelligence and increasingly generative ai, the foundation of that really is cloud.

Maureen: And I assume that also ensures computing power. Because my understanding is generative AI takes a lot of computing power.

Dave: It does. If we’re talking about generative ai, our point of view is that there’s really three layers of the generative AI stack, and at the bottom layer you [00:06:00] have really model training, and that’s the training and inference of models, and that’s where you hear a lot about cost and computing power and the cost to train a model.

There’s also some other things going on. There’s some supply issues around these sorts of technologies. And so what we’ve done is we’ve created some of our own customized. Chips to address some of those issues. Uhtraining, which is for training models and inia, which is for the inferences and so on that bottom layer of the stack.

And there’s been a lot of talk just recently about generative ai. Most of that discussion has been about the application layer, hence where you hear a lot about chat, GPT and technologies like that at the application layer. But at that bottom layer, we see customers training models and doing inference, and that’s where a lot of computing power is required.

The middle layer, what you have is a situation like ours where you have a product like Bedrock where an organization can bring many models in [00:07:00] as well as their own data, and combine that in an architecture to really support doing generative AI and getting the predictions out of it from many sources of data.

And you can do that securely. You can do it without putting your own data in a situation where it’s available to others, so it’s only available to you. And then at the top layer, that’s the application layer. We build a lot of applications, but I think there’s gonna be. Applications built by many, many parties that are gonna develop new ideas and new innovations that we haven’t even thought of yet.

I’ll give you an example. Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, they’re a world leader in cancer treatment. They built a new research solution using Claude. Model on Amazon Bedrock and it helps clinicians in the interpretation of certain lab results that can be particularly complicated to understand. And so this solution is really designed to provide fast and accurate analysis and aid clinicians and the diagnosis of medical conditions, assessment of treatment, and determinations of the [00:08:00] next steps in clinical care.

And that’s just an example of what’s possible with generative ai. We’re really just at the very beginning of these technologies.

Maureen: I appreciate hearing about the three different layers. ’cause we don’t often talk about the foundation at all and rarely talk about the second layer. Although when we think about healthcare institutions, national labs, security is paramount as well as horsepower.

Dave: Yeah, absolutely. At AWS, we wanna play key role in democratizing these sorts of services, like democratizing machine learning, making it accessible to anyone who wants to use it. Democratizing access to generative AI services like I described in that middle layer. And so our goal is to make it safe and practical and cost effective for public sector and to successfully build and deploy generative AI solutions on that top layer and build applications that will really help deliver on their mission.

Maureen: It sounds like that top layer is only possible with [00:09:00] the foundation and the second layer, otherwise the applications themselves don’t function. They’re not grounded in anything.

Dave: That’s true. And I would also add that there’s not gonna be one model that rules them all. I mean, we have our own models.

There’s lots of really great models that are being trained. There will be more to come. And again, I would just emphasize, I think we’re in the very beginning of this phase, but I think what you said is, is really key. Security is key. Responsible AI is key, and we’re really working closely with our customers on things like that.

We’re committed to developing AI responsibly. We take a people-centered approach. Prioritizing education with our customers, and we want to integrate responsible AI across all of that lifecycle that I described.

Maureen: You’ve said responsible AI about six times in the last sentence. It doesn’t escape me. How do you, and how does AWS define responsible?

How do you even. Defining what is responsible in such a complicated environment. [00:10:00]

Dave: It’s gonna be a collaboration. Responsible AI is gonna be a collaboration between government and industry to support the safe, secure, and responsible development of all of these technologies. At Amazon, we’re dedicated to driving innovation on behalf of our customers and consumers, but we’re also very convicted about establishing and implementing safeguards to protect them, and I think that’s going to be a continuing collaboration between government and industry for many years to come.

Again, I think this people-centric approach that I mentioned is really important. It’s critical because getting as many people involved in learning about ai, understanding AI is gonna be part of how we develop responsible AI for all of us going forward. Education and a people-centric approach is gonna be one of the primary things that help us get there.

Maureen: Will you elaborate a little bit on both the education and people-centric.

Dave: Yeah, we’re doing things like, [00:11:00] you know, we announced something called AI Ready, and that’s a new commitment to provide free AI skills to 2 million people globally by 2025. We’ve launched a few initiatives designed for all ages and all levels of knowledge.

To get at this problem. So eight new and free generative AI courses. We’ve got AWS Generative AI Scholarship, so that’s providing more than 50,000 high school and university students globally with access to a new generative AI course on Udacity. Then we’ve got a new collaboration with code.org designed to help students learn about generative ai, and we’re focusing on helping students from underrepresented and underserved communities get access to generative AI education.

These are also foundational elements. I can tell you, just on a personal note, I don’t wanna go back too far because I would date myself. When I was in high school, one of my high schools was one of the few that had access in the eighties to a computer lab. And it made all the difference in the world for [00:12:00] me and the students that got a chance to participate back then and for my career.

And it’s through these types of programs, we wanna remove barriers to accessing these sorts of critical skills.

Maureen: So next is AI leadership skills. Yeah. Now that, now that we teach our people to do it, now we have to teach our leaders to do it.

Dave: We can help with that too. I mean, I think, I think this is one of the most exciting times in technology, and again, I don’t wanna date myself, but I’ve been around technology a long time and this is one of the most exciting times.

And I do see leaders across public sector embracing the discussion. And I think that’s a good thing. It’s a good that they’re embracing the discussion and having the discussion because we believe that this is gonna reinvent. Nearly every customer experience. And it’s a great opportunity for leaders to get involved and understand how that’s gonna happen and what sorts of things they should be considering and thinking about.

Maureen: And back to the curiosity and sometimes frustration that there is an opportunity for those who are embracing.

Dave: Yeah, [00:13:00] sure.

Maureen: And not that we don’t still have frustration.

Dave: Yeah. Yeah. Back to the crankiness part. Yeah.

Maureen: You also talked about people-centric. Now that you’re training people, talk a little bit more about the people-centric part of this.

Dave: Generative AI has the potential to transform every customer experience. There are going to be opportunities and innovations that we haven’t even thought of yet. Giving people the training to understand what generative AI is, what the possibilities are, and then providing the infrastructure in a way that’s organized for people to go do that is gonna allow this invention and reinvention and transformation.

And so there are few keys we see. One is empowering decision makers with data. Generative AI can process and analyze vast amounts of data faster and more efficiently than a human could. Empowering decision makers with data and this understanding is gonna be critical. I think the other [00:14:00] thing is it’s gonna help speed up research faster, drug discovery, more accurate detection, more efficient treatment.

Again, this people-centric approach of helping people understand what are the possibilities, more personalized and convenient services. Chatbots can handle routine citizen inquiries so that employees can focus on more complex tasks while also improving. Customer service experience, generative AI can improve productivity.

You can apply it to repetitive tasks so the humans can focus on higher level priorities. An example of that would be like an agency could use it to augment workflows like document processing or case management or something like that. And so it’s gonna be about helping people understand what are the use cases, what are the possibilities.

There’s a great example in the UK where the Swindon Burro Council used generative ai, and they created this solution that basically converts complex documents like a tenancy agreement into easy read format, and [00:15:00] people with learning disabilities can get access to these tenancy agreements. It could also help with low literacy skills or cognitive impairment.

This organization’s gonna open source the solution. So you know, you think about the implications of that for Citizens Access. It’s a really compelling and exciting time. So helping people understand the possibilities here and getting them to learn about what it would take. It’s gonna allow them to convert ideas like this into action.

Maureen: The place I go is medical research.

Dave: Yeah.

Maureen: And I love the idea that it’s also helping learning and for people who are not typical in the learning space, giving support material so people can live independently is huge.

Dave: Yeah. There’re just so many opportunities. I mean, you, you talk about research just to, to jump in there.

The Allen Institute is using AI to build the first ever map of the human brain, providing insight into brain disease and why conditions like [00:16:00] Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s occur. And the plan is to leverage generative AI to help researchers simulate brain processes and speed up discoveries, computing power, generative ai.

These are all at the forefront of this sort of research.

Maureen: I’m working with cancer researchers and what they can do now just with the access to compute power. Imagine a future where there is no cancer or people are not dying of cancer. It’s an illness that you get that gets then cured.

Dave: Yeah.

Maureen: Because I assume most of our listeners have had someone who’s touched by just that one disease and then amplify that out to every disease we have.

Dave: Yeah. What a wonderful vision, and it’s something we can all agree on. It’s a global issue for all of us, and we’ve got technologies now that can help us get there faster.

Maureen: Then another one because now that people aren’t gonna die of cancer, we need more food. So what is the mechanism where we can then use sensors and AI to adjust food [00:17:00] production?

I mean, there are just so many ways that this ripples through our entire economic structure and our infrastructure.

Dave: We’re at the very early days of this wave. Again, with the cost of computing resources coming down, the scale of cloud, the ideas that are out there in the world, and you start to get excited about the possibilities for sure.

Maureen: In these little imagining exercises, I’m incredibly excited, and yet I recognize a lot of people aren’t yet ready to embrace it. From a leadership perspective, how can organizations accelerate the pace of embracing it? How do you work with your clients to help them get excited about it

Dave: in a number of ways.

The first is the foundation is cloud. Fundamentally, you’re not gonna get to the promise of generative AI without moving to the cloud and moving your data to the cloud and getting it in a place where it’s accessible, where it’s [00:18:00] secure, where it’s readable and healthy, and in a place where you can apply computing power to it, where you can combine it with models where you can.

Maybe perhaps start to create your own large language model based on your data. You know, you can use other large language models, but nobody knows you, like you. Step one is really helping organizations on their strategy to move to cloud. The other thing is we’ve got a lot of partnerships out there and we’re cultivating even more.

You know, one, we just recently announced a new AI focused, what we call Cloud Innovation Center at Arizona State. That center will help global public sector customers use AI to address their challenges, and any nonprofit or education or government organization can apply to work on a challenge at one of our cloud innovation centers.

We offer things like no cost, technical expertise, prototyping, help define use cases, and so good success there already, we’ve already helped create a chat bot that delivers [00:19:00] real-time support on cybersecurity or query medical documents. And so partnerships I think are gonna be critical and we encourage those.

And then I mentioned training and upskilling. The workforce of tomorrow has to be ready. It really is the most transformative technology of our generation, but we’ll only maximize that potential if we bring along the brightest minds from all walks of life. We wanna make sure that anyone, anyone with the desire to learn can access this next generation technology.

Some of the programs I mentioned earlier, like AI Ready. To help 2 million people. That’s one way We’ve got a big focus on the students in all communities. We committed to help 29 people get free cloud computing by 2025, and we’ve already helped more than 21 million. So we’re almost there on that pledge.

And I think those are three foundational ways we’re helping customers

Maureen: because this is such a game changer. It has the opportunity to reduce, I wish I could say a race. [00:20:00] But reduce the gap between haves and have nots. I don’t know that that’s the right wording, but areas where people didn’t traditionally have access because their parents didn’t have access and their grandparents didn’t have access.

By making this available to all communities, underrepresented communities and creating a pathway seems like it creates a very different future than. Many people could have imagined based on their past.

Dave: You’re exactly right, and the democratization of this technology and these tools is a critical element of that.

Like I mentioned earlier, just in a more personal example, I was fortunate enough to have access to. Personal computers and an early look at programming languages, and I just got excited and inspired by it as a young person, and it’s literally set my life and trajectory in a way that might not have gone otherwise, and I had access to it.

You can take your ideas and those [00:21:00] ideas can come from anywhere. I mean, they can come from anywhere in any community, anywhere around the world, and they’re there today. Getting that access is really critical, and having that access be affordable, having the training will help unleash those ideas, and we’re extremely committed to that.

And we think that that’s the way we’re gonna continue to innovate as a world, and it’s gonna accelerate productivity.

Maureen: And you’ve talked about people who have learning disabilities and other folks who were also being brought forward based on either your training or the technology itself in the applications.

Dave: Absolutely. And there are so many examples of. Opportunities around the world. You know, I heard about, we had an education technology company in India called Bribe Books. It’s like a creative writing platform for children, children of all ages to learn creative writing and publish their books online and sell printed books on demand that, you know, they’re using generative AI to develop bu, which is an AI assistant, and it helps young [00:22:00] learners with their writing.

Here’s an opportunity to do creative writing for people of all abilities, to get access, people of all backgrounds, to get access. And so what’s in your mind? You can create. And generative AI and education technology platforms like Bright Books are helping us.

Maureen: It does create the image of a very different possible future.

How can AWS help government organizations use generative AI in a way that’s secure, responsible, and cost effective?

Dave: You know, I mentioned before we have millions and millions of customers at AWS. Security is everyone’s job at this company. It’s built into everything that we do. It’s built into the way that we approach every conversation with customers.

It’s. Our top priority, you know, for ourselves and, and for customers and partners around the world. And so we believe, and I talked about the model that we had earlier, we believe a couple of things are important. One, you have to build a [00:23:00] system that’s secure, that’s scalable, and that your security scales with it.

But also two, just. Really protects the integrity of your data and that you’re not losing providence over your own data. And we’ve got a lot of tools and we offer customers a lot of different tools to help support them, to secure their infrastructure and secure their data and secure their applications.

And then we offer a lot of support to do that. We offer a lot of training. We offer a lot of professional services, a lot of architecture support. We are helping enable the mission of public sector customers around the world. Their success, their ability to deliver on their mission is critical, and in some cases very high stakes.

So we take that very seriously and we work with our customers every day to make sure that they’ve got the best security that the cloud can.

Maureen: Let’s go back and talk a little bit more about leadership and we were joking about curious and annoyed, um, [00:24:00] and we’re seeing or will see world changing opportunities for each of those opportunities.

The leaders we are working with have to be willing to embrace them, to actually have them happen, to materialize them. How do you help? Folks move beyond what may be very well grounded fears in favor of a world where we cure cancer.

Dave: How do we help leaders move beyond that is we do a lot of work around understanding.

What our customers are trying to accomplish. And I’d say one of the things that I think is unique about Amazon is we are very focused on inventing with our customers or inventing on their behalf. Other companies have strategies and those strategies can work, but for us it really is about what customers.

Our fundamental approach is to understand what customers are want and what they’re looking for from us, and then we work [00:25:00] backwards from that. We work backwards with them on delivering what it is that they want. New technology often transforms the way we work and live, but it also creates demand for all sorts of new skill sets and leads to all sorts of innovations.

Public sector organizations are looking for that too. They’re looking for ways to reinvent. Uh, if you’re a nonprofit, you may be looking for ways to reinvent the donor experience. If you’re a researcher, you may be looking for ways like you and I have talked about to end cancer for everybody. Generally, leaders get on board with that.

Leaders are oriented that way as well too. And so when you talk about the possibilities and you talk about the opportunities to do this sorts of transformation. At the leadership level, you often don’t get disagreement that that’s where you want to go. And I, I see our role is helping them understand, well, how do we do that?

How do we do it responsibly? How do we do it where we’re managing resources the right [00:26:00] way, costs and resources in a healthy way? And I see our role is helping leaders understand that there’s a way to do that, and that cloud is fundamental to making that happen.

Maureen: As I’m thinking about some of my clients, many of them are not yet well versed in ai, don’t even know what’s possible.

Is there an organizational structure like do we have a Chief AI officer? Do we need AI skills on boards? Who helps move the organization forward, is really the underpinning of that question.

Dave: I do think governance is really important, whether you’re a hospital system or a nonprofit, and I do think the notion that you’d have a skills-based board if it’s possible, and that you’d have talent on that board that has either a background already in these sorts of technologies or has done some work or some thinking in it.

I think that is a good recommendation. If I’m advising a board today and they’re starting to think about these things, I’m saying if you don’t have a [00:27:00] skills space board, then maybe bringing on some talent that has a background here would be really helpful on the C-suite side. Absolutely, and this can take different forms.

You can have a chief technology officer who can also serve as the chief digital officer. Again, it’s a skills space thing, and you have to bring on folks, I think, who’ve got some experience here, but also have got some ability to understand what you’re gonna need in terms of governance and security and what the use cases are.

We often find real progress happens when you’ve got top down leadership. When you’ve got the folks at the top that are convicted and they’ve made some decisions about, this is the way we’re going to go, they set the vision, they set the governance, they bring the talent in, and then they tell the organization to go.

Those are the organizations that really make progress versus the ones that seem to just talk about it and don’t really get moving on it. That senior leadership and that governance is really, really critical in getting moving in this area.

Maureen: [00:28:00] So I want to amplify what you just said ’cause it’s so crucial as we’re looking at the percentage of organizations that will be out of business in the next decade, and it’s something like 40% vision governance.

Talent execution.

Dave: Yes.

Maureen: And that resonates as absolutely fundamental. And none of those can be excluded. You don’t have talent. You’re not gonna execute, you don’t have governance. You’re not executing effectively to the end that meets the vision. And you don’t have a vision, you are likely to be off track.

Dave: Those are all leadership functions and we work with a lot of leaders. We help support leaders, and this move to AI and generative AI is not gonna be in one industry. It’s not gonna be one company. It’s gonna be a whole of industry and a whole of public sector approach. I think I mentioned a little bit earlier about the collaboration.

It’s really critical to us that public sector and industry collaborate on these sorts of things. There’ll be lots of upskilling [00:29:00] programs and training programs. It’s gonna take industry to do that, particularly in public sector, but it’s gonna be a critical part of the future, and we spend a lot of time with leaders talking to them about this.

Maureen: We recently published a book on leadership and followership in the age of ai, and one of the organizations that two of the authors came from is the Uniform Services University. Uses is at least in collaboration with us, heavily involved in creating the leadership and followership thinking in ai, which is really exciting for us to have that kind of collaboration.

Dave: Yeah, I’ve been working with government for a long time. And I want customers to move faster because I see the opportunity, and you talked a little bit about national security. We also get visibility into some of the things going on around the world. So I think it’s critical that government moves fast in this area for a number of reasons.

I like programs, like we have a program here called Bridge, which we bring in fellows from government. From organizations like Sys [00:30:00] where they spend a period of time with us, they learn about industry, they learn a little bit about Amazon culture and our way of innovating, and they take that back to their roles in government and public sector.

And those are exciting programs. I get to speak to those cohorts and they become, they’re all leaders, but they also become the future leaders, the future, even bigger leaders of organizations. And I think programs like that. Are going to be even more critical as we start to embrace this. But I, you know, look, I’m super proud of governments across the world from what I see.

I’m really proud of how thoughtful they are about these emerging technologies, amazing professionals we have across the world and government. I believe we’ll get there. It’s never fast enough, but I do believe we’ll get there and I, and we will get there in a way that’s healthy and responsible and innovative, and safe and secure.

So I can’t say enough about how amazing some of our public sector customers and partners are.

Maureen: Thank you, Dave. This has been an amazingly insightful conversation [00:31:00] and for our leaders. I wanna go back and again, reify the idea of vision, governance, talent. Execution that there is a top down and a bottom up, but we don’t get there without the top

Dave: Agree.

Totally. Thanks for having me.

Maureen: Thank you. This has just been a delightful conversation and I do encourage our listeners to explore more about what you’re doing.

Dave: Great. Thank you.

Maureen: How would people learn more? I realize there’s, you know, a little known website called amazon.com, but how would they learn more specifically about what you’re doing?

Dave: I think the most traffic comes from my own house. The signals coming from inside of the house on that one. But yeah, you can go to AWS, our website and AWS, we have a public sector website that’s got use cases. It’s got information about success stories. It’s got. All sorts of great information about products and services and so that would be a great way to start.

I’ve got a couple of blogs up that you can read about. [00:32:00] If you just Google AWS public sector are probably the top hit there and you can go start learning and being curious.

Maureen: You also mentioned the partnership with Arizona State, the Innovation Center.

Yeah,

Dave: our cloud innovation center. You can find that on our website and got a lot of information about our, we call ’em Kicks Cloud Innovation Center.

We call it a kick, and then tons of information about what we’re doing there together with Arizona State.

Maureen: Beautiful. I am an adamant supporter of junior achievement. I can imagine that kind of a collaboration where young people are learning about ai. In the junior achievement space would be phenomenal.

Dave: It’s really remarkable. I had the chance to spend some time in Canada at a university where we have a similar type of center and we were rededicating the effort that we had there, all the students had little booths set up where they were demonstrating applications that they had built and I was blown away.

I mean, I couldn’t even get to the program ’cause I wanted to stay and just hear what these young achievers, what, what [00:33:00] they’d come up with. Just, you know, mind blowing and just the ideas that were coming out and then what they had built and they built, you know, in this particular case, they built some applications on AWS and I.

I could have spent all day there. The power, the ideas, the thinking, and just to see it unleashed to particularly in young students was quite remarkable.

Maureen: The hope for the future of generation when we see things like that is high.

Dave: Yeah, it is.

Maureen: Thank you, Dave, for all you’re doing.

Dave: Well, thanks for having me.

This was a lot of fun. Hopefully I wasn’t too cranky. You can have me back.

Maureen: We would love to have you back.

Dave: Awesome.