Episode 10
The AI Partner Playbook
With Brian Bohan
What if alliances could supercharge enterprise transformation?
In this episode of REWIRED, Akanksha Bilani sits down with Brian Bohan, Director of Consulting Partners, Center of Excellence at AWS, to unpack how enterprise transformation is accelerating faster than ever before. From redefining global partner strategy to building new methodologies that shift deterministic processes into probabilistic, Agentic ones, Brian shares how AWS and its partners are rewriting the operating manual for the modern enterprise.
Together, they explore real-world breakthroughs from the field, including Agentic systems that slash automotive delivery timelines, and research agents saving tens of thousands of hours in biotech discovery. As Brian puts it, the future belongs to organizations that harness AI and build cultures that let us focus on what creativity unlocks next.
REWIRED Ep 10 Podcast Transcript
Akanksha Bilani (Host):
Welcome to Rewired, a podcast that shares the coolest stories of innovation and behind the scenes breakthroughs from Intel, AWS, and our favorite partners.
I'm your host, Akanksha Bilani, I run the go-to market team for Team Amazon at Intel. And really, our role is helping bridge the path with AWS partners and customers. Today I have the privilege of speaking to Brian Bohan, the Director of Consulting Partners, Center of Excellence at AWS.
Brian, thank you so much for being here.
Brian Bohan:
You bet. Thanks for having me. Really excited.
Akanksha Bilani:
Welcome, welcome. Brian, would you like to tell the audience here a little bit about your role within AWS and how we're driving excellence with our customers today?
Brian Bohan:
Yeah, absolutely. I can unpack that long, long title, which you got through. So thank you. And so my team, I lead a team that really has a dual remit or dual mission. So on one hand, we do look after a set of global strategic partners. So think about the GSIs like Accenture, Deloitte, IBM, TCS, Capgemini, etc. As well as some of the advisory partners like McKinsey, Bain, BCG.
We also have channel partners and we're defining their global strategy and really partnering tightly to grow our respective businesses. At the same time, with this other part of the remit where we are a Center Of Excellence. So we're picking up the signals across all of our consulting partners and our customers, or developing hypotheses or running experiments. And then from those experiments we're picking out, what do we think is really going to work.
And then as we look forward, especially right now with Gen AI and Agentic just changing things seemingly every week, and also all the transformation that's happening among consulting partners, where do we want to place our bets? Which partners are going to be those partners that we work with to help us grow our business to $500 billion and beyond? So that's the second part of my team's remit. It's actually a super exciting time to be doing this, again, given with all the change.
Akanksha Bilani:
It's amazing to see how our partners can take advantage of the focus that you guys have, through your partnership. So that's tremendous. So on that same vein, you know, since you've been kicking it and driving this with AWS since a while, do you want to tell the audience about the exciting projects that you've been working on lately and potentially a favorite customer story that you think that you're super proud of?
Brian Bohan:
One is really close to home, and I like this one because it really it's a great example of why my team exists. And so, a part of my team works very closely with some of the large, again, global systems integrators who also happen to have large what we call business process outsourcing or business process as a service businesses, where they'll take over entire back office processes for customers and run those and optimize those over time.
And then in addition to that, there's a whole slew of pure plays that do this as well in very specific areas. And when you think about what's going on with Agentic and you think about what they do, which is managed processes, this is where we're going to see a lot of the innovation, a lot of the transformation take place is with partners like that delivering really profound results to their customers.
So my team dove in working very closely with these partners. Got really specific on the processes that are going to have the highest propensity to make an impact. And this is like early on. Right. And I think there were a lot of tools and a lot of technology, but not a lot in the way of how do you literally go from a deterministic process to a probabilistic process?
You need to understand the context of the process. You need to bring the right tools and services and capabilities. You need to think about how does the workforce transform around that. Then you need to think about, how do I observe it and how do I govern that process and how do I run it at scale? And they really dove in. They developed a reference architecture. They developed a whole methodology around this.
Akanksha Bilani:
That's amazing. Wow. So that's a massive methodology, I would say. I know AWS has all of these leadership principles, but I think you guys are definitely breaking glass. So congratulations. That's amazing.
Brian Bohan:
I want to just tell one more customer story. I'm in the office right now, as you can see, and I bumped into Dan, who's on our team. He's working with one of our partners, and he introduced me to another colleague of ours who's a PhD from our automated reasoning team. And so together they're working with one of our partners with an auto manufacturer.
And by applying generative AI built on Bedrock, AgentCore and applying automated reasoning, they're taking down the time of order to delivery from six months to two weeks. And what's so cool about this is now we're talking about applying Gen AI in the heart of the enterprise and core systems, core processes, like delivering vehicles. And so with automated reasoning, which is really differentiated in Bedrock, we're able to do that.
We take the prompts and then we apply automated reasoning to predict which prompts are going to actually deliver the best results. And then when those results come back from the models, we also apply automated reasoning to tune them to get them highly accurate. And so that's that kind of reliability and accuracy that you need to really make sure that you can rely on the results from the AI and move forward confidently.
And then this week, too, I had a couple folks from my team in town, and we were doing exactly like you talked about, right? How do we ourselves apply AI and adopt AI and all the tools that we have so we can be more productive? What's really like, I think, helped us within AWS and broader Amazon, take a giant leap forward in the last really several months is Quick Suite.
With Quick Suite at the edge now, we can actually use it as a deep research tool. You can automate workflows with Quick Suite. So we're doing that right now with our team. Just this week I was on a call. Someone was asking a question about a totally different part of the business and the old model would have been, okay, let's set up a meeting and do like a monthly review and everyone writes a document.
This was okay, well, we'll just use Quick Suite to go introspect the data sources, which all have the MCP servers on them. We'll spin it up and we'll create a workflow that checks it and then sends it to you via Slack or email or however you want. Right. And so we're just changing the ways we work completely. And we told our customers this as well, that all the tools in the world won't help you if your data isn't good. If you own a partner, if you own a domain, an initiative or program, you are now the librarian for that particular domain. And it's your job to be the curator and curate your knowledge store.
Now you have the knowledge bases. You have the agent sitting on top, and then you just have the prompt already baked in, and then you just produce the answers on a regular basis. And again, through workflows, pushing them to the right people. So we are really passionate about adopting this. And by doing so, I think we're able to talk to our partners and our customers more effectively as well, because this is exactly what they're all going through.
I'm super excited about all the capabilities we're going to be launching this year that will benefit our partners. That will give you the content that you need, but also allow you to contribute back through the AI tools. So it's much more seamless, a lot less friction, to work with AWS.
Akanksha Bilani:
Oh my God, that's incredible. Yeah, kudos to you, your team as well as AWS for thinking outside of the box. You guys are definitely custodians of a lot of data and a legacy of relationships that you guys have nurtured and garnered in the past 20 years. And if there's a faster and a more productive way to make sure that we drive those discussions to think bigger about what our collaborations look like for the next years to come.
That's super exciting, and Intel is very excited to catch up with that. That's awesome.
Well, on that same note, we were talking about state-of-play today, Brian, I wanted to think a little bit futuristic for the benefit of our audience. What do you feel is going to be the next disruptive technology in our industry?
Brian Bohan:
I think the most disruptive thing that's going to happen in the next, I don't know, one, two, five, ten years is actually just the adoption of Agentic AI. We’re still figuring out the ways of working around this. When I talk about this like, I really want to start with, like, why are we doing all this? And I think we're doing all this to free people to do those things that are uniquely human.
There's one customer story too that this makes me think of, which is, the Genentech. The process to discover new therapies is intensive and it's expensive. It takes a long time. Now they've stood up this research agent built on Bedrock and AgentCore, and it's really an orchestration of agents. And it saved them 43,000 hours of time to develop drugs.
It's making their researchers so much better and so much more effective because they're not having to do the drudgery of looking through the research and figuring out the biomarkers. It's doing that for them. So it lets them think through the next creative problem solving. To me, that's what I'm so excited. Like you could talk about like all this future stuff, but we've yet to begin to really fully adopt this.
And I think that's just going to be a big game changer, especially if we keep the human at the center and focused on what this unleashes, in terms of their potential.
Akanksha Bilani:
I absolutely love it. The focus on the why, so that it can work backwards from all of that is tremendous and amazing thoughts on that, Brian. I'm very excited about seeing how, you know, the innovations that the organizations as well as the industry are driving right now is going to just make us live better lives. For the sake of obviously us, but also for the sake of our next generations to come.
So that's amazing, that's great thoughts. Thank you for sharing.
Brian Bohan:
No, thank you. Thanks for having me. It's always fun to talk about these things.
Akanksha Bilani:
Well, that wraps up our show today. You've been listening to Rewired, the podcast celebrating innovation on the bleeding edge. Brought to you by Intel and AWS. Check our show notes out on the Rewired page at www.rewired-podcast.com or wherever you listen to podcasts, for links to learn more about what we discussed today.
I'm your host, again, Akanksha Bilani, and I would love to give a massive thank you to Brian
for being here and sharing these awesome stories and vision with us.
Brian, thank you so much for coming down.
Brian Bohan:
My pleasure. Thank you.
