Title

AWS re:Invent 2023 - How AWS and BMW Group team up to accelerate data-driven innovation (PRO204)

Summary

• BMW Group IT is structured into 36 domains with 339 products, distributed across 29 countries.
• BMW and AWS have a strategic collaboration to accelerate data-driven innovations, focusing on breaking silos, accelerating innovation, and democratizing data.
• The collaboration is structured around four pillars: partnership business office, platform enablement (Cloud Data Hub and AI platform), joint use case teams, and training and enablement.
• The Cloud Data Hub (CDH) is the foundation of the partnership, enabling data-driven use cases and supported by AWS professional services.
• The partnership has delivered 59 use cases leveraging data and has over 1,200 use cases leveraging data from the CDH, with more than 20,000 users.
• Patrick presented the journey of creating the CDH, which generated 1.9 billion euros in business value over three years, and the transition from an on-premise data lake to a lake house architecture using Apache Iceberg.
• The data portal is a one-stop shop for BMW employees to discover, explore, request access, manage, and analyze data.
• Marc discussed the AI platform and its impact on business processes, including a use case for vehicle option availability and the creation of an MLOps platform.
• The AI platform includes a service portfolio with six service clusters to support the sustainable implementation and operation of AI in business processes.
• Upcoming sessions at re:Invent will showcase analytics use cases and the integration of AWS QuickSight into the data portal.

Insights

• The partnership between BMW and AWS exemplifies a successful enterprise-level adoption of cloud services and AI to drive innovation and efficiency.
• The Cloud Data Hub serves as a central repository for data, enabling various teams to access and leverage data for their specific use cases, which is a key factor in breaking down data silos.
• The use of Apache Iceberg for the CDH indicates a trend towards lake house architectures, which combine the benefits of data lakes and data warehouses.
• The data portal developed by BMW is a significant tool for data democratization, allowing employees to easily find, access, and work with data, which is crucial for fostering a data-driven culture.
• The AI platform and MLOps approach demonstrate BMW's commitment to integrating AI into their core business processes, which is likely to be a growing trend in the automotive industry and beyond.
• The session highlights the importance of top management sponsorship and a culture of collaboration between partners for the success of such large-scale digital transformation initiatives.
• The concept of a flywheel, inspired by Amazon.com, is applied to the partnership, indicating that a continuous cycle of use case selection, data-driven value delivery, and capability enhancement can lead to scalable innovation.
• The presentation underscores the potential of generative AI to empower business users to perform data analysis without technical assistance, which could revolutionize how non-technical staff interact with data.
• BMW's AI service portfolio addresses various aspects of business processes, suggesting a holistic approach to AI integration across the company.
• The session suggests that the future of AI in business will involve not only the development of AI models but also the governance and integration of AI into business processes, which is critical for sustainable and responsible AI deployment.