Now in its 13th year, Amazon’s AWS re:Invent conference merged old and new for more than 60,000 in-person attendees at The Venetian Resort Las Vegas. Held Dec. 2-6, the event—Amazon's largest of the year— “focused on innovating and strengthening AWS building blocks for customers while adding several new ones,” said Tom Soderstrom, a director and enterprise strategist at Amazon Web Services, a subsidiary of Jeff Bezos’ e-commerce giant that provides cloud computing services. 

Those “building blocks,” Soderstrom explained, spanned “computing, database, storage and inference to support every type of application and help customers build the next generation of applications.” Alongside a focus on foundational cloud infrastructure, in the spirit of newness, generative AI was the key theme that took center stage at this year’s re:Invent. 

In all, a whopping 11 new announcements were made for an in-person and virtual audience—all of them having something to do with machine learning. Digitally, Amazon saw an uptick in attendance from 2023, with over 400,000 business leaders, tech enthusiasts, and other IT professionals tuning in. 

Soderstrom pointed to the new “Nova family of models [that] were of particular interest.” These AI models—referred to as foundation models, or FMs—can interpret text- or image-based prompts and spit out image or video outputs. Amazon’s ambitious bet on machine learning is all about “making customers’ jobs easier and enabling them to do more with generative AI,” Soderstrom explained. 

The exec also pointed to “SageMaker Unified Studio, [which] was announced in preview, and will help users access all their data and tools for analytics and AI in a single environment, built on the Amazon DataZone, with simplified user interface.” Another announcement made at the conference: Amazon Q Business, which the company dubs its “most capable Gen AI-powered assistant,” now boasts a suite of new capabilities and insights. 

The reveals were made throughout the five-day event, between product demos, training sessions, perusing AWS partners’ exhibits on the trade show floor, and five executive keynotes from leaders like AWS CEO Matt Garman and special guest Andy Jassy, president and CEO of Amazon, Soderstrom said. 

Proto Hologram was among the exhibitors and dished to Corporate Event News that because of re:Invent 2024’s bullish bet on generative AI, it sought to put its most advanced AI capabilities on display in ways it’s never demonstrated publicly before. The result: “Two AI hyper-realistic avatars representing AWS execs, engaging in ad hoc technical conversations with each other and with individual attendees of the show,” said Sean Storin, Proto’s head of sales.  

“The re:Invent crowd is also very international, so it was an excellent environment to show how our avatars were able to switch instantly to converse fully in any language an attendee chose,” Storin continued, noting that Proto is a partner of AWS, “and our solutions incorporate many AWS products this crowd would be familiar with.” 

Off the show floor, there was an impressive 2,000-plus “sessions for learners of all levels,” Soderstrom said. They included Chalk Talks, which took on an interactive question-and-answer format alongside a lecture delivered by an AWS expert—as well as Builders’ Sessions that nixed the traditional presentation in favor of a guided demonstration. To help attendees navigate such extensive programming, AWS offered “guidance on how to break down and identify favorite sessions based on roles, industries, areas of interest, and even for first-time attendees.”  

Networking opportunities also abounded, and meetings with the AWS team were known as “deep dives,” Soderstrom said, adding that “many attendees pointed this out as a highlight.” 

Keep scrolling for a closer look at AWS re:Invent 2024 and note that re:Invent 2025 is already in the books, returning to Las Vegas Dec. 1-5. 

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