Foundational AI capabilities

Iterating through your AI transformation journey relies on your foundational capabilities to adopt AI across business, people, governance, platform, security, and operations. A capability is an organizational ability to use processes to deploy resources (such as people, technology, and other tangible or intangible assets) to achieve an outcome. The following figure shows the list of foundational capabilities specifically relevant for AI adoption (pink). In gray are existing CAF capabilities that remain untouched for AI adoption.

Figure 4: The AWS CAF-AI foundational capabilities

For example, the product management capability in the Business perspective section. Although product management is already a needed capability to successfully develop cloud-based products, its implementation is significantly different when looking at AI services in the cloud. The remainder of this document follows this logic: We call out the deviations and specific needs for AI adoption. The remaining capabilities are described in the original AWS Cloud Adoption Framework document. Which executive level stakeholder owns which of these capabilities depends on the organization. Often, multiple stakeholders have a shared interest in one or more capabilities. To support navigating this document, we provide a list of typical stakeholders that are concerned with a perspective:

• Business perspective: This perspective helps ensure that your AI investments accelerate your digital- and AI-transformation ambitions and business outcomes. In particular, we enrich many of the capabilities in this perspective to explain and share how to make AI center-stage, reduce risks, and increase outputs and outcomes for customers, effectively enabling the formulation of an AI strategy. Common stakeholders include the chief executive officer (CEO), chief financial officer (CFO), chief operations officer (COO), chief information officer (CIO), and chief technology officer (CTO).

• People perspective: This perspective serves as a bridge between AI technology and business, and aims to evolve a culture of continual growth and learning, where change becomes business-as-normal. We are extending the AWS CAF by zooming in on capabilities that most impact future competitive advantage in the age of AI: the right talent, the language it speaks, and the culture that holds it together. Common stakeholders include the chief human resources officer (CHRO), CIO, COO, CTO, cloud director, and generally other cross-functional enterprise-wide leaders.

• Governance perspective: This perspective helps you orchestrate your AI initiatives while maximizing organizational benefits and minimizing transformation related risks. We pay special attention to the changing nature of the risk and therefore the cost that is associated both with the development as well as the scaling of AI. Additionally, we introduce a new CAF-AI capability to this perspective: The responsible use of AI. Common stakeholders include the chief transformation officer, CIO, CTO, CFO, chief data officer (CDO), and chief risk officer (CRO).

• Platform perspective: This perspective helps you build an enterprise-grade, scalable, cloud platform that enables you both to operate AI-enabled or infused services and products, but also provides you with the capability to develop new and custom AI solution. We enrich the capabilities to shine light on how AI development is different from typical development tasks and how practitioners can adapt to that change. Common stakeholders include CTO, technology leaders, ML operations engineers, and data scientists.

• Security perspective: This perspective helps you achieve the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your data and cloud workloads. We largely rely on the best practices from the AWS CAF here but extend on how you can reason about the attack vectors that can affect AI systems and how to address them through the cloud. Common stakeholders include chief information security officer (CISO), chief compliance officer (CCO), internal audit leaders, and security architects and engineers.

• Operations perspective: This perspective helps ensure that your cloud services, and in particular your AI workloads, are delivered at a level that meets the needs of your business. We provide guidance on how to manage operational AI workloads, how to keep them operational, and how to ensure reliable value creation. Common stakeholders include infrastructure and operations leaders, ML operations engineers, site reliability engineers, and information technology service managers.

For each of these perspectives, there is a natural or logical order by which the capabilities are addressed or improved that orders your areas of action for your AI transformation journey in time. The following image depicts a sample order and an assessment together with experienced implementors of AI Strategies. It is best used to establish which of these capabilities already exist in your organization and how mature they are.

Figure 5: The AWS CAF-AI foundational capabilities ordered by maturity and evolution