ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: Step-by-step guide for startup founders A practical guide to help make your AI vision a reality

Forging ahead
When deployed with the right strategy, generative artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential
to change the anatomy of work. By streamlining work activities that absorb 60–70 percent of
employee time, startups can improve productivity down to the individual worker.1 This
can fast track product innovation, increase agility, streamline processes, boost revenue, and
allow for better, faster decision making.
The lack of a single universally accepted playbook for generative AI success is keeping some
founders on the sidelines, unsure of how to take the next (or even the first) step on the AI
journey. By democratizing generative AI, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is helping startups
at any stage overcome barriers to adoption and forge ahead with confidence. This eBook
outlines a proven path—from taking the first step to measuring results—with insights from
AWS best practices and its experience helping

What are artificial
intelligence,
machine learning,
and generative AI?
AI is a way to describe any system that can replicate tasks that previously
required human intelligence. Almost all AI systems are built using
machine learning (ML). ML utilizes large amounts of data to create
and validate decision logic, forming the basis of an AI model. The AI
application then feeds input data into that model, and the model
outputs human-like decisions. The rapid advancement of ML, massive
proliferation of data, and easy availability of scalable compute capacity
can help businesses accelerate how they use AI and, particularly, how
they leverage generative AI.
Generative AI is a type of AI that can create new content and ideas,
including conversations, stories, images, videos, and music. Like most
AI, generative AI is powered by ML models—very large models that
are pretrained on vast amounts of data and commonly referred to as
foundation models (FMs).