Amazon Bedrock is a service for building generative AI applications, offered on cloud computing platform Amazon Web Services (AWS). It was first announced in preview in April 2023, and made generally available in September 2023.
The platform acts as a kind of marketplace, allowing businesses to pick which AI models they would like to build their generative AI apps on top of and customize with their own proprietary data.
What Is Amazon Bedrock?
Amazon Bedrock is a service for building generative AI applications. The platform allows companies to choose which AI models they would like to build their apps on top of, and then customize them with their own proprietary data through Amazon Web Services.
Companies big and small are eager to implement generative AI into their own business operations as a way to enhance productivity and cut costs. Some of the largest tech powerhouses are rushing to accommodate them. Amazon Bedrock is Amazon’s biggest move yet into this rapidly emerging sector.
“Amazon Bedrock is leading the industry to a new place,” Sherry Marcus, director of Applied Science at AWS, told Built In. “A place where customers can easily choose from different high-performing [models] from leading AI companies, get access to a broad range of capabilities they need to build generative AI applications, and simplify the development while maintaining privacy and security.”
What Makes Amazon Bedrock Different?
Choice and Flexibility
Amazon Bedrock brings many of the leading AI models (such as Anthropic’s Claude and Meta’s Llama 2) under one roof, allowing businesses to easily pick and choose the models they like, and experiment for different use cases while keeping up to date with the latest model versions.
The element of choice makes Amazon Bedrock different from pretty much any other generative AI tool today. While other companies like Microsoft and Google offer access to only their own models, Amazon Bedrock allows companies to pick from a variety of foundation models made by prominent AI companies like AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Stability AI and, of course, Amazon itself. This, in a sense, democratizes access to generative AI technology, as Marcus put it.
For companies to make the most of generative AI’s potential, “choice is paramount, Marcus said. “There is no one model that will rule them all. It’s about choosing the right model for the right use case.”
“We just have a ton of flexibility within AWS,” Jeff Reihl, CTO of legal tech company and Amazon Bedrock customer LexisNexis, told Built In. “What we like about Amazon Bedrock is they don’t restrict to one single model, or a set of specific models from a specific vendor. It gives us, as a user, a lot of options because we’re going to use the best model to solve the customer’s problem at the best price and the best performance.”
Security
Because Amazon works with all of these foundation model vendors directly, they actually manage the model on behalf of those companies within their own ecosystem. So if a business uses one of the models, all of the proprietary data they plug in stays within AWS, and it is managed and protected to Amazon’s standards. This can give companies a lot of peace of mind when it comes to data governance and compliance with any existing privacy legislation, Travis Rehl, senior vice president of product and services at cloud company and AWS partner Innovative Solutions, said.
“It really enables so many companies who are nervous to use private or confidential information,” Rehl told Built In. “Now they can do it with confidence because they know their data is secure.”
Personalization
Because companies can feel more comfortable in using their own data in these models, they can create more personalized generative AI products and services that are helpful to their unique needs. Leveraging these models and their own data, businesses can create what Amazon calls AI “agents” that automatically execute tasks, like processing insurance claims or creating ad campaigns, without compromising the security of their sensitive data.
Ways to Use Amazon Bedrock
The inherent flexibility of foundation models and services provided by Amazon Bedrock makes it easy to build generative AI products for a wide variety of tasks, powering everything from search to content creation.
Chatbots
Amazon Bedrock can help companies build their own chatbots, or virtual assistants that understand user requests, break down tasks, engage in conversations to collect information and take actions to fulfill those requests.
For instance, data analytics and risk assessment firm Verisk uses Amazon Bedrock to power its AskMax chatbot, which gives users quick contextual answers to support their questions, potentially eliminating hours of manual search.
Search
Generative-AI-powered search engines can find and synthesize relevant information to answer questions based on a large corpus of data.
LexisNexis created its own search engine, called Lexis+ AI, which allows users to easily search for legal and regulatory documents. It also has a conversational AI component, which means it can carry on conversations with users and refine their queries, Reihl said.
Text Summarization
Amazon Bedrock helps companies create tools for text summaries, providing abridged versions of articles, books, blog posts and any other writing.
LexisNexis also incorporated this capability into its Lexis+AI so that users don’t have to read hundreds of pages of legal documents on their own.
Text Generation
Generative AI is perhaps best known for its ability to create new pieces of original content, such as blog posts, social media posts and marketing emails.
Web hosting company GoDaddy uses Amazon Bedrock to help its customers accelerate their content creation, helping customers fill out their online business pages and more efficiently connect with relevant suppliers, consumers and funding opportunities.
Image Generation
Another popular application of generative AI is image generation, which automatically creates artistic (and sometimes photorealistic) images or animations. These can be helpful in creating presentations, websites and ad campaigns. That’s how online travel booking site Booking.com uses Amazon Bedrock.
Amazon’s Growing Generative AI Dominance
Looking ahead, the generative AI market is expected to eclipse $1 trillion within the next decade, according to an analysis from Bloomberg Intelligence. And skyrocketing demand for new generative AI products — powered by new products and assistants that accelerate their creation — gives cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft and Google an opportunity to claim a substantial piece of that pie, as businesses shift more workloads to the public cloud.
Right now, AWS is the largest cloud provider in the world by market share, so it stands to reason that the company will continue to win in this space, especially now that Amazon Bedrock has been released.
Amazon has also developed its own chips made specifically for training AI models with less compute power, a move that will likely help the company dominate the industry even further as tech companies scramble to offset the global chip shortage. As of September 2025, Amazon’s chips will be used by Anthropic — a top competitor to ChatGPT-maker OpenAI — to build, train and deploy its future foundation models, opening a major new front in the ongoing AI arms race.
Still, generative AI is still a bit of a “Wild West,” as Reihl put it. It can be a threat to data privacy, produce biased results and infringe on copyright and other laws. Amazon has been a vocal supporter of responsible AI, making voluntary commitments toward AI safety at the behest of the White House and speaking at the United Nations. But it remains to be seen how any future AI regulation will affect Amazon and other industry giants.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Amazon Bedrock?
Amazon Bedrock is a service for building generative AI applications. The platform allows companies to choose which AI models they would like to build their apps on top of, and then customize them with their own proprietary data through Amazon Web Services.
Is Amazon Bedrock generally available?
Yes. As of September of 2023, Amazon Bedrock is generally available.
When did Amazon Bedrock launch?
Amazon Bedrock was first launched in preview in April of 2023 as part of a set of new tools for building generative AI on AWS. It was then made generally available in September of 2023.