How to improve your front, middle and back offices with AWS

It’s time to stop looking for your AI mega-moment and see the incremental advancements that can help drive broader economic transformations with their cumulative impact. Operations in the front, middle and back offices, for example, can benefit from increased efficiency, faster turnaround and innovative new ways of working, and this is especially true in how organizations work with their CSPs. As clients look at cloud providers, they are focused on how that provider can help accelerate their ability to innovate with leading technologies.

The future is public and multicloud. Most of our survey respondents use public cloud (95%) and more than half (56%) tell us they use one CSP primarily for most of their workloads while employing secondary CSPs for specialized purposes. If you already work with Amazon Web Services, you know that AWS isn’t just a provider. Its open, agile ecosystem serves as a conduit to many familiar applications — including those from Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce — to help accelerate your ability to integrate systems and drive innovative outcomes.

When selecting a primary CSP, it’s important to consider how it can help you reinvent the ways you operate in your front, middle and back offices. Here’s what AWS clients should concentrate on.

How AWS can help your front office 

While many companies still think about AI as part of their technology strategy, Top Performers already see it as an integral part of everything they do across functions. In the front office, for instance, CIOs team with CMOs to focus on hyper-personalization and loyalty ecosystems. Powered by AWS, the resulting solutions can enable new ways to meaningfully engage customers on any device and at any location at just the right time.

At the same time, we see chief revenue officers looking at how their sales teams can leverage AI to help accelerate deal cycles, curate proposals and presentations, and accelerate general time to market for products. With AI tools, sales teams can be better informed and more prepared for customer conversations, and they can better understand their customers’ current needs to prepare for future requirements.

What to do 

• Talk to your executive team and get radically customer centric. Automating day-to-day tasks and repetitive, manual processes can give your human agents more time to focus on clients.

• Develop persona-based GenAI solutions that can target customers and, at the same time, ease your teams’ workload. Think of your internal teams like you would buyers and ask the same questions. What are their goals? Their pain points? How does your solution fit into their lives and, ultimately, improve your customer experience? On the flip side, targeted, personal tools and transparent messaging can help get your customers to a sales or customer service agent faster.

• Experiment with rapid, iterative testing in a controlled environment. Think of it like the scientific method. Start from a hypothesized use case, test deployment and use your results to refine your idea into a scalable solution.  
  

How AWS can help your middle office 

In the middle office, CIOs work with COOs and their teams — including procurement, customer service, risk and sustainability leads — using AI to modernize and streamline their processes. This in turn helps the front office better meet customers where they are. It also provides internal teams with the ability to run the business at a higher velocity with less tech debt and less cumbersome systems.

An AI-powered help desk can help yield faster, more effective service processes, collecting essential information and routing internal or external stakeholders to the appropriate service agents. In another example, PwC has developed an AI-driven annotation solution for intellectual property (IP) management. Media companies can execute thousands of contracts every year, governing their rights to control various IP. Using large language models (LLMs) in AWS Bedrock, the solution can quickly digitize and aggregate decades of contracts and extract hundreds of business-relevant terms and attributes for immediate decision-making — doing in seconds what otherwise could take months of manual research.

What to do 

• Focus on operational units that can better connect your front office with customer centricity, like your supply chain operations or sustainability planning and reporting.

• Make your middle office efficient, fast and connected in delivering a premium customer experience. Remember that the same actions that benefit your front office can help your middle office run the business as well.

• Manage risk. While introducing AI in more customer-facing tools can feel riskier than using it in your back office, the rewards are also greater. Your middle office can be instrumental in developing and maintaining the guardrails that enable you to create innovative, scalable solutions.

How AWS can help your back office 

You’ve done the heavy lifting. Your organization’s data and operations are now unified in a single source of truth on cloud. Now it’s time to think about how your CSP can go beyond hosting that data and help you build strategic relationships.

Back-office AI applications can tie together the work you do in the front and middle offices. CIOs and their IT teams can drive new ways of working and reinvent backend systems to accelerate delivery and help drive business strategy. Top performing organizations aren’t just rationalizing their systems, either. They’re injecting AI into applications and workflows, teaming AI and human agents to improve experience and productivity — letting AI agents handle the technical duties so people can focus on forward-looking strategy. Additionally, employees are leveraging AI agents and tools to help improve their own productivity through platforms like Claude and Amazon Q. 

Claude is one of the family of LLMs that Amazon uses to inject AI functionality into its applications and services — it’s the engine that powers GenAI in many applications. Amazon Q is the AWS GenAI chatbot that can enable a variety of outcomes, including helping developers to generate and audit code or access provisions, making the development life cycle more effective, agile and secure, as well as quicker and higher quality. It even has built-in guardrails to help non-techies generate workable code and solve problems on their own.

What to do 

• Refine in the back office the innovations that come from your front office. Think about how your customers can use your technology on a daily basis and align the back office with those goals in mind. 

• Control your environment. Think about what guardrails and governance are needed to enable your technical teams to free themselves from manual work. Using AI tools, non-technologists can complete low- or no-code solutions in a fraction of the time as manual development.

• Allow AI to handle complexity and automation so humans can focus on creativity, strategy and decision-making. Allow them to focus on the next level of innovation while the machines handle the grunt-work. 

• Look for easy wins. Don’t just focus on finding your “aha” events — improving and iterating micro-moments can build into transformative change over time.