As the business world becomes ever more digital-focused, getting the most out of your data has never been more important. Artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technology is proving an increasingly useful ally for companies of all sizes, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) is looking to position itself at the forefront of this booming space. At its recent AWS re:Invent event, the company put AI and ML firmly in the spotlight when outlining its plans for the future, showcasing a huge range of use cases, customer stories, and new releases all focused firmly around AI and ML. But how big a role can the technologies really play, both for AWS and for your business? TechRadar Pro spoke to Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of AWS Data and Machine Learning, to find out how much is hyperbole, and how much is true innovation.

On the second day of Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent, Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of AWS Data and Machine Learning (ML) revealed the latest innovations during his keynote. To start, Sivasubramanian announced the launch of Amazon Athena for Apache Spark, which he said will provide organizations with a more intuitive way to run complex data analytics. He noted that Apache Spark will run three times faster on AWS. The next product announcement was of the general availability of Amazon DocumentDB Elastic Clusters, a fully-managed solution to quickly scale document workloads of any size. Amazon SageMaker now supports Geospatial ML, giving access to multiple new kinds of data.

At its re:Invent conference, AWS today announced Amazon DataZone, a new data management service that can help enterprises catalog, discover, share and -- most importantly -- govern their data. The nifty part here is that AWS is using machine learning to help businesses build these data catalogs and generate the metadata to make it searchable. "To unlock the full power, the full value of data, we need to make it easy for the right people and applications to find, access and share the right data when they need it -- and to keep data safe and secure," AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said in today's keynote. The tool will provide users with fine-grained controls to manage and govern this data. That's long been a major problem for enterprises, but it has only gotten harder as the amount of data has increased, ensuring that the right users have access to the right data, without compromising personally identifiable information, for example.