 Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of eight of its public sector summit live in Washington DC in-person event and also digital hybrid. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here with Kim and Jerry. So the vice president of U.S. education state and local government. Kim, great to see you again. It's great to see you as well. We're in-person since 2019. I know, first time. It's exciting to finally see people and actually recognize. People are doing deals. We've got an expo floor. It's happening. It's a lot of excitement. So what a ride, I got to say, in the past two years since the pandemic, we've been covering a lot of public sector action, mainly because it's just been such a growth area. It's been really actually kind of interesting to see how old antiquated, slow-moving parts of the public sector had to literally transform overnight. Over night. State and local government and education, which is your areas. Absolutely. Interesting. And you know, video conferencing, the internet didn't really break. But still, that is a mindset change. What's this remote learning? What was your observation takeaway? I take a look at all the K-12s and higher ed and how quickly they had to shift literally overnight. It was amazing to see how quickly these educators really shift their focus to continue education. We had our Imagine Education event on Monday. It was great to have so many leaders across the institutions come and join us and share their best practices. Whether it was transforming the way they address their students with companies like Zoom and engaging them, or even how they were supporting their teachers, their administrators through the pandemic, it was amazing to see how quickly they moved. What innovation do you think they're most interested in? Because obviously it's a cultural change. Absolutely. I mean, education, I mean, that is highly impacted. You got parents, you got teachers, you got administrations, the community at large. They're all interested in this. It's all a public display. What were they most interested in? You know, I think parents first and foremost, they realize the difficulty of being that teacher with their children. But if we take it a little bit further down the road, I think the important part is learning is customized and it's personalized. And learning is not just a time on a schedule that you go and sit in a class, but now that students, parents, they want it all the time. They want it readily available. But if I think about what we'll see moving forward is the data to which they were collecting and changing that student outcome, how do you inject support services for students who may not necessarily be going through the classes at the same level as other students? So using the data, personalizing the support that students need, and then more importantly, inserting additional resources to help them through it. You know, it's very interesting and I'd love to get your reaction to this because it's something that I've been thinking about, we've been talking about on theCUBE, is education, like events, is going to be changed forever. It's never going to be the same. You get a lot of hybrid. The people have been exposed to remote learning, other sources, maybe non-linear progressions. Now you have kind of a new way. Kind of interesting for cloud to be in that position because that's kind of like what cloud does. Cloud allows for new things to develop new workflows and you got AI and machine learning kind of right there. So you kind of see the dots connecting in education. Because it's new, it's not going to be the same. Does that favor the innovator? Does it favor the AI? What's your take on all that? I think we have to change our thought on what a student is. It's really a lifelong learner. So if you take a look at our young children, they have an expectation of how to experience education very differently than what you and I would experience. So if we first take that step back and say, how do we provide the education that the individual is comfortable with? I think that's the game-changing opportunity. There are amazing ed tax. That's a part of my business that I love watching. They're innovators, they're former teachers, they're thought leaders, they're born in the cloud and they want to change the way education looks. So I don't think we'll ever get away from having an instructor, so to speak. But what we will have is different mechanisms in order to support those students and lifelong learners. You know it's interesting, you bring that up because you don't have to go one more step down is that Max on stage yesterday talked about laying baseline numbers down for one of the nonprofits he was supporting, Acorn, Acorn I think it was. And that mindset of getting the data, because the cloud, you see things now quickly. The data's there, so if something's not working, you really can't hide, right? So education and state and local government, you can't hide projects or put up, you know, camouflage around things that aren't working. It's either working or it's not. Well, we saw that through the early stages of the pandemic where systems were failing because they couldn't support all the legacy debt that the state specifically and some education institutions had. They had to quickly look to innovate, but I had the opportunity to meet with several state CIOs yesterday and my first point to them was thank you because they really struggled, but more importantly they saw the opportunity to innovate quicker and that's exactly what we're doing. I don't know if you had the chance to see the Utah use case about changing from a mainframe to moving it to the cloud. It was exciting to hear about the savings, but more importantly the innovation that they see, because you're right, it's about transparency. I think COVID there was, it was out there. The migration, modernization trend certainly very relevant in your area. It's probably one of the biggest use cases we see. The other thing I'd like to get your thoughts on is workforce, the workforce. That's changing too, what's your take on the workforce? Well, World Economic Forum says that 50% of our workforce must be re-skilled by 2025, and when you think about that, so we have early in career coming out of college, but an entire workforce that needs to change. I think between Educate Academy, our community colleges, and those non-for-profit organizations, they see the opportunity. We just need people to harness what technology can do for their careers. One of the things that you guys have always been part of, and since the beginning I've been covering you guys, you have a lot, you do a lot of stuff for people's missions. You're solving problems, world problems, not just for profit. You're doing kind of the right thing, I would say. Now you've got this new innovation studio, I saw the news on that. What is that about, because that looks cool. First of all, studios, are there like cameras involved? Yeah, well, I think the way to look at it, so at Amazon HQ2 out here in Arlington, we will have a space for people to come and work with Amazon experts to solve some of those biggest challenges. Everyone has a mission, and when people are passionate about the mission, we start to use our processes and our mechanism like working backwards. So understanding what problem they're trying to solve, working back from what that issue is, and then pulling it through, whether it's data, information, or new, fresh ideas, we'll be hosting them and working with other Amazonians who might be interested in solving for us. And there's some big names involved too here in DC. Georgetown's involved, I think I saw it, some other groups that they can bring data to the table. Absolutely. How's it going to work? So someone says, hey, I see a big problem in society or the world when solving. So Georgetown's a great example, social good, they're so committed to it in the community and globally. So they'll bring their students and we'll sit down and understand what that mission is that they're trying to solve for. They've got amazing programs to help returning citizens back into the workforce. They're out there to help, but it's what's that extra little nudge that we could help them bring it through and up through technology. Well, that's awesome. I'm looking forward to seeing that play out, open up and we get back into the workforce. Maybe bring theCUBE there, solve some CUBE problems. Absolutely. Do some video documentaries on that. All good content. On the pandemic, I got to ask you because one of the things came up, this was clear over the past two years. And I remember we reported a lot of them in the U.S. and outside the United States and Canada specifically. During the pandemic, the critical services that the government had to provide were on, weren't going to stop. So even though people kind of sidetracked things, they still had to get stuff going. There was some mission critical government services that were needed. You guys helped out a lot. What are some of the areas that you guys helped the governments be successful in? Well, I think it's interesting how they, just like students had to quickly move to working or learning from home, workers had to work from home. Amazon Connect was absolutely a lifeline for many of the governments that, one, they had to support their citizens, but two, actually support their workers. They went from taking calls in a call center type environment to literally taking those calls from, maybe their kitchen table or a side room. So Connect was an opportunity for them in a couple of different ways, serving the citizens, but also serving the workers that took care of it every day. And LAUSD, I think was the most creative when I think about how quickly they moved. They had to take, whether it was LA County or LAUSD, both of them realized how they needed to change the support of their employees. So they stood up Connect literally overnight and offered a whole different level of support. But then two, LAUSD took it even one step further and said, you know what? We still have to provide social services to our students. They then turned it into an opportunity to support students in English and in Spanish, literally overnight with their support. You know, I won't name names, but I actually talked to one of your customers on this point, on Connect, and this person was a skeptic. Ah. They were a skeptical cloud, not Amazon, but the cloud, I got my ways and we did a process, we were not going to change. Okay, he had the force to change. He then came at it and was a reference on an interview. He came out and said, first of all, I'm convinced I'm never going to go back to the old way. He saw the agility and he was skeptical. And then he was nervous because he was under a lot of pressure to deliver. Sure. And it was tough. And he goes, oh my God, we came off the other side. So the Connect thing really did help people. Yeah, you know, and I've been saying this for the last four years. It's not a question of if, it's a question of when. And I think that's the piece that we all recognized during the pandemic. They had to move quick. And it was great to see them take the challenge and actually execute on it. So on modernization, obviously migration is a big theme, seeing migration and modernization. The applications are being developed faster than ever before. DevOps is being revolutionized. It's being much more agile. People are realizing that the speed to build apps with the data, with some of the new cloud high level services, that things are happening fast. And there are traditional blockers now that are becoming those old security group or the IT group. So you have these areas that are slower. The pace car now is the DevOps developer. Absolutely, that and data sharing. Data sharing. So this now is starting to change the internal dynamics, the power dynamics of entities. So as organizations modernize, how do you talk to the folks out there then and say, hey, you know, there's a way to do this. We all can get along harmony, more harmonious architecture or organizational structures. What are some of the best practices? Well, I think it's important to know it's a cultural shift. As you point out, you know, people are in their individual organizations feeling that they're supporting their customer base. So we really work very closely with them to understand it's not just about technology, it's about the business process change and the cultural shift. You have to, I mean, there's that always that, that tensions like, is this going to impact my job for the individual? And what we're hearing them say, this is not about you're getting less work, you're getting more work and we're shifting. So bringing those, bringing any state work or even an educator along the journey to say, your job is not over, your job is literally just begun. It's the cultural shift that has played the biggest role. So the folks watching right now that might say, you know, I got to move faster. What would you say to those people out there? Know what good looks like first. You know, I think over the past years or decades, they've just built on what they've done. The working backwards process is probably the most impactful for our civil servants and our leaders to say, how do I serve my citizen differently? How do I serve my student differently? If you start there and work backwards, the data's all there. The question is, what are you doing with the data? Because if you're not actually taking the information and turning it into action, it's really hard. So if there's anybody out there who's like, where do I start? Work backwards, find the person and the problem that you're working from and work it backwards. I don't know who it was, but someone told me yesterday, it was 28,000 data centers out there in the government. All with data in it. So get it all in one spot. One spot and make it actionable. Awesome. Kim, great to see you. What's new, what's the highlight for the event for you? Obviously, face to face, cool, but you're seeing customers. What's the highlight? I think it's actually just seeing the customers. I've had all my customers and many of my team virtually in my house for the last 18 months. So it's good to walk the floor, see the customers and more importantly, partner with the partners that have helped our customers collectively. It's fun to see people and say, hey, good to see you. And it's been a year and a half. It's been like, oh my God. So it's refreshing. It's nice to see you without a face mask. I think that's the other piece. I think we're all anxious to move past. Cool. Kim, thanks for coming on. Kim, as your Vice President of US Education, State and Local Government here at AWS, really making a difference. Now that with the cloud, you can't hide, the data's there, the value's there. See who can transform, otherwise they'll be on the sidelines. So it's the CUBE coverage, AWS Public Sector Summit live in Washington, DC. Be right back.