Highlights of the AWS Summit Zurich 2025

How are Swiss companies balancing innovation with strict regulatory requirements? What does an AI implementation look like in banking, public sector, and manufacturing? How is Amazon Web Services helping companies to turn their ideas into productive workloads? The AWS Summit Zurich 2025 answered these questions through real customer stories and technical deep dives. This recap contains the most impactful announcements, customer success stories, and technical strategies shared across the day – with 13 sessions now available on-demand for deeper exploration.

Key highlights from the keynote

The AWS Summit Zurich demonstrated the rapid pace of innovation in cloud computing. That 46% of Swiss businesses are already using AI shows the mainstream adoption of artificial intelligence across industries. Chris Keller (Managing Director, Europe Central @AWS) showed for example, how the RIVR robot Milo delivers food to customers. The AWS Zurich Region now offers over 167 services, providing customers with comprehensive tools to modernize their operations while maintaining regulatory compliance. Central announcements in the keynote included the upcoming availability of Oracle Database@AWS in the AWS Zurich region starting in 2026. Chris Keller stated that customers are getting through this upcoming launch the power of Oracle Exadata combined with the simplicity of an AWS native experience. After this, Keller announced the availability of Apertus – a family of large language models (LLMs) developed by Swiss AI – through Amazon SageMaker JumpStart. Customers can deploy Apertus in their own AWS account with just one click. During the keynote, customers such as Sportradar and Syngenta presented their success stories. Sportradar built powerful chatbots to answer complex sports stats questions. Changing customer experience through chat- or voice bots is an overall trend to enhance customer service quality and increase operational efficiency. Syngenta shared how they are using AI & ML to support millions of farmers with real time decisions to maximize their productivity.

Diving deep in the breakout sessions

In over 70 sessions showed AWS customers, partners and local experts various trends across industries. 12 sessions plus the keynote session were being recorded and can be now accessed on-demand.

A central topic was generative AI and how regulated companies can leverage it to transform not only their internal operations but also customer experiences or product innovation. Zurich Insurance showed in their session how they are scaling generative AI, what capabilities are needed, and the audience learned how they could use Amazon Q for Business to increase their productivity. Next, Pictet Asset Management spoke about their journey to build a future-ready AI platform and the importance of finding the right level of governance to give enough flexibility and foster innovation. Central aspects in their talk were that customization really makes a difference regarding how much value could be created from generative AI, and that security and privacy must be built in from day one. A precondition for being able to customize AI with the internal relevant data assets is that companies have solved the challenge of dealing with their data sets. While it is easy to speak about potential concepts and ideas around this, Alpiq showed in their session how they effectively designed and implemented a data platform for real-time energy trading.

In the session it was shown how Alpiq combines native AWS services with open-source and commercial software products to follow a best of breed approach.

Concrete and productive use cases around artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) were also shown by Syngenta and Swiss Post. Syngenta presented in their session Implementing AI Document Processing at Scale how companies could use generative AI and services like Amazon Bedrock Data Automation to reduce manual efforts for managing documents. Another common challenge that affects organizations is to identify and reduce fraud. Swiss Post emphasized in their session on one side the importance of proper data management including practices like data classification and data labeling to fight fraud. On the other side, the speakers highlighted that also traditional machine learning practices and the usage of Amazon SageMaker AI could deal very well in managing fraudulent activities.

That there is no “one size fits all AI model” was shown in the session Scaling generative AI workloads with efficient model choice. The audience learnt about the model selection framework, how AWS customers use techniques like model distillation or fine-tuning and most importantly how to compare different models through Amazon Bedrock Evaluations. The last on-demand available session around AI/ML is delving into how Swisscom efficiently fine-tunes and deploys LLMs with Amazon SageMaker. A central discussion point of this session is how customization could improve the outcome of models and that it is key for companies to find the right balance between quality, costs and latency.

Beside generative AI, Digital Sovereignty was an important topic at the AWS Summit Zurich. The session Addressing Sovereignty Concerns: Privacy, Compliance & Vendor Lock-in tackled critical concerns about operational resilience, data protection, residency, and vendor lock-in. The audience learnt how AWS designs services with zero operator access through the AWS Nitro System and what is really behind the CLOUD Act. Next, PostFinance demonstrated in their session how they – as a system-critical bank – successfully adopt cloud-native services, remaining vendor agnostic and addressing critical concerns around exit strategies and disaster recovery.

Meanwhile, Avaloq spoke in their talk Shaping the future of modular and composable banking solutions about the need to modernize core banking systems and how they are using cloud-native services like AWS Lambda or Amazon DynamoDB to create composable modules. During the session Reimagining Manufacturing: Clariant’s SAP RISE Journey with AWS, Clariant shared how modernizing their SAP core system on AWS represents a strategic step toward digital transformation and smarter manufacturing. The migration established a scalable foundation that now supports innovation projects like predictive maintenance powered by AWS IoT services or intelligent automation using agentic AI across key processes such as order-to-cash or procurement. Finally, Crealogix spoke about Building a Secure AWS Self- Service Platform for Regulated Industries. The central idea is here to lower the cognitive load for development teams and accelerate them through a platform that is based on automation and self-service capabilities.

Conclusion

The AWS Summit Zurich 2025 demonstrated how Swiss companies are successfully combining AI innovation with regulatory compliance, leveraging AWS services to transform operations across industries while maintaining digital sovereignty. At the same time the event brought AWS, partners, experts and customers together. It was a day full of interesting conversations, educational talks and demonstrations. Come by and visit us at the next AWS Event!

You can directly navigate to the AWS Summit Zurich 2025 Youtube playlist by clicking on the below picture. The playlist with the recorded sessions from AWS Summit Zurich 2024 is available here.