The new strategic collaboration agreement with AWS to enable AI-powered solutions for SMBs includes a launch of Sage Earth on the AWS Marketplace will kick off in a few weeks in the UK and Ireland, but other geos, including North America, will have a bit of a wait – like 18 months.
Walid Abu-Hadba, Chief Product Officer at Sage
LAS VEGAS – At the Sage Transform event here, one of the major announcements was the extension of the two companies’ partnership around Sage Earth to launch the first domain-specific accounting Large Language Model (LLM), as well as to make the AI-powered carbon reporting solution Sage Earth available in the AWS Marketplace.
“Last year we talked about our relationship with AWS,” said Steve Hare, Sage’s CEO. “They help millions of SMBs to scale with cloud services. Last year, we introduced Sage Earth, carbon accounting software. This year we are announcing that it will launch on AWS marketplace.”
Hare noted that Sage will develop a domain-specific LLM for accounting and compliance using Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Lex.LLMs.
“This combines Sage’s 40 years of empliance expertise with AWS’ to parterning with AWS’ abilities around compliance LLM,” he added.
Sage will develop a domain-specific LLM for accounting and compliance using Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Lex. This specialized accounting and compliance-focused LLM will initially inform Sage’s new AI-powered assistant, Sage Copilot. It will also serve as a robust foundation designed to enable SMBs to navigate local accounting and compliance applications. The Powered by AWS capability will give the LLM will have the capability to process and analyze vast amounts of data swiftly and efficiently.
Walid Abu-Hadba, Chief Product Officer at Sage, believes that this is part of the most critical aspect for this year’s Transform.
“This is a deep relationship with Amazon in three dimensions,” he said.
“Dimension number one, which is super exciting, is that we are creating a domain-specific market mode and domain-specific language model that we will be partnering equally deeply with AWS on, and we will bring it to market with them. It will all be specific to accounting and accountants.”
Abu-Hadba said that Sage believes very strongly that that is the future.
“The reason we are able to do high degree of automation, very low latency and of hallucination, is because we will be depending heavily on this domain specific model that we control,” Abu-Habda stated. “For example Sage Copilot will not be where you go to ask about the weather or things like that. That we will leave to the large language models. We will be able to do a high degree of automation within our products with a high degree of accuracy. That’s why we are partnering with Amazon about this.
“Another one that we are announcing around Amazon is that Sage Earth is now available on AWS Marketplace,” he added. “We believe that this is the future, that this is what will help SMBs become really conscious of carbon accounting. We will also use a lot of AI technologies to actually supply that through our domain specific models.”
“This collaboration signifies a shared vision between Sage and AWS to transform accounting solutions for small and mid-sized businesses, focusing on simplifying carbon reporting and accounting for our customers and the wider business community. We are committed to harnessing the power of technology to drive innovation, enhance operational efficiency, and pave the way for sustainable growth among SMBs,” Abu-Hadba indicated. it uses AWS services including Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (Amazon QLDB), Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). The solution leverages accounting and other data sources to calculate businesses’ carbon footprints and suggests emission reduction strategies for small businesses and large enterprises’ value chains.
Don’t look for it just yet though if you live in Canada or the U.S. Sage Earth will be available in AWS Marketplace in the UK and Ireland in the following weeks, with plans to extend to North America and across Europe over the next 18 months.
Long term, it does fit into Sage’s strategy of expanding their geographic footprint.
“Half of our business today is in North America, and the other half is the U.K., France, Germany, Spain and South Africa,” said Eduardo Rosini, Sage’s Chief Growth Officer. Sage used to be in Latin America, but not now. We have some distis there, but we don’t specifically make products there.”
