Name: AWS User Group UK Meetup #74
Start: 2025-12-17T18:00:00.000Z
Location: AutogenAI

We are delighted to welcome [Phil Basford,](https://www.linkedin.com/in/philipbasford/) Senior Director at Cognizant UK&I Consulting and [Ashraful Alam](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashraf2k/), AWS Cloud Technical Lead at Legal and General.

Insurers deal with billions of messy, multi-format documents that used to take hours or days to process. **Phil's** talk shows how Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) on AWS - using Bedrock, Textract, Comprehend, and custom SageMaker models - automates extraction, classification, and validation end-to-end. Expect real-world architecture, pre-processing/post-processing patterns, and outcomes: 90%+ accuracy and >500x faster turnaround across £500M+ of business.

**Ashraful** will show you how to supercharge Amazon Q in the terminal with MCPs - 49 servers, live AWS checks, and Playwright for browser automations, custom rules for killing hallucinations. FSI-grade guardrails (prod protection, cost, audits) at £0 extra - a verification-first, agentic platform you own.

**Programme**
**18:00:** Arrival, registration
**18:15:** ***TALKS START***
**20:00:** Networking with food and a drink provided by the generosity of our sponsors.

**Talk 1**
***Using AI to help process documents in Insurance with Phil Basford***

The insurance industry has billions of historical documents; with hundreds of thousands more being generated every day. The documents, in varying formats are used both internally and with other insurers to agree terms, assess risk and create accurate quotes. Historically each document can take a few hours or even days to manually process and needs to be loaded into each company’s systems. AI is helping several companies to reduce this processing time to minutes by automating the process using Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), saving time, increasing the accuracy, and readying the data for further analysis - giving valuable insights back to the business. IDP uses the latest AI services; Amazon’s Bedrock, Textract to extract text, Amazon Comprehend to classify and detect entries in the documents and custom models with labelled grown truth in SageMaker. This architecture will look at these services alongside the pre-processing, processing, and post processing challenges and showcase how to jointly leverage these services for the best success.

Using IDP, one customer achieved an accuracy of 90%+ and a more than 500x reduction in processing time across over £500 million worth of business

**Talk 2:**
***How to Put Amazon Q or Any Agentic Coding on Steroids with MCPs with Ashraful Alam***

Amazon Q is powerful out of the box, but in the terminal it becomes a superpower. In this talk, I share how I turned Amazon Q CLI into a fully-fledged, verification‑first AI platform using the Model Context Protocol (MCP) all without adding $0 extra cost. I’ll walk through how I built 49 MCP servers to remove hallucinations, browser automation with Playwright, and live AWS verification that eliminates hallucinations in practice. You’ll see Financial Services Institution grade guardrails (production protection, cost controls, and full audit trails) that makes Q feel native to a builder’s workflow, secure and reliable. You’ll leave with a blueprint to extend Amazon Q/ any agentic coding beyond chat into a trusted, terminal‑first, agentic platform you own and can evolve infinitely.

Remember to follow us [@AWSUserGroupUK](https://twitter.com/AWSUserGroupUK) and on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/aws-ug-uk) for the latest updates and you can find videos of our past meetups on [YouTube](http://bit.ly/2dZnvEE).

AWS AI in Practice

Paul Spratley

Ruben Sancho

kaushalyarajak903

Jennifer Ersoz-Jones

Alex N

Airon

Abhimanya Koushik Vemuri

Norbert D'souza

Paddy Gallagher

Ravi

David Smith

Ashraful Alam

Imran Bashir

GalinaOstroumova

Paul Ardeleanu

Mohsan Jaffery

Killian Kavanagh

Michael

Ian Gatley

AWS AI In Practice #2

AutogenAI

Welcome to our December meetup!

This event will be our Holiday Social. More details to follow.

A big thank you to our sponsors [The Scale Factory](https://www.scalefactory.com/).

**Programme:**
**18:00:** Arrival, registration
**18:30:** Talks start
**20:00:** Networking with food and a drink provided by the generosity of our sponsors.

If you are interested in speaking at one of our events please check out our [call for papers here](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf-x7wCrPgmgBvmldT095aAyu9gTm0JjE0ioJlhdG4c1EOUMg/viewform).

We are advocates for greater inclusion & diversity in UK Tech and are especially keen to receive talk submissions from people in underrepresented groups. If you are interested in speaking at a future meetup but would like to discuss what to expect or need assistance please contact our Inclusion & Diversity Lead Natalie Gray - graynataliej@gmail.com or DM her [@natjgray](https://twitter.com/natjgray)

Remember to follow us [@AWSUserGroupUK](https://twitter.com/AWSUserGroupUK) and on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/aws-ug-uk) for the latest updates and you can find videos of our past meetups on [YouTube](http://bit.ly/2dZnvEE). If you want to chat with other members, join our [Community Discord Server](https://discord.gg/yMa8Rvtsmy).

AWS User Group UK

Muhammad Hammad Khaliq

Mirela Popoveniuc

Shailendrasinh Gohil

Ella

Joel Hammond-Turner

GEORGII LESNICHENKO

Abs Lamzini

Andy Read

BrianLinuxing on BlueSky too

Shaun

Ruslan Nazarets

Lewis James

Sudipta Cha

Sanjay

kalpitsharma31

User 399623640

AWS User Group UK Meetup #74

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