MALAYSIA—DECEMBER 3, 2025—At re:Invent 2025, Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, today announced that 123RF, a royalty-free stock media platform headquartered in Malaysia with more than 230 million assets available to 12.4 million users globally, has launched a service that uses generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) to understand video content. 123RF’s early testing on a sample of 5 million videos has doubled accuracy in video descriptors and improved search relevance to autonomously understand what is in videos and images using Amazon Nova. This implementation particularly benefits 123RF's ecommerce customers who need to quickly find appropriate videos or images to pair with products, directly impacting how many products they can list each day.
Intelligent Content Discovery
Conventional searches frequently produce irrelevant results when contributors submit inaccurate or insufficient tags or keywords. For example, when a user searches for "green bag," the AI-powered system analyzes the actual visual content to return images and videos of green bags themselves, rather than unrelated clips that simply have green backgrounds or happen to include the word 'green' in their tags. 123RF can now use AI to automatically detect trademarked logos and flag branded content, categorizing it by licensing categories like commercial use or royalty-free. The AI can identify trademarked patterns on clothing or branded products within images and videos—subtle details that traditional checklist methods might overlook—and automatically flag them for appropriate licensing categorization.
“AWS has fundamentally changed how we operate at 123RF, transforming us into an AI-powered creative enabler. Our marketing teams now launch campaigns 35% faster. This efficiency means our teams can focus less on repetitive work and more on serving the creator economy,” said Bernadine Michael, CMO, 123RF. “The real breakthrough is how Gen AI on AWS democratizes creativity across our global subscriber base. Designers and marketers who previously spent hours searching for the perfect asset can now instantly find precisely what they need, regardless of language or cultural context.”
Creating a Global Creative Asset Marketplace
123RF processes over 3 million image uploads monthly, each requiring thorough compliance, copyright, and quality verification. Previously, this labor-intensive process required 30-40 human reviewers manually processing approximately 3,000 images daily. The media platform also faced the challenge of expanding its Gen AI capabilities globally because most user-generated metadata like titles, keywords, and descriptions, are in English, but the platform needed multilingual support for 15 languages. This went beyond direct translation and required handling idioms and cultural nuances. 123RF has transformed both its operations and customer experience — reducing content review time by 92% while simultaneously enabling customers to find perfect creative assets in 90% less time with significantly improved accuracy.
"Our AWS-powered AI technology now 'sees' images the way humans do," explained Phoebe Liew, CTO, 123RF. "When someone uploads an image, our system instantly captures what makes it visually unique – like identifying a specific architectural style or recognizing the composition of a sunset scene. This visual understanding means we can match similar images automatically, regardless of what language the description is in. Instead of relying on keywords that might be inaccurate or missing, we're analyzing the actual visual elements. This breakthrough helps our customers find exactly what they're looking for faster, eliminates duplicate content, and identifies potential copyright issues with remarkable accuracy – all because the AI understands the image itself, not just the words describing it."
To support its rapid growth and global expansion, 123RF leveraged multiple AWS Gen AI capabilities that work together to scale operations:
● 123RF used Amazon Bedrock with Anthropic’s Claude 3 Haiku model to build a professional translator, that can capture cultural nuances and context. For example, in English, “freedom” implies individual autonomy, but its Japanese equivalent “jiyū” can sometimes suggest selfishness, which means it may not carry the same positive, universal resonance. The system can help users comply with these nuances while also identifying specific elements like copyright icons, logos, and quality flaws autonomously.
● Amazon Nova’s understanding models, including Nova Pro and Nova Lite enable 123RF understand content copyright risks before the content reaches the marketplace, helping to protect users.
“123RF demonstrates how AI transforms creative workflows – tasks that once took designers days now take minutes, enabling Malaysian companies to compete on a global stage. This has set a new benchmark for what's possible beyond the stock media industry,” said Hussein Mohd. Ali, Country Manager, Malaysia, AWS. “Our Unlocking Ambitions survey reveals that startups are leading this charge, with 48% already implementing AI solutions and nearly a third building entirely new AI-driven products. This entrepreneurial spirit is positioning Malaysia as an emerging hub for AI innovation in the region.”
About AWSAmazon Web Services (AWS) is guided by customer obsession, pace of innovation, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. By democratizing technology for nearly two decades and making cloud computing and generative AI accessible to organizations of every size and industry, AWS has built one of the fastest-growing enterprise technology businesses in history. Millions of customers trust AWS to accelerate innovation, transform their businesses, and shape the future. With the most comprehensive AI capabilities and global infrastructure footprint, AWS empowers builders to turn big ideas into reality. Learn more at aws.amazon.com and follow @AWSNewsroom.
