A leading U.S. university deployed Research Assistant, an AI-powered advisor on Amazon Bedrock, on top of its existing Research Gateway platform. Researchers now describe their infrastructure needs in plain language instead of navigating cloud provisioning screens, with the assistant recommending instance types, estimating costs, and provisioning workspaces automatically. Onboarding time dropped from days to hours, and routine support requests fell by over 50%.
A leading U.S. university is a world-renowned research institution with a long history of scientific innovation and medical breakthroughs. Researchers across the university conduct leading-edge work in clinical research, biomedical informatics, disease prevention, medical imaging, precision medicine, and AI-driven healthcare innovation.
After successfully deploying Research Gateway, a secure cloud-based research platform, the university faced a different challenge—not security, but adoption. Researchers struggled to select the right cloud infrastructure, understand cloud costs, and confidently provision AI-ready research environments.
Relevance Lab addressed these challenges by introducing Research Assistant, an AI-powered advisor that guides researchers through infrastructure selection, automates provisioning, and continuously optimizes cloud usage while maintaining institutional governance.
Inside the AI-Powered Research Assistant
The full case study covers how Research Assistant, built on Amazon Bedrock, guides researchers through infrastructure selection, automates provisioning, and continuously optimizes cloud costs while maintaining institutional governance.
View the Full Case StudyBusiness Challenges
Following the successful deployment of a secure, HIPAA-aligned Research Gateway platform, the university had established a scalable foundation for secure biomedical research. Researchers could provision compliant workspaces, collaborate securely across institutions, and leverage cloud-based compute resources for analytics, AI, and machine learning.
However, despite the platform's technical capabilities, adoption among research teams remained lower than expected. Researchers were experts in biomedical science—not cloud infrastructure—and many found it difficult to determine the right computing resources for their projects.
Research IT observed several recurring challenges:
As cloud adoption accelerated, the university needed a more intelligent and scalable way to bridge the gap between secure infrastructure and researcher productivity—one that could guide users through infrastructure selection, recommend cost-effective compute resources, simplify project provisioning, and reduce dependence on Research IT for routine operational support.
The objective was not simply to provide secure research infrastructure, but to make that infrastructure intuitive, accessible, and financially predictable for researchers while allowing Research IT to scale support across a growing portfolio of biomedical research projects.
Solution
Research Assistant
Relevance Lab introduced the Research Assistant, an AI-powered research advisor that sits on top of Research Gateway and provides several valuable capabilities.
Examples
- "Create a GPU workspace for my cancer genomics project."
- "Show me yesterday's cloud costs."
- "Add Dr. Smith to my research team."
- "Which projects have idle GPU resources?"
- "Why was my data import rejected?"
- "Summarize today's security alerts."
The Research Assistant complements Research Gateway by acting as an intelligent advisory layer that continuously analyzes project activity, cloud utilization, governance posture, and operational telemetry to proactively recommend improvements.
Architecture Highlights
Researcher-Centric Access with Easy Conversational Interface
Researchers access a conversational interface to get recommendations on research computing infrastructure and then create secure virtual workspaces without requiring direct infrastructure access.
- Amazon Bedrock provides the GenAI reasoning engine
- Knowledge Bases ground responses in institutional policies
- Research Gateway executes approved actions
- Guardrails ensure compliant responses
- IAM and KMS enforce least-privilege access
- CloudWatch provides operational telemetry used for recommendations
Research Gateway for AI-Powered Research Computing
Relevance Lab Research Gateway provides a secure, cloud-based foundation for biomedical research, clinical analytics, and AI/ML research. Built on AWS, it enables researchers to provision compliant workspaces and access cloud computing resources while maintaining institutional governance and HIPAA-aligned security controls.
Building on Research Gateway, Relevance Lab introduced Research Assistant, an AI-powered advisor that helps researchers select the right AWS infrastructure, estimate costs, provision research workspaces, and navigate governance requirements. By combining intelligent recommendations with conversational access, the solution makes research computing easier to use while reducing routine demands on Research IT.