Inside Amazon’s AI cloud strategy
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. When Matt Garman took over as chief executive of Amazon Web Services in June, one challenge stood out among the rest. He is now responsible for directing the efforts of the cloud-services business—the main driver of Amazon.com’s profits—to harness the potential of artificial intelligence for its customers.
In doing so, he has to compete with powerful rivals like Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet. At the recent WSJ Tech Live conference, Garman talked with Emma Tucker, editor in chief of The Wall Street Journal, about AI and other significant challenges, including government regulation and the potential effects of Amazon’s decision to call an end to remote work for corporate staff in the new year. Here are edited excerpts of that conversation.
WSJ: Like a lot of big tech companies, Amazon is spending huge amounts of money in the AI boom. Do you worry that all this competitive spending is creating a bubble? Or do you think it’s leading to tangible results? MATT GARMAN: I firmly believe that AI, and particularly generative AI, is a transformational technology that is going to change every single company, every single job, every single workflow out there. WSJ: I think there’s a general perception that Amazon was off to a bit of a slow start with generative AI.
What are you doing to play catch-up? GARMAN: I think the whole world was amazed when ChatGPT first came out. So what you saw was a bunch of providers rush out and try to get something out to market quickly. We took a bit of a different approach.
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