Adam Selipsky's departure from Amazon Web Services, announced last week, comes as the cloud unit faces heightened competition from companies rolling out artificial intelligence services.
After years of rapid expansion, growth at AWS decelerated to 13% in 2023, down from 37% in 2021 and 29% in 2022, reflecting more conservative spending by businesses on IT and cloud services. Amazon has downsized across the board, including Garman's selection for the top job"indicates Mr. Jassy and perhaps Mr. Bezos believe he's the person most likely to help Amazon close the lead and maybe establish a lead of their own," said Luria, who recommends buying Amazon shares.A source close to Amazon, who asked not to be named, described Garman to CNBC as a"wartime" leader and said change was needed to get more aggressive in AI.
Amazon's annual shareholder meeting, which took place virtually on Wednesday, arrived at a precarious time. It was held just days after Selipsky's departure and was overshadowed by AI-focused events at top tech companies., a faster model with improved capabilities in text, video and audio. Google followed a day later at its developer conference,During a Q&A session on Wednesday, Jassy was asked twice about the status of Amazon's generative AI efforts.
The company has also boasted about the success of AWS' Trainium and Inferentia chips, with Anthropic using them to build and train its models, a process often performed on The week before his departure, Selipsky made some changes to the Q team. He tapped Dilip Kumar, a longtime Amazon executive who helped develop and launch its cashierless checkout technology, to oversee the"Amazon Q Business set of services," according to a memo sent to employees that was viewed by CNBC. Kumar will report to Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of AI and data at AWS.