Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president at Amazon Web Services, speaks during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on Aug. 29, 2019 in Shanghai, China.
Gao Yuwen | Visual China Group | Getty Images
Amazon’s cloud group is establishing a unit that will build software for working with artificial intelligence agents as the company aims to keep pace with competitors in generative AI.
Swami Sivasubramanian, an Amazon vice president who has been at the company for about two decades, announced the plans in a Wednesday LinkedIn post.
“Agentic systems offer possibilities that extend far beyond today’s chatbots and will drive efficiency like we haven’t seen before,” wrote Sivasubramanian, who most recently was in charge of Amazon Web Services’ database, analytics and AI services. “They will orchestrate complex workflows and solve problems with human-like reasoning, while maximizing performance and cost effectiveness at scale.”
On Tuesday, Reuters reported that AWS CEO Matt Garman called agentic AI a potential multibillion-dollar business for AWS, in a memo about the new group.
Customers have begun adopting agent software through AWS. Amazon is also a big user internally. For example, the company’s programmers have begun directing AWS’ Q developer service to write or update source code.
Sivasubramanian said Amazon has “saved 4,500 developer years using Amazon Q Developer’s code transformation capability to upgrade Java applications.”
In November, Microsoft announced an Azure AI Agent Service, and two months later Microsoft-backed OpenAI started allowing paying users try its agent software called Operator. In December, Google said it would provide limited access to its Agentspace tool for a select set of customers.
Amazon leads the cloud infrastructure market, with nearly $29 billion in AWS revenue in the fourth quarter, well ahead of Microsoft and Google.
Amazon has started promoting a next-generation version of its Alexa voice assistant that will be able to use AI models from AWS and from Anthropic, which is backed by Amazon. Anthropic is handling the most advanced elements of the new Alexa+, CNBC reported last week, though an Amazon spokesperson called the information “false.”
WATCH: Clara Shih, head of business AI at Meta, on the ‘agentic’ future of the economy
