If Amazon Web Services’ annual re:Invent tech conference proves anything, it’s that the cloud infrastructure player is all about artificial intelligence.
AWS announced dozens of announcements from new AI agents and updated big language models, to products with LLM and agent creation capabilities. AI for business was everywhere. But are his customers as willing?
AWS CEO Matt Garman acknowledged during his keynote that businesses have yet to see a return on their AI investment. He thinks that’s about to change — and quickly.
“I think the advent of artificial intelligence agents has brought us to an inflection point in the trajectory of artificial intelligence,” Garman said. “It’s going from a technical marvel to something that gives us real value. This change will have as big an impact on your business as the internet or the cloud.”
While analysts told TechCrunch they were impressed by some of AWS’ technology announcements this week, they’re not sure it’s enough to move the needle on enterprise AI adoption or change AWS’s position in the AI race.
AWS is one of the market leaders when it comes to cloud infrastructure. The same cannot be said for its business AI offerings.
Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google hold a commanding lead in enterprise market share for real AI models. AWS has the advantage of having everything in-house, including infrastructure and its own AI training chips.
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Naveen Chhabra, principal analyst at Forrester, told TechCrunch via email that while AWS has announced several new technologies, it doesn’t change the fact that many businesses are not ready to adopt AI.
“The AWS AI announcements show that AWS is thinking ahead, and perhaps far ahead,” Chhabra wrote. “Most enterprises are still piloting AI projects and are rarely at the maturity levels that AWS expects them to take advantage of the offerings resulting from these announcements.”
A widely cited MIT study as of August found that 95% of businesses are not seeing a return on investment from AI.
Ethan Feller, equity strategist at Zacks Investment Research, told TechCrunch in a phone interview that the new Nova AI models, agents, and model-building capabilities weren’t what stood out to him as interesting from this week — even though those were the products AWS made the most. Instead, it was the infrastructure announcements.
“AWS AI Factory is really exciting,” Feller said of a new initiative that allows customers to run AWS AI in their own data centers. “AWS is a huge player in operating models and dominates the cloud industry. I think that’s where Amazon’s expertise really lies. It’s good to double down on where they have expertise.”
Feller likes that AWS wants to make a vertical AI play, but thinks it might make more sense to do so through partnerships with other AI players like Anthropic and Nvidia, as opposed to using all of its own AI technology.
Nevertheless, AWS is still well-positioned to gain market share in AI while continuing to grow its core businesses.
AWS’ position as the industry’s leading cloud provider means it has a solid business footing despite what’s happening in the AI market, because it provides the rails for the industry’s technology — no matter what the AI trend is right now.
If the AI industry turns out to be the bubble some say it is, AWS, which posted $11.4 billion in operating income in the third quarter, will likely be less affected by a negative change in AI market conditions than its peers.
This gives AWS room to experiment and iterate on what its AI market position might look like down the road. That’s why, even if businesses aren’t ready for the technology that’s out there today, AWS should keep working to improve it.
Follow along with all of TechCrunch’s coverage of the annual enterprise tech event here, and see any announcements you may have missed so far here.
