Amazon cloud boss Matt Garman inherits business under pressure to keep pace in AI

In May 2023, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy was asked by an attendee at the annual shareholder meeting how the company was innovating in generative artificial intelligence. OpenAI's ChatGPT had gone viral, and the major tech companies were all rushing products out the door to compete in the emerging world of chatbots and image generators.

Jassy responded to the question by touting Amazon Web Services, the cloud unit he'd helped launch 17 years earlier, eventually turning it into the company's main profit engine. AWS, under the leadership of Adam Selipsky, was developing its own AI products, Jassy said, and had the potential to provide critical infrastructure for other companies developing AI services.

"It's very early days in generative AI," said Jassy, who succeeded Jeff Bezos as CEO in 2021. "It's very high potential, and we're investing quite a bit in it and expect to be a leader."

For Selipsky, who took over AWS when Jassy was promoted, the days got late quickly.

In the most significant shake-up of Jassy's tenure at the helm, Amazon announced last week that Selipsky, 57, was exiting AWS and will be succeeded by Matt Garman, 48, a veteran AWS executive who most recently led sales and marketing.

The problem for Selipsky and the challenge for Garman is that Amazon has yet to emerge as a leader in generative AI despite throwing billions of dollars behind OpenAI competitor Anthropic and rolling out its own large language models, or LLMs. In the developer universe and among startups, the company is battling the perception that it's falling behind cloud rivals Microsoft and Google, in addition to lagging OpenAI in developing AI tools.

After years of rapid expansion, growth at AWS decelerated to 13% in 2023, down from 37% in 2021 and 29%