Amazon’s cloud unit may have this ‘Microsoft’ fear, company responds

Amazon is reportedly the latest tech company to be pushing hard to sell its AI models to industry players. A report has said that Amazon Web Services (AWS), the e-commerce giant’s cloud business, is facing a tough competition from OpenAI, Google and, specifically Microsoft in the AI space, risking its cloud dominance.
Citing people with knowledge on the matter, Business Insider has reported that Inside AWS, there has been a ‘fear of losing to Microsoft’.Some employees at the company are said to be concerned that Amazon was caught off guard by the sudden emergence of generative AI.
Previous reports have also claimed that Amazon is playing catch-up to its rivals, most notably Microsoft, because they are worried about Q – its AI chatbot developed for enterprise use – is losing some customers to Microsoft’s Copilot because of a lack of certain AI features.

Why Amazon employees feel Microsoft Copilot has an edge over Q

The publication reports that some Amazon employees say that Microsoft has an advantage because it has a wide range of business applications, such as Microsoft 365 productivity suite, that allows it to demo how AI can improve customers’ productivity.
“AWS, meanwhile, has struggled to build a strong application business, despite years of trying,” the report notes.

What Amazon has to say

Meanwhile, a spokesperson for AWS has challenged this by saying that AWS has several successful software applications for companies, including Amazon Connect, Bedrock, and SageMaker.
It’s “no secret that generative AI is an extremely competitive space. However, AWS is the leader in cloud and customer adoption of our AI innovation is fueling much of our continued growth. AWS has more generative AI services than any other cloud provider, which is why our AI services alone have a multibillion-dollar run rate,” the spokesperson was quoted as saying.
The spokesperson added that Amazon Q, launched in April, is already seeing robust growth.