M+E Connections

Amazon continues to see momentum grow for artificial intelligence (AI), especially generative AI (Gen AI), and the company continues to invest heavily in Gen AI although it’s still a nascent category, according to Andrew Jassy, its CEO and president.

The company is seeing “considerable momentum on the AI front where we’ve accumulated a multibillion-dollar revenue run rate already,” Jassy told analysts April 30, during an earnings call for Amazon’s first quarter (ended March 31) that was also webcast.

“We recently launched a new generative AI tool that enables sellers to simply provide a URL to their own website, and we automatically create high-quality product detail pages on Amazon,” he told analysts April 30, during an earnings call for Amazon’s first quarter (ended March 31) that was also webcast.

“Over 100,000 of our selling partners have used one or more of our Gen AI tools,” he said.

Meanwhile, Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers are also “quite excited about leveraging Gen AI to change … customer experiences and businesses,” he went on to tell analysts.

The company also continues to “add capabilities at all three layers of the Gen AI stack,” he pointed out.

“Companies are also starting to talk about the eye-opening results they’re getting using SageMaker,” he said. “Our managed end-to-end service has been a game changer for developers in preparing their data for AI, managing experiments, training models faster, lowering … latency, and improving developer productivity.”

“The top of the stack are the Gen AI applications being built,” he told analysts.

The company also just announced the “general availability of Amazon Q, the most capable generative AI-powered assistant for software development and leveraging companies’ internal data,” he pointed out.

“On the software development side, Q doesn’t just generate code, it also tests code, debugs coding conflicts, and transforms code from one form to another,” he said. “Today, developers can save months using Q to move from older versions of Java to newer, more secure and capable ones.”

He added: “Q is not only the most functionally capable AI-powered assistant for software development and data, but also setting the standard for performance. Q has the highest-known score and acceptance rate for code suggestions, outperforms all other publicly benchmarkable competitors in catching security vulnerabilities, and leads all software development assistants on connecting multiple steps together and applying automatic actions.”

Amazon customers are “gravitating to Q, and we already see companies” including GoDaddy, National Australia Bank, NCS, Netsmart, Slalom, Tata Consultancy Services and Toyota “using Q, and we’ve only been in beta until today. I’d also caution folks not to overlook the security and operational performance elements of these GenAI services.”

Meanwhile, Amazon still sees “significant opportunity ahead in our sponsored products, as well as areas where we’re just getting started, like Prime Video ads,” Jassy also said.

“Prime Video ads offers brands value as we can better link the impact of streaming TV advertising to business outcomes like product sales or subscription sign-ups, whether the brands sell on Amazon or not,” he said.

Although it’s still “very early for streaming TV ads … we’re encouraged by the early response,” he added.