Amazon Inks Deal with OpenAI, Plans New AWS Applications

Q is the way for companies to get an AI assistant in the hands of every employee they have across the company. It allows customers to leverage data across all of their enterprise. But excitingly, today we're launching a desktop application. And I personally, I've been using it for the last couple of weeks, and it's the single best AI productivity enhancement I've tried of anything. It's really incredible. It allows you to work across your email, across your Slack, across all the information on your desktop, quickly pull information across various different settings, and it learns with you as you go. So it learns who your coworkers are, learns who you operate with, learns who you write to. It's an incredible, incredible productivity enhancer. And it's something that we're launching today and really excited about. We're also pushing deeper into applications in the agenda. That is everything from healthcare, hiring, supply chain.

Yeah, look, we think, and it's true, many of our customers are going to reinvent many of the applications that are out there. But we see that with agents out there today, every application is being remade. And with Q, we saw an opportunity to remake personal productivity inside of an enterprise setting. And with Connect, we're doing the same across many enterprise applications, whether it's with supply chain, whether it's with contact centers, whether it's with healthcare. We see the application opportunity to apply AI and agents to a number of these applications. And these are areas where Amazon has a lot of expertise and where we can add that expertise and help customers use AI to completely reimagine many of these traditional 30, 40, 50-year-old processes.

Yeah, in many of these, the things that we're building are actually quite complementary to many of those partner offerings. And so I think if you think about actually Connect, Connect and Salesforce have had a partnership for a really long time where many customers use those together in order to provide even better outcomes for their customers. And we think that's going to continue to be the case today where things like Connect Decisions is really a helpful add-on for customers that are doing supply chain. It's an agentic helper to help you make great supply chain decisions, but use it together with your existing supply chain solution. And so it's really complementary to many of those products that our customers and our partners build on top of us today.

For customers, we've always thought that AWS, and we always have produced offerings for customers at every layer of the stack. We obviously excel at the infrastructure layer where enterprise cloud is by far the largest and the most established. And we've also built services higher up the stack, things like databases, things like analytics services, things like AI services. And increasingly with Connect, for the last ten years we've been offering applications in the top layer. And we've always said there's millions and millions and millions of customers who build applications for that top layer. We always think that we'll build a few. Some of those will show customers things that they're able to do with their technology. Sometimes it's to expose areas where we're experts and we think that we can provide value to customers. But we always know that there's going to be lots of players up there at the application layer.

Absolutely. We see, you're absolutely right. A lot of our revenue today is on Amazon Bedrock and it's through accessing frontier models. But we see that every application in the world is going to be remade with AI. We think agents are going to totally change how work is done, how jobs are efficiently done. And we think we have some opportunities to have some unique offerings in that space that really change the game. And so we think that Amazon Q is one of those, we think Connect is one of those, we think Kiro on the coding side can really help people. And when you have some of these applications, it often inspires others to build around them. And we think it's a great opportunity for us where we think we have differentiated ideas to really change how things have been done for a long time.

Yeah, well, we're quite excited about the partnership that we're announcing with them today. So, yes, so for a long time, when we built Amazon Bedrock as a way for our customers to access frontier models and access AI models, we've always started with the position that we wanted to offer choice and we wanted to offer all of the best models available out there. And today we're excited to be bringing OpenAI into Bedrock. It's, I think it's something that our customers have asked for for a really long time.

That's right. We've had open models for a while. But yes, this is the frontier model. So starting in preview today, we have OpenAI's model o4-mini and o3 is coming in the next couple of weeks. We're also collaborating on a new offering, which is called Managed Agents featuring OpenAI, which is a complete managed agent capability. So customers can really easily make stateful agents and build agentic applications together with Bedrock and OpenAI. And it's really just the start of a long-term partnership that we've established together. As the teams have gotten together, we see opportunity for us to really invent new capabilities for our customers to go and build interesting applications together. And really excited about working together with the OpenAI team and unlocking more things that customers can build on.

Our customers have long told us they want to be able to use the absolute best cloud with the best set of models available, and they wanted to run all their applications on AWS. And they weren't able to run, and they did, every, and they did. Oftentimes our customers run every part of their application native. Yes. And then they had access if they wanted to use the OpenAI models, they'd either use them direct from them in their first party or through Azure or somewhere else. Now they don't have to make that tradeoff. And with the OpenAI team and the AWS team, we're really excited to not have to force customers into that choice. And if they want to build all in the AWS set of tools and capabilities, it's where their applications run. It's where most customers store their data, it's where they feel most secure. And they can now run that together with OpenAI models, together with the whole suite of models that we have in AWS, including Anthropic models, including open models, including Nova models, a whole set of models, and they can combine the best of what they want to do in order to build their applications.

Yeah, well, look, I think the team announced a statistic recently that Codex, which is also available in AWS in preview starting today in the last couple of weeks, has grown from 2 million users to 4 million users in just a really short amount of time. That is incredible. I mean, that is really unprecedented growth and it just shows that they're building really, really capable opportunities out there. But our customers still say, I would love to access and power Codex through Bedrock. So I have the security of Bedrock and AWS. Now with the launches today, all of those millions and millions of customers that are loving Codex can choose Bedrock as the provider and get the AWS security that comes behind that.

That's exactly what one of the things the OpenAI team is so excited about is partnering with AWS, is that exact partnership. And I think it's one of the things that we do well at AWS is partner with folks that we're building together with. And just like with Anthropic, which we have a fantastic partnership with, and we've really built this business together with Anthropic where we lean into them, we help their customers build applications on top of us and find out the best ways to use their cloud models. And we've seen their business really take off, and that's what we anticipate doing with the OpenAI team as well.

Yes. Well, we absolutely are expecting a lot of growth there, which we're quite excited about. And OpenAI has made a large commitment to us to use Trainium in particular, but across our AI services to grow their business. And so yes, they're strongly committed to growing their footprint on top of AWS, and we expect Bedrock to grow really rapidly as well.

There is still, I think, more demand out there than there is supply, right? For sure.

Well, yes, it's the first day, so I can't tell you that. Yes, but yes, the OpenAI team, I think, would gladly take more capacity from us this year and next year and the year after that as we add it. And so we're still working really hard to continue to add more capacity, whether it's power, whether it's chips, whether it's memory, all around the world. And I think that, you know, we're planning for success across many dimensions there. But yes, today the world is still largely supply constrained when it comes to AI capacity.

That's okay. That's, that's, that's, look. Microsoft has benefited from the growth of AWS since the very early days. In fact, we've supported Windows licenses as an example, I think since 2007, 2008. I can't remember the exact year. But so Microsoft has benefited. They build great software, they have good partnerships, and they should benefit from those. But customers really want to use those technologies. SQL Server is a good example that runs great on AWS. In fact, many of our customers tell us that SQL Server runs better, way better on AWS than it does on Azure. And so for those customers running on AWS is where they get the best reliability, the most security and the broadest set of features. And so that's great. And if Microsoft benefits because their software or their partnerships or their licenses are being used inside of AWS, that's great. And in this case, we partner with Microsoft just like we partner with Oracle and other providers that build software. And we want to make all capabilities available on AWS for people to build.

You mean for the managed agents? Managed agents, they called it stateful runtime before, but the launch name of it is called Managed Agents. And it's just, we're just as excited about that as we've ever been, by the way. So that product is something that we...

This is the only place that will have this Managed Agents product together with OpenAI. And we think it's going to be the single best and easiest way for you to go and build agent applications that learn with you over time. They get better over time. It's a really simple way to... It includes kind of this agent-like harness and a bunch of these pieces together that makes it really easy to build agents that leverage the latest frontier models from OpenAI. And so we're very excited about that product. We think that that is going to take off like gangbusters. It's launching in preview today as well, and it'll be here in the next couple of weeks. And we think that customers are going to really love how easy it is to build agentic applications with that product.