About Matthew Garman
Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services, stated that replacing junior workers with AI is "one of the dumbest ideas he's ever heard." He said that while half of white-collar jobs may change, "change" does not mean "wipe out," comparing the shift to the introduction of Excel, which eliminated hand-calculation jobs but created new ones. Garman also described junior employees as "the cheapest employees" who "haven't learned bad habits" and are willing to learn new tools, and he said their jobs will be "vastly different" in two years but "more exciting and interesting."
Garman's comments come as Amazon has cut 30,000 jobs over the past year and as the company rolls out AI agents that promise to replace entire jobs. He expressed optimism about AI's impact on employment, contrasting with previous guest Eugenia Kuyda, who described the fear of job loss as "super justified."
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Matthew Garman's recent appearances.
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Transcript (29 segments)
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Bloomberg Audio Studios0:02
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.
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Interviewer0:07
You've built Quick AI that works across all applications, but I think that the main issue or point is that it builds context over time. What were you solving for with Quick?
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Matthew Garman0:19
Quick 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. Excitingly today we're launching a desktop application and I personally have 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 co-workers are, learns who you operate with, learns who you write to. It's an incredible productivity enhancer and it's something that we're launching today and really excited about.
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Interviewer1:02
AWS is pushing deeper into applications in the agentic AI context. That is everything from healthcare, hiring, supply chain. What was the need that you saw because a lot of the customer base of AWS will offer something quite similar.
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Matthew Garman1:20
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 in AI, every application is being remade. And with Amazon Quick, we saw that 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 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 into customers using AI to completely reimagine many of these traditional 30, 40, 50-year-old processes that companies have.
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Interviewer2:05
It makes you think of names like Salesforce, ServiceNow, SAP, key customers. What kind of conversations did you have with them about why the broad suite through Amazon Connect is useful and what they...
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Matthew Garman2:20
The things that we're building are actually quite complimentary to many of those partner offerings. And so I think if you think about actually 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 a really helpful add-on to customers that are doing supply chain and it's an agentic helper to help you make great supply chain decisions but you use it together with your existing supply chain solution. And so it's really complimentary to many of those products that our customers and our partners build on top of AWS today.
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Interviewer3:00
What's the strategy and goal for AWS and pushing deeper into the application layer? Like what do you think it will change for you rather than what you just outlined on the customer?
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Matthew Garman3:11
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 AWS 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 analytic services, things like AI services and increasingly with Connect for the last 10 years, we've been offering applications at the top layer. And we've always said there's millions and millions and millions of customers who build applications at 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 that 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.
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Interviewer4:00
What AWS has talked about is AI revenue run rate which getting into detail seems to focus a lot on the frontier models, how they're accessed, how they're used. But if you think about Quick, Connect applications, is that something Matt that you see making meaningful contribution in the AI revenue bucket?
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Matthew Garman4:18
Absolutely. You're absolutely right. A lot of our AI 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 Quick 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.
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Interviewer5:01
OpenAI. What's new? What's changed in your relationship?
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Matthew Garman5:05
Well, we're quite excited about the partnership that we're announcing with them today. 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 something that our customers have asked for for a really long time.
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Interviewer5:35
And we're talking specifically about frontier models, not just open weighted models, which was...
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Matthew Garman5:40
That's right. We've had open weight models for a while, but yes, this is the frontier model. So, starting in preview today, we have OpenAI's model 5.4 and 5.5 is coming in the next couple of weeks. We're also collaborating on a new offering which we call 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 AWS.
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Interviewer6:29
Think back to 2023. OpenAI's models were only available on Azure, right? Since then until now, what kind of behaviors did you recognize in the AWS customer base? Like did they literally open Azure accounts so that they could have access to something that wasn't available in AWS and that was kind of the indicator to you that you needed to make models.
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Matthew Garman6:56
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 in AWS. And they weren't able to run, and they did oftentimes, our customers run every part of their application in AWS and then they 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 trade-off 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.
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Interviewer7:53
It's early days. I appreciate that. But what is the sort of one metric you could point me to that gives you the conviction there is absolutely demand there at the enterprise level or otherwise for OpenAI's models.
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Matthew Garman8:08
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.
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Interviewer8:49
I think you know about Claude as a comparison or case study. What was so interesting about Claude through Bedrock is Anthropic got the benefit of a platform. You channeled business to them. But equally people want to use Claude. So they that channeled business to Bedrock. Do you see that playing out similarly with OpenAI?
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Matthew Garman9:09
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 AWS 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 OpenAI team as well.
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Interviewer9:38
Have you Matt had to make an assessment of how much of the spending that Amazon's committed to is literally dedicated to OpenAI infrastructure wise to support the ramp up of availability?
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Matthew Garman9:51
Yes. Well, we absolutely are expecting a lot of growth there, which we're quite excited about. And OpenAI's made a large commitment to AWS to use Trainium in particular, but across our AWS 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.
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Interviewer10:14
Does the demand meet the infrastructure that's been put in place? So, where are we in the balance between future supply and current demand? And is that true of OpenAI? I can't appreciate we're in preview as you speak.
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Matthew Garman10:22
There is still, I think, more demand out there than there is supply, 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 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.
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Interviewer11:01
We are in a strange situation where OpenAI models can now run on AWS, but Microsoft will benefit financially because of the latest terms of their agreement. They've ended exclusivity, but OpenAI continues to make payments to Microsoft. How do you think about that?
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Matthew Garman11:20
That's okay. 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 in 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.
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Interviewer12:17
You built Bedrock and stateful runtime at a time where access to models was constrained. Now if OpenAI is the case study it's available broadly everywhere. You know what's the benefit of accessing it through AWS? What's the pitch really? Why does a customer need to use AWS? That's the simple question.
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Matthew Garman12:38
You mean for the, and we're calling this Managed Agents, we called it stateful runtime before but the launch name of it is called Managed Agents and we're just as excited about that as we've ever been by the way so that product is something that we... Why do you want to use AWS? Well, this is the only place that we'll 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 agentic applications that learn with you over time that get better over time. It's a really simple way to, it includes kind of this agentic 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 is going to take off like wildfire. It's launching in preview today as well. And it'll be GA 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.