Amazon Wants 80% of Conference Discussion to Be About Generative AI
Expect a lot more talk of generative AI at Amazon cloud computing events this year.
The Amazon Web Services cloud unit is now requiring its AWS Global Summit events to fill up to 80% of their agenda with generative AI-related content, according to an internal memo obtained by Business Insider.
AWS Global Summits is a series of events held in cities across the world where Amazon leaders, partners, and customers go on stage to talk about AWS products and use cases. It’s an opportunity to connect with potential customers and showcase AWS’s newest technologies, similar to its annual re:Invent cloud conference.
The AWS marketing team has told employees they can re-purpose generative AI-related content found in last year’s re:Invent conference to reach the 80% quota, the memo said.
“To better enable our customers to learn how we think about and approach Gen AI, marketing leadership is prioritizing the inclusion of Gen AI sessions and customer use cases at 2024 Global Summits,” said the memo. “Up to 80% of all Global Summit sessions will be sourced from 2023 re:Invent sessions tagged to Gen AI.”
The new directive shows how Amazon is going to extraordinary lengths to promote its AI prowess, at a time when interest in generative AI is skyrocketing. Microsoft, OpenAI, and Google are considered to be ahead with more popular AI products, while Amazon has been internally scrambling to address any perception of falling behind.
In an email to BI, Amazon spokesperson Patrick Neighorn confirmed the memo, adding that the change is largely driven by customer demand.
“AWS Summits are incredibly popular interactive learning conferences where we offer customers their choice of sessions on the topics they care most about, and today that’s generative AI,” he wrote. “With the number of participants in AI sessions more than doubling at re:Invent, we’ve worked hard to ensure all our attendees have the opportunity to get hands-on experience with our generative AI offerings, like Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Q, and Amazon SageMaker, in addition to hundreds of other AWS services.”
‘Multi-billion dollar’ business
This is all part of Amazon’s recent effort to double down on AI. Earlier this week, Amazon made its Q chatbot assistant broadly available.
The company also offers Bedrock, which gives developers access to multiple AI models. Amazon developed homegrown AI chips, too, called Trainium and Inferentia, that compete with Nvidia’s GPUs. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy previously said “every single one” of the company’s teams is working on some kind of AI project.
Some of this is starting to pay off. On Tuesday, Jassy said Amazon is on pace to generate “multi-billion” dollars in revenue this year from its generative AI offerings. In Amazon’s annual shareholder letter this year, Jassy said generative AI may be “the largest technology transformation since the cloud (which itself is still in the early stages), and perhaps since the Internet.”
Generative AI has already been accounting for a larger share of Amazon’s public comments. Last year’s AWS re:Invent conference was also mostly centered around AI. At the event, Amazon unveiled a number of new AI products, including the Amazon Q assistant and an updated AI training chip.
It’s not just Amazon who’s doing this. All of the major tech companies, including Microsoft, Google, and Meta, have upped the portion of their AI talk in public events. Among the 9,000 largest companies tracked by market research firm AlphaSense, artificial intelligence was mentioned in 2,926 of their corporate events, such earnings calls and industry conferences, in the first quarter of this year. Five years ago, only 952 events mentioned AI, AlphaSense data shows.
For some Amazon employees, the heavy talk around AI has become a frustration, leading to what they call “AI fatigue,” as BI previously reported.
“All of the conversations from our leadership are around GenAI, all of the conferences are about GenAI, all of the trainings are about GenAI…it’s too much,” an AWS employee wrote in an internal Slack channel last year.
That trend is likely to continue. At future AWS events, employees will have a hard time convincing leadership to feature non-AI sessions, the internal memo said.
“Please keep this strategy in mind when submitting your session topic or customer speaker,” the memo added. “Remaining agenda slots will be extremely limited.”
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