Companies around the world are all facing an interesting dilemma in 2024, according to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy: their biggest problems and solutions might be one and the same.
“The opportunity and risk is pretty similar in that there is this wildly transformative, disruptive technology in generative AI that you can’t get through any conversation without talking about,” Jassy says.
At a dinner in Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday, Jassy told Fortune CEO Alan Murray that prior to the pandemic, companies were largely moving to modernize their preexisting technology to innovate and lower costs. But the pandemic prompted them to think about saving money by any means necessary, and the mainstreaming of generative AI a few years later allowed them to dream about cost savings on a whole different level.
Now, it seems they’re at somewhat of an impasse about how to proceed.
“I just see companies really battling with prioritization between are they better off continuing with that modernization of their technology platform, or should they spend all their new engineering resources on generative AI,” Jassy says.
But it’s not as simple as picking a single option, he adds. If companies don’t have their technology infrastructure in place, it’s going to be hard for them to be successful in AI.
“It’s such a sure win to be able to modernize your technology, move to the cloud. That to me is a very predictable payback,” Jassy says. “Yet at the same time, it would be foolish not to figure out how to use generative AI successfully.”
It’s ultimately going to have to be a balance, Jassy says, with every company prioritizing what works best for them. He predicts that most companies will probably opt for the more sure path forward, modernizing their tech, and then investing in one or two AI initiatives that benefit their customer experience, and where they can learn how to be successful using AI..
Since OpenAI introduced its ChatGPT large language model chatbot to the public in November 2022, AI has become an almost single-minded focus of companies around the world. Excitement around the tech has forced tech giants like Google to hurry and launch their own chatbots.
Amazon has been working on AI for years, but announced the launch of its business chatbot called Q in November of 2023. The chatbot is built on 17 years of Amazon Web Services knowledge and is meant to help employees with things like streamlining tasks and communications, generating blog posts, summarizing content, as well as writing and analyzing code.
Amazon has also invested around $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic, a San Francisco-based company founded by former OpenAI staff. Anthropic launched its gen AI chatbot Claude to a broad audience in March 2023.
Jassy told Fortune on Thursday that Amazon is currently building some 60 other AI applications, but added that it’s still “early days” in the AI revolution.
“This is like three steps into a marathon,” he said.