Matt Garman joined Amazon Web Services as an intern nearly two decades ago. But his appearance earlier this month at the cloud computing giant’s annual conference in Las Vegas marked something of a debut.
Garman was appointed CEO of AWS six months ago, overseeing Amazon’s $100 billion cloud business. AWS’s sprawling collection of data centers powers some of the world’s most popular services, such as Netflix, Apple, and Uber. Many of those customers were in the audience at the AWS Re:invent event as Garman, sporting jeans and a button-down shirt with sleeves rolled up, confidently presided over a three-hour keynote presentation alongside a rotating cast of his lieutenants, partners, and, even, his boss.
The air of confidence and poise is in keeping with what, from the outside, might look like the dream job handover. Garman inherited Amazon’s most profitable business, accounting for more than 60% of the internet giant’s $47 billion in operating profit over the first nine months of the year, with an enviable market share and blue chip customers locked into lengthy contracts. As an experienced hand on the AWS wheel, Garman’s mission revolves around keeping a good thing going — something he acknowledged in a recent interview when he told the reporter “there’s not a desire to massively change anything.”
And yet, as Garman’s tenure gets underway, a confluence of events are coming together that might force him to take more drastic actions than he’s let on.
The generative AI boom is causing companies across industries to overhaul their technology strategies and to re-evaluate the kinds of things they need from a cloud provider, a major shift that has the potential to bring a windfall of enterprise spending but also to upend the balance of power in a cloud market where AWS has long called the shots. Garman and team’s Las Vegas presentation was heavy on AI announcements, but Amazon’s main cloud rivals, Microsoft and Google, have been attacking the new Gen AI opportunity feverishly too. Plus Nvidia, the AI chip giant, recently disclosed that it’s building its own cloud services that could challenge AWS’ core strength.
“There’s the potential that if Amazon or AWS doesn’t innovate in AI at a faster speed, they are gonna stay behind in the market,” Cate Ciccolone, a former senior AWS security consultant who left in the spring, told Fortune a month before the conference. “For a lot of people in the industry when they think of AI, AWS is not gonna be the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd choice. They have a lot of ground to cover and I think that’s partly why it’s getting a lot of attention internally.”
Garman also finds himself balancing along the tightrope of reinvigorating an internal culture that has grown bureaucratic amid years of overhiring and bloated middle management, while at the same time winning over some talented employees who’ve grown dismayed by a five-day return-to-office mandate.
Then there’s the Trump factor. The former and incoming president, as some may recall, has not been a fan of Amazon founder and executive chair Jeff Bezos thanks in part to what he deemed unfair coverage by the Bezos-owned Washington Post. During the last Trump administration. Amazon successfully argued in court that the former president’s animus toward Bezos directly resulted in AWS losing out on a $10 billion government contract. No one can predict what squabbles his next administration might bring.
How Garman leads Amazon’s most profitable organization through this crucial moment of both grand opportunities and challenges will go a long way toward writing the next chapter of the tech giant’s post-Bezos arc. Given AWS’ importance to Amazon’s bottom line and overall AI gameplan, the new CEO will be under intense scrutiny from investors looking for assurances that the steady hand can also be an agent of change when necessary. In interviews with a dozen current and recently-departed AWS employees, Fortune has taken one of the first close looks at the man leading the cloud computing juggernaut, his first few months on the job, and what his stewardship means for the business.
A good B.S. detector
Garman, 48, grew up in Scottsdale, Arizona, in a family “full of big talkers who liked to deliver a point that got heard.”
He’s credited at least some of his ability “for cutting through and getting to the ground truth” of what someone is or isn’t saying, to that family dynamic. “I think that’s something I bring to the table,” he’s said.
A former AWS leader described it to Fortune another way: “He has a very good bullshit detector.”
“I’m guessing that’s what Andy [Jassy] liked about him,” the former AWS leader said.
While Garman grew up a fan of the Phoenix Suns and spent a lot of downtime playing basketball during college and business school, he was decidedly not a jock. “He played a ton of intramural hoops but was also serious and geeky,” a former classmate told Fortune.
Josh McFarland, a venture capitalist at Greylock Partners who met Garman at Stanford and briefly worked at a dot-com startup with him, described his longtime friend as “solid” with an “unflappable” demeanor — a “very down-the-middle guy.”
After Stanford, during the dot-com boom, McFarland convinced Garman to let him live out of a 7×12-foot laundry room inside a Redwood City ranch-style house that Garman and other friends shared. While McFarland drove an SUV with flames on the hood, and another roommate owned a brand-new Honda sports car, Garman opted for a used sedan instead.
“And he was absolutely happy with that,” McFarland said.
(The lack of flash extends to Garman’s attire. McFarland said he recently teased his old friend about the sneakers he wore during an on-stage interview, so he’s having custom AWS-inspired Nike Air Force 1s made for him.)
Garman met his future wife Shanti during freshman year at Stanford, where he completed both an undergraduate and graduate degree in industrial engineering. Over the next five years, he worked in startups in product management roles, before enrolling in the MBA program at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
During the summer of 2005, after his first year at Kellogg , Garman joined what would become AWS as an intern, before it even launched publicly.
“When he started at Amazon, I remember thinking, ‘Oh, this makes perfect sense; Matt Garman is an Amazon kind of person,” McFarland said. “You put your head down, you do good work, you crank, you grind.”
After graduating in 2006, the year AWS officially launched, Garman accepted a full-time job as the division’s first product manager at a time when the company employed only three sales people.
“We did everything,” Garman has said. “I was the product manager and I wrote product detail pages, came up with pricing plans, ran product naming meetings—whatever was needed.”
That he’s stayed with the company nearly two decades since then says something about the fit he’s felt.
“He bleeds the culture,” said Erik Pupo, an AWS cybersecurity manager who left the company last year.
Some who’ve worked with him told Fortune however that the fact he’s spent the vast majority of his career at AWS has instilled in him an air of self-confidence internally that can at times come across as arrogance. Others, instead, see his demeanor simply as one best described as “intense.” Either way, multiple sources said that Garman has inspired fierce loyalty from his own leadership teams in his prior AWS roles.
Detour to the CEO job
The only major blip in Garman’s steady rise at AWS came when Jassy was tapped to replace Bezos as CEO in 2021, and the top job in the cloud division opened up. Many insiders expected Garman, who was a year into a new role running AWS sales and marketing, to get the nod. But Amazon instead chose former AWSer Adam Selipsky. The move was viewed as a surprise by some because Selipsky had been out of AWS for more than five years, running the software company Tableau as CEO in the interim, while Garman had continued taking on more responsibility inside AWS and had never left, having led both large technical teams and, later, the sales and marketing division.
But if Garman felt resentful about losing out, he didn’t show it. Instead, it gave him an additional three years running sales and marketing, which he was put in charge of one year earlier.
“It [was] a huge opportunity to really dive in deep with customers, understand how sales teams operate, and think about how we better organize there, thinking about marketing and how do we clearly communicate what the value is that we bring to customers,” Garman said earlier this year on a CNBC video podcast.
For that reason, the CEO transition has felt seamless for many big customers, according to both AWS employees as well as those like Corey Quinn, whose consulting firm DuckBill Group works with large AWS clients to lower their bills.
Garman’s comfort level also could be one reason that he doesn’t see a reason to immediately put a drastic imprint on the company.
“I’ve taken a lot of my first couple of months of this job as an opportunity just to learn and get to understand where people are coming from, both customers and employees,” he told another Fortune reporter recently. “And figure out how we can go faster and do more.”
Most of the dozen current and former AWS employees and managers that Fortune interviewed for this piece echoed the sentiment that there have been few significant changes inside the company that they can attribute to the CEO change.
And that may very well be a smart tact.
“Remember who AWS’ large customers are?” Quinn, of the DuckBill Group, told Fortune. “These are banks, these are airlines, these are nation-states. And one thing large institutions crave is stability. I would say that whenever you have a CEO transition with a business as something as impactful to operations as AWS, you go out of the way to avoid major changes in the first 6 to 12 months.”
The Amazon Q challenge
The world around AWS is changing though, and Garman has methodically taken on the task of tuning-up and adapting the business for the AI era.
Even before Garman became CEO, AWS had positioned Amazon Bedrock as the centerpiece of its cloud AI strategy. The gist of this very Amazonian approach is to offer a one-stop shop for AI foundational models – from companies like Anthropic and Meta to Amazon’s own homegrown LLMs – that AWS customers can use or train to build their own generative AI applications for their own businesses. At the Las Vegas conference earlier this month, Amazon announced the Bedrock Marketplace, which offers access to a total of 100 large language models, many from outside firms and for specialized use cases.
Garman has framed AWS’ entry into the Gen AI sector as more deliberate than others who “ran and did hundreds of proof of concepts and…had chatbots on their website very quickly.” Let other companies paint flames on the hood, AWS is essentially saying, we’re giving business customers the reliable, practical vehicle they need to navigate the AI landscape.
AWS spokesperson Shiri Blatt told Fortune prior to the conference that tens of thousands of organizations were already using Bedrock, including Ferrari and Nasdaq.
“The business has really taken off,” Garman told a reporter recently, echoing past comments by Jassy, who has said the AWS generative AI business is generating multiple billions in annual revenue.
AWS does, in fact, have its own chatbot technology in Q, a generative AI assistant that AWS is trying to sell to both developers as well as other non-coding businesspeople. Several Amazon employees told Fortune that the company is more aggressively pushing Q in recent months.
The reviews have been mixed.
One AWS manager said that developers on his team have enjoyed testing out the tool for coding purposes, but the results it generates can range from “comically incorrect at times” to “mainly just regurgitating” the exact information that’s in a software product’s documentation without adding more content or nuance.
Another AWS manager said Q has been known to generate results that reference libraries of pre-written code that don’t exist.
“It was unusable,” the manager said.
Still, one of these employees said that Q’s accuracy and usefulness seems to have improved over the last month or two as the company trained the tool using newer versions of Claude, the foundational model created by the AI startup Anthropic, with which Amazon has a close partnership and in which the tech giant has now invested $8 billion.
Garman’s boss, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, also introduced at the Re:Invent conference a new family of Amazon-built AI foundation models called Nova that received positive early reviews.
“With this release I think Amazon may have earned a spot among the top tier of model providers,” a prominent AI researcher, Simon Willison, said afterward.
The attention that Q, and all generative AI efforts, are getting from Garman make sense to some. “I think he wants to put more focus on it because there are problems,” said Pupo, the former AWS manager who previously worked as CIO of Columbia University’s medical center. “The challenge has been how to sell Q.”
Blatt, the AWS spokesperson, said that Q is a response to customer demand for an AWS-focused assistant, and that the company is committed to continuously improving it. She also pointed to an earlier Amazon announcement stating that the version of Amazon Q that’s designed for software developers accomplished the equivalent of an estimated 4,500 years of work on one Java-related project resulting in performance improvements that represent $260 million in savings. She added that Q has ranked highly on leaderboards for software development assistants, and has outperformed published results from other assistants on correctness and helpfulness.
Current and former employees who spoke to Fortune were mixed on whether Garman’s background and skill set make him a good or poor fit for a CEO steering a giant incumbent during this transformational pivot to AI. But, for better or worse, AWS’ AI strategy is likely not one solely resting on his shoulders. Jassy, after all, presented the Nova models at the Las Vegas event, while Bezos recently disclosed that around 95% of the time he still spends at Amazon as executive chairman is focused on the company’s AI efforts.
Welcome to the spotlight
Outside of the AI ground war, AWS under Garman has surprised some customers by discontinuing access to a long list of lesser-used services, part of what Garman has described as a “little bit of a clean-up.” That alone is not problematic – some have even applauded the move as a necessary retrenchment to better focus internal priorities and investments – but the uncertainty for some customers created by the steady drumbeat of deprecations could be. AWS has announced at least 30 services that are either being deprecated, or ceasing to accept new customers, in just six months since Garman stepped into the CEO role.
“They are not beloved services, they are not in high demand,” Quinn said. “But the fact they are turning off yet something else starts to lead folks to think, ‘Maybe they are going to cancel something I do use.’”
Then there’s the AWS culture that Garman has both helped create but is now also attempting to fix. When Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced the controversial five-day back-to-office mandate in September, he lamented the lurching bureaucracy that a fat layer of middle-management has created in recent years, including organizational flaws like “pre-meetings for the pre-meetings for the decision meetings.”
“When you have a very kind of hierarchical organization where people don’t feel like they have that ownership to make decisions, you go slow,” Garman said in a recent interview. “And for us, speed really matters.”
Indeed, that very predicament has pushed some AWS employees away.
“I couldn’t resolve inside my brain that we were told to live by the Amazon Leadership Principles like “Invent and Simplify” when I have to get 15 different approvals to proceed with anything,”
Ciccolone, the former senior security consultant at AWS who left in May, told Fortune in an interview.
Ciccolone was recognized inside AWS as a standout employee who was tapped by leadership as one of 120 AWS staff members globally to be honored earlier this year with a “Legend Award” as part of a new employee recognition program. Garman, a few months shy of becoming CEO, presided over the celebratory event. But Ciccolone was so dismayed by the stifling bureaucracy she says she experienced in her daily work, and the talent exodus she says it helped incite, that she chose to leave AWS this spring, only shortly after being honored.
Part of Amazon’s answer to bureaucracy creep is a target of a 15% reduction in the ratio of managers to individual contributors across the company. Another is the new full-time in-office mandate, that goes into effect in January, which executives believe will help newer employees absorb Amazon’s unique invention and decision-making culture more quickly.
While the RTO decision was Jassy’s to announce, Garman has defended it in blunt terms both internally and publicly. At a staff town hall meeting in October, the AWS chief told employees that if they didn’t like the rule, they could seek employment elsewhere.
“If there are people who just don’t work well in that environment and don’t want to, that’s okay, there are other companies around,” said Garman.
Despite stating that his comments weren’t intended “in a bad way,” his words and delivery enraged some employees who believed he was insensitive to the major impact the mandate could have on some employees’ lives.
“I guess we expected a little more savvy to be able to communicate it better internally,” one longtime AWS manager, who said they had no problem with the new work arrangement but were disappointed by the delivery, told Fortune. “He’s handling it in a way that’s so cavalier and with too much bluntness.”
But “blunt” and “straight shooter” were each descriptors for Garman used by multiple sources who spoke to Fortune. Garman, they said, is the type of executive who would much rather work on new deals or brainstorm new offerings than spend time making small talk or defending a work arrangement that was the norm for so long.
Quinn, the AWS billing consultant, says he has experienced this first-hand. Quinn is something of a celebrity in the AWS ecosystem and is known, in part, for taking humorous selfies with attendees at AWS events. But while he says several former top AWS execs have agreed to selfies with him in the past, Garman stands alone as the only one to have denied him. Quinn took it in stride.
“He’s direct and I actually appreciate that,” Quinn said.
The AWS spokesperson said that Garman’s “direct approach” is viewed as a positive leadership trait that aligns with the company’s famed leadership principles. (Amazon’s “Earn Trust” principle celebrates those who “speak candidly.”)
Another sign that Garman might still be adapting to the new spotlight that accompanies the CEO role? When a different Fortune reporter recently asked him for the part of the job that has surprised him the most, he quipped: “How many more interviews that I need to do.”
Asked by the same reporter for the toughest change he’s had to implement early on, Garman remarked again: “Outside of having to do more interviews?”
Blatt, the Amazon spokesperson, said the comments were made in jest and reflected the overall amiable tone of the rest of the interview. She noted that Garman also mentioned enjoying his press interactions, and that he understands the role of communication is crucial to the CEO position.
“He has always been highly focused on results and outcomes,” DuckBill’s Quinn said, “ but so much of the act of being CEO means you no longer get to do things you used to do if you want to succeed in the role. He’s under massive levels of scrutiny.”
The great Trump unknown
Whether Garman will face additional scrutiny in the form of a combative Trump administration is one more major unknown. Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos has done his best to smooth over what was a tumultuous relationship with Trump during his first term.
The Washington Post’s owner reportedly squashed the paper’s Kamala Harris endorsement weeks before the election (a move that Amazon’s former longtime spokesperson called “cowardly”). Then, after Trump was reelected, Bezos congratulated him in an uncharacteristically gushing tweet that celebrated his “extraordinary political comeback.”
“I’m actually very optimistic this time around,” Bezos said of Trump’s upcoming term at the DealBook Summit in early December.
“He seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation,” Bezos added. “And my point of view, if I can help him do that, I’m going to help him.”
Amazon later announced a $1 million donation to Trump’s inaugural fund, as did Meta and OpenAI’s Sam Altman. Soon after Bezos’ DealBook appearance, the Amazon founder was spotted having dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Trump. Amazon’s Blatt said that AWS officials have worked with policymakers and regulators across five administrations, and that the company looks forward to working with the incoming Trump administration as well as policy makers and state and federal officials to promote an environment “that allows us to continue to innovate on behalf of customers.”
It of course remains possible that Bezos has genuinely warmed to Trump like many wealthy business leaders have. But it’s also plausible that Bezos has decided he needs to at least attempt to develop a civil rapport with an unpredictable leader to protect his myriad business interests. And AWS remains an increasingly key one.
Garman has helped create this powerful and profitable plank of the Bezos business empire since its earliest days, providing the behind-the-scenes discipline and efficiency that made AWS the dominant cloud service. Now, it’s his turn to show what he can do in the spotlight.
Are you a current or former Amazon employee with thoughts on this topic or a tip to share? Contact Jason Del Rey at jason.delrey@fortune.com, jasondelrey@protonmail.com, or through secure messaging app Signal at 917-655-4267. You can also contact him on LinkedIn or at @delrey on X, @jdelrey on Threads, and on Bluesky.