AWS CEO on AI, Return-to-Office Policy and What’s Next in the Cloud | WSJ

AWS CEO on AI, Return-to-Office Policy and What’s Next in the Cloud | WSJ

Show Video

- So, look, you stepped into the role as CEO of AWS in June, but that was after a 20-year career at Amazon, and you took over at a time of great change and with sort of the demand for cloud computing services growing ever higher. So, in a nutshell, can you explain to us what your vision is for AWS? - Sure, yeah. Look, AWS has been going for, it's about 18 years now, and our vision is not that dissimilar from when we started, which is largely to help companies of all sizes and shapes, and governments now, to be able to go and focus on the things that they do best. And so our vision is we wanna provide compute infrastructure and storage and services, so that companies, whether they're startups or large enterprises, can innovate fast and do the things that they are most focused on. And so if you're a bank or a healthcare company or a two-person startup, running infrastructure and building storage services or database services or compute services is likely not the thing that makes you special and makes you different than your competition. Those are just the ways that you get there.

And so our vision is to help those companies be able to do that. To help them go fast, help them be able to scale globally, and help them be secure and have great operational availability, and so that they can innovate and focus on what makes them unique and special. And so, that's our focus, and we wanna do that with a partnership mentality too, where we really partner with our customers, and we want our customers to love us and not have that old school kind of vendor relationship with their tech providers, where it was kind of antagonistic, but we help 'em grow together. - So, like a lot of big tech companies, Amazon is spending huge amounts of money in the AI boom. I mean, do you worry that this, that all this competitive spending is creating a bubble, or do you think it's leading to sort of tangible results? - Yeah, I think, well, look, I firmly believe that AI, and particularly generative AI, is a transformational technology that is gonna change every single company, every single job, every single workflow out there. And so, when I think about where we are today and where I think the technology will be, then over the next couple years, I really think that everything, every one of those businesses is going to be disrupted.

The way that workflows are gonna be done, the way that businesses will be done, the customer experiences that will be out there, I think they'll be fundamentally different. And so, I think this is a foundational technology that will change many of those businesses that are out there today, existing ones and new ones. And so, I don't, you know, there'll be ups and downs, there will be stories about how it's overblown, and now it's a best thing since sliced bread, and then once again, it's driving tons of value. But I think it is a fundamental technology that is gonna have the transformational impact on a wide variety of industries out there. - Can you perhaps give us an example of an AWS AI use case that's had a sort of, you know, a tangible business value for a big company? - Sure. Yeah, I think, look, if you think about, there's a whole range.

So you can take somebody, like a technology company like Adobe, who, on AWS, saw that this was gonna be, have a big impact on how people use their creative suite. And so, they trained a new model, and they launched it, and now they run Firefly, which is the way that allows you to use generative AI. That instead of the old way of kind of using Photoshop and going in and trying to update things, you can actually use AI to create images inside of their creative suite, adjust images and be much more creative as you're going and building images and videos inside of their suite. Then you look at somebody like GE Healthcare, who's using generative AI to completely change how workflows are done inside of a hospital. And so if you go into a hospital, and you talk to doctors and nurses, they would love to spend more time with patients and less time doing the administrative tasks that actually take up much of their time.

Together With GE Healthcare, we've announced a partnership to work together on that problem to try to automate many of those workflows that do take up much of their time today. And then you can go look at some of our financial services, where Nasdaq is using AI models today in their market, and analytics, to look after fraud or to find if there's any sort of market manipulation things going on. And they've been able to respond to any sort of questionable events 30% faster, which has a huge impact on making sure to shut those things down quickly. So, and that's just where things are today. I think in the future, there'll be more and more bigger impacts.

- So, I think there's a general perception out there that Amazon was off to a bit of a slow start with generative AI. What are you doing to sort of play catch up? - I do agree that that is a general perception, and I totally agree- - You're gonna tell me why it's wrong. (chuckles) - an actual- Yeah, so look, I think, I think the whole world was amazed when ChatGPT first came out. And it was a fantastic application. One, in that OpenAI did a great job and built a great model, but also, it kind of triggered a creative renaissance, where everyone realized what these models were capable of doing.

And a lot of people in the tech industry had been working on some of these things and trying to kind of crack that code for the last couple of years. And we knew the generative AI models were powerful and had the potential to do a lot of amazing things. And I think this broadly opened it up to a wide swath of people who understood what these models could be capable of. And so what you saw was a bunch of the providers rush out and try to get something out to market quickly.

And I'm sure many of you all, 'cause companies ran and did hundreds of proof of concepts, and they had chat bots on their website very quickly. And we took a bit of a different approach, mainly because of how we think about how we support our customers. And so we said, I do think this is gonna be a transformational technology, but the things that our customers are gonna care about, our enterprise customers are gonna care about, are, we think, fundamental to making sure that you get this right, which is, they're gonna wanna make sure that their data is secure, they wanna make sure that they, 'cause we firmly believe that your data is the thing that ultimately differentiates one company versus the other as you go and actually apply these models inside your businesses. And so companies wanna make sure that that was very secure, that it wasn't leaked back to models, and that they had control over how that data was accessed when they're using it together in an application. And then we also thought that companies...

We wanted to enable people to go build interesting models and interesting technologies, really. And so if you're thinking about putting generative AI into an application, we kind of had this long-term view that you wanted access to all of the capabilities that were gonna be there. And we had this fundamental view, which was controversial probably two years ago, and is not so controversial today, that there wasn't gonna be one model that was gonna be "the rule them all" type of a thing. But there's gonna be a lot of different models.

There's gonna be small models and big models, and actually used in concert with each other to go build interesting applications. And the people were gonna need a rich set of tools in order to actually go build interesting experiences and go deliver interesting business results. And so we took a step, we basically said, "We're gonna go build that platform so that our enterprise customers, our startup customers, our government customers can go build those applications and build what's gonna be unique to them, and not just get to market something quickly. I think we're now seeing, that's now been out for, it's probably been about nine months now, and we're seeing our customers really love that platform, build real enterprise use cases on that platform. Not just proof of concepts, but things that are delivering actual value.

And we're quite excited about the trajectory that we're seeing that business on. - So, you mentioned then security, and I know that you've said publicly that that's your number one priority. There's all this data out there that's being, you know, companies relying on you to provide security around it. Now, we saw over the summer what a big tech outage looked like when CrowdStrike problems hit, caused this outage. Do you lie awake at night worrying about what might happen if there was some sort of attack on AWS.

- (sighs) Well, we spend a lot of time worrying about that, so I actually am able to sleep at night, mostly because we spend a lot of time thinking about that during the day. But we take that responsibility very seriously, and we have layers upon layers of protection to try to as best protect, our own infrastructure and our customers, from that. And so there's a couple of things to remember there. It's both, and by the way, there's kind of like two number one priorities for us. It really is security and operational excellence, and they kind of go hand in hand. And as you think about security, there's an enormous amount we invest from the very lowest layers of what we build on, from hypervisors to kernels to operating systems to our networks, to how we've architected all of AWS to ensure that we have the very best security.

And we employ many of the best security mines in the world and spend billions of dollars every year to ensure that the AWS environment is protected. And we really start from, every time a software developer builds a new application, they start with security. They think about, "Okay, how am I gonna build this in a secure way?" They have checkpoints to make sure it's secure.

We actually have AI models that are constantly kind of sending up signals and say, "Hey, you may wanna think about coding this in a different way." And then we have a very rigorous process before anything gets close to production to make sure that we are adhering to all of our best practices. But the other important thing is how we architect our systems. And so, the example you're referring to, CrowdStrike was actually not a security issue, it was actually an operational issue, right, where a deployment went out. And so we also have systems that ensure that deployments can't hit everything at the same time, and they go out, and they roll out in a coordinated fashion so that they go to a little bit at a time, and only certain sets of our infrastructure at a time to try to isolate any potential issues that do get through all the various checks and balances that we have. So we spend an enormous amount of time thinking about, how do we really secure the environment, how do we really ensure that we're operationally excellent? And then we then go build tools along with our broader partner ecosystem to help customers secure their environments as well.

And it's a hard problem, by the way, and it's getting harder all of the time. - Yeah, I mean, where do you see the greatest threat coming from? Is it individual hackers? Is it rogue governments? Is it, I mean, you know, you must be aware of the threats out there. - Yeah, I think it's from, look, the security is an issue from all over the place. I mean, security can be, it can be nation state actors, it can be your own developers that accidentally lift your keys in a repository and published it to a public GitHub repository, and some ransomware people then took control of your account. Like, it can be a wide range of things that can impact customers. And so we try to help across that whole stack of things.

And it's, and again, security is not one of these things that's easy to bolt on after the fact. And there's others out there that are scrambling to try to get that security piece in place, and it's hard. You have to really build it from the ground up, and that is key to ensuring you really have that strong environment. - So another big challenge, which I know you spend a lot of time thinking about, so much so that you've, Amazon has bought its own small nuclear reactor, is energy. And Amazon's not the only one. I mean, other big tech companies are investing in their own energy sources.

Now, nuclear is all well and good, but I think I read that these nuclear react, these little moderate- - Small modular reactors. - Small modular reactors - aren't gonna come on stream till 2036 at the latest. So, that's great, but what are you gonna do in the meantime to meet the energy demands? I mean, is there going to be, given the demands, is there gonna be enough electricity left over for everything else? - Yep. I think it's 2030, hopefully not 2036. - (chuckles) Well, these things always run- - We're more optimistic- (Emma faintly speaks) they can come- (Emma faintly speaking) a little sooner than that. But they're just part of the portfolio. And so I think there's a number of things that as we think about both energy now, energy in the next, call it three to five years, and then energy 10 years out, I think we're trying to think about all of those different timelines, because it's really impactful.

As you think, particularly if you think about these generative AI models that folks are building, estimates are that kind of two to three models out, an individual model may require somewhere between one to five gigawatts of power, which is like a small to medium, maybe a large city. It's like a million households or something like that. And so, it's an enormous amount of power that these models could require in the future.

And so, we're thinking about... In the near term, there are projects in place that, you know, can meet all of the needs in in the next couple of years. And many of those are renewable, by the way, whether they're wind, whether they're solar, et cetera. We've invested, Amazon over the last five years, every year for the last five years has been the biggest investor in renewable power projects all around the world.

We've done more than 500 renewable power projects, adding funding brand new projects, bringing new power onto the grid to power, what we think, is an important renewable source of power. And we think that nuclear can be a big part of that. And so some of that, by the way, is bringing on, there's a bunch of nuclear around the world that's been shuttered, because people didn't need actually that source of power.

And so the very first project we did was a partnership with Talen in Pennsylvania to bring almost a gigawatt, or eventually be almost a gigawatt, of power back online that just wasn't being used in the world today. And so, some of that is bringing some of these plans back online. Some of it is thinking about how you can refurbish, you know, called dirty energy plants or whatever, and bring them back online as clean energy plants. And some of them are investing long term. And some of these small modular reactors, you're right, they're not gonna solve anything in the 2020s, (laughs) but in the 2030s, you know, in 2030 plus, they could be a excellent source of energy as we're looking to solve the energy problems.

- So, we have an election coming up, and tech industry leaders have very strong views on regulation. So, the question I wanted to ask you was, if there is a new administration, well, there will be a new administration- - [Matt] Of that much, I'm very confident- - Which that one I'm more confident of. - that that will happen. - Either way, would you still like to see Lina Khan in place? - What I'll say is we have successfully worked with every administration that's been in place so far. - That's a politicians answer. - And will continue to do so. (audience laughing) No, look, like that is the business from an AWS perspective in particular.

We supported both conventions, we support elections all around the world. Not just in the US, but in Latin America and Asia and other places. And I think it's an important... And we are, the US government is an enormous customer of ours, and we do support them.

You know, we support the intelligence agencies, we support the DoD, we support the fed and financial services. Like, there are many of the US agencies that run many of their critical workloads in AWS. And so we, it is a political-ish type of answer, but it's true.

We support agencies throughout whichever the party is is currently running. And then we take that responsibility very seriously. I think it's an important mission that we support the country on. And so from our perspective, it's super important.

I wanna continue to support the country, no matter if it's a Republican or Democrat in office, and that's our plan. - But do you fear that too much regulation will hold back the development of, you know, these new technologies around AI, or do you think it's the US has roughly got it right? - Well, I do think, and we spend a lot of time thinking about that, and actually, I think that is a super important question, that the key piece that I advocate for is that we're happy to play with whatever rules the government wants. I think what we advocate for is really thinking through not setting regulations or policies that are inadvertently going to lead us to the place that you're trying to avoid. And that is what I worry about the most, is that if you put the US companies at a competitive disadvantage, by saying, "You have to, you know, do x, y or Z regulation," whatever it is, "around AI," I think you have to be somebody super careful about that, because it's very easy to construct a scenario where you actually give China the leg up that you're trying to prevent by accidentally kind of holding back the companies that are doing all this incredible innovation.

And so, it's a hard question, by the way. Like, I don't think we know the answer, and I think zero regulation is probably not the right answer either. So, and I'm not saying that, but it's just, we have to be thoughtful about it so that you don't accidentally end up in that place.

- So, there's one question that I know everyone here is very keen for me to ask you. - They are? One question, that's it? Okay. - One in particular. - I'm ready for it. - And I'll cite the "Wall Street Journal" headline that we gave when this story happened, which was "Bosses Rejoice," and it was the news that Andy Jassy was ordering everybody back into the office five days a week from January. Now, you were speaking about this last week, and you were very clear. You were like, "So shape up or ship out," was basically your message.

- It's not what I said, (Emma chuckles) but it's okay. (chuckles) - But that was definitely- - It's your editorial license, but that's not quite what I said. - It was definitely the message.

So, have people shipped out, or has there been a lot of pushback? - Yeah, just to be clear, what I actually said, (audience laughing) because it wasn't that, it was more like, for us, we think that being in person is super important for us. We think that our teams are more innovative, and particularly as we really think about how do we wanna disrupt and we wanna invent on behalf of our customers. We find that there is no substitution for doing that in person.

Just the creative energy, and how fast you're able to iterate. When you're sitting there writing on a whiteboard, or you're talking to people in the cubicle next to you, or you're running into people that are in a different department, but you see them at the coffee line or whatever it is, and there is, just that exchange doesn't happen when you're remote. And so we think that that creative spark is incredibly important to what we do at Amazon, what we do at AWS. And so that together with that culture of Amazon, which is incredibly important too, and we think is what makes Amazon special and what makes us what we are, it's very hard to impart that in the same way in a remote workforce.

And so, you know, we tried three days a week first, and then what happened is, you know, Bob would come in on Monday, and Sally would come in on Tuesday, and we kind of didn't accomplish what we wanted because everybody picked a different set of three days. And so we didn't have those teams, 'cause it's really that in-person collaboration that we wanted. And so what I encouraged the teams was like, that's what we've decided, and we think that that is important to our customers.

We think that's important to our future innovation and the culture of our company. And I said, it doesn't make it the only way, it doesn't mean that that's the only way to run a company. It doesn't mean that that's the only decision you can make, but it's the decision that we're making. And so if it's not for you, then that's okay. You can go and find another company if you want to. But for us, that's what we've decided is what we think is the best way to operate our company, and that's how we wanna move going forward.

- And so do you, could you put a number on what percentage of the workforce you expect to churn in January or before then? - I don't know. It's a good question. I think, look, I've had plenty of people reach out to me and say, "Part of the reason I came to work at Amazon is because I wanna work together with a bunch of smart people and be together. And so I like that we're doing this." And a bunch of, I've heard a bunch of people also say, "Look, it's super hard for us to go say the things and to get people back in 'cause it's, you know, 1/2 or 2/3 or 3/4 of the team is back in.

But if they're not, everybody's there, you still are in this weird hybrid mode." So, you know, I don't know which percentage, I am optimistic that most of our employees actually are excited about that in-person working. But you know, I also think that there's a lot of people out there that want to work on some of the hardest problems in technology and want to work on some of the biggest problems and the most exciting things that we're working on, and that they actually get excited about being in person with a bunch of other smart people really trying to solve really hard problems. And those are the people that we want to be at Amazon to work with us. - And have you had

a lot of CEOs on the phone saying, "Good for you! Let me know how it goes." - Look, I do think, and there's a reason, it's because I do think that, look, some of those decisions are hard, but I do think that a lot of that innovation, the speed of execution really is better when you get your teams in person. - So, we haven't got much time left, but I just wanted to ask you, you've obviously been at Amazon for 20 years- - 18. I'm not quite 20 yet. - 18. 18. Oh, you need to correct the record.

- Oh, you know (speaks faintly) fact check. - It's very much, (Emma and Tom chuckle) Yeah. What would be your advice if you're spending a long time at a place, you know, for avoiding sort of professional stagnation? - Well, I've been super lucky on that front. So, I've been with AWS for 18 years, and you know, there's not a lot of businesses that grow from zero to 105 billion over the 18-year period. And so- - You didn't have time for professional stagnation. - And we're still growing at 19% as of Q2.

And so, still growing pretty rapidly, and that has afforded me, personally, a lot. I mean, my job changed every six months. It was, you know, we were a startup trying to get to $100 a day in revenue to we were trying to win our very first government contract to, you know, to now trying to manage a large business that's continuing to grow rapidly, and navigating large enterprises and startups and everything in between.

And so, I've been fortunate enough to change. I changed couple jobs, and I led engineering teams and product teams. I got to lead the sales and marketing organization. But what I would say is that I think the key piece for me is be curious and not being afraid to try new things. I think, when Andy first asked me if I would go lead our sales and marketing organization, as an example, I had spent the last 12 years or so leading deep technical organizations, which by the way, I hadn't done before that either, so that was also a stretch.

But when he asked, I was like, "Are you sure?" 'Cause I've never led a sales and marketing team before. It's like, "No, you could probably do it, you'll be fine." And so, you know, I jumped in and was willing to do that. And I think being curious and going to learn a new space, and I, you know, was totally open with the team and was like, "Hey, I'd love to learn how to do this, and tell me what works and tell me what doesn't, and we'll try to go see if there's some innovation things that we can do along the way." And I just, I think that's part of it, is being willing to try new things.

- And what would you say is the key difference at Amazon, between Amazon led by Jeff Bezos and Amazon led by Andy Jassy? What have you noticed? - I don't know. It's a good question. Fortunately, I still get to see Jeff occasionally. So we're not without Jeff, fortunately, 'cause he's awesome. But you know, I think there's a lot of interesting challenges that Andy is particularly well suited to go after, as we think about scaling a bunch of the businesses that we have and the phase of growth that we're in at Amazon today. I think Jeff was incredibly creative.

He is a very disruptive thinker who innovated on probably more different dimensions than almost any other entrepreneur has. And if you think about the challenges of scale and the challenges of right sizing a company and the challenges of kind of thinking about how you move some businesses to profitability, where some were very profitable and others were in growth mode but needed to focus more on that, I think Andy is very well suited to that role. And then I think Jeff was very prescient in handing off the reins to Andy when he did. - Good. Well, look, in spite of the fact that we're out of time, I think we should take some questions from the audience.

So, has anyone got a question for Matt? There's one over there. - [Audience Member] I'm a new customer. I just (faintly speaking) into the cloud this last year.

- Awesome, thank you. - [Audience Member] And the security is definitely the most important to us since we handle very private information. And so when we looked at (speaking faintly) my understanding is that the future really is quantum computing, a combination of these things. So as a company that puts all this future investing into it, can you tell us what the future looks like with this type of quantum computing combination with AI? - Sure.

Yeah, the question was around, in case you guys couldn't hear, around quantum computing. Quantum's a super interesting technology. I think it's probably a decade out before quantum computers are stable enough to perform really useful work, but could be incredibly disruptive on a number of different areas. On the positive side, I think like things like material science and optimization problems, and there's a number of areas where, unfortunately, it's also breaking encryption, is another thing that quantum computers will be very good at, once they get to be large enough. So my advice today is look into quantum safe encryption. There are many out there.

Some of them, I think were not quite nailed onto exactly what that standard is, but I'd encourage you to keep an eye out on quantum safe encryption. That's the best thing you can do in the short term to really ensure your security for when quantum is is out there. But it's an area that AWS is, also makes big investments are, and it's a super interesting area in technology in the next decade.

2024-10-25 17:39

Show Video

Other news

X1 vs XL: AMS vs Toolchanger - What's better? 2025-02-11 16:00
Elon Musk Debuts Revolutionary Anti-Gravity Fighter Jet 2025-02-09 18:02
10 Amazing Facts About Tech & Science in the Baroque Era [The Well-Tempered Cast] 2025-02-08 23:39