The top executive of Amazon Web Services urged employees on Thursday to speed up product launches by the cloud computing provider at its major Reinvent event in December, as per a meeting transcript reviewed by Reuters.
Amazon’s division usually unveils its most groundbreaking new products and services at the annual Las Vegas conference. For example, last year AWS introduced its Nova chatbot, competing with OpenAI and other AI competitors.
“Increasingly, we’re finding that when we introduce innovative new things at Reinvent, it’s beneficial if we can actually launch them instead of just pre-announcing,” Matt Garman stated during an internal all-hands meeting.
“Customers want to use our products when we mention them, and we notice that being slow to release products diminishes the initial excitement.”
It was unclear which products Garman was referencing.
“Reuters has completely misinterpreted a secondhand account of what was a motivational internal discussion, where we urged the team to continue providing significant value to customers at Reinvent, just like every year,” an Amazon spokesperson stated.
Amazon has been dealing with a perception of lagging behind competitors in AI development. Recently, a Morgan Stanley analyst asked Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on an earnings call about concerns on Wall Street that “AWS is trailing in genAI, with fears of losing market share to competitors.”
Jassy defended the company in an unusual eight-minute rebuttal, saying AI was in the early stages of development and there will be multiple winners.
Still, Garman pressed his staff on Thursday. “The first and very most important thing we’ve got to do is make sure that we deliver on the roadmap that we have,” he said.
Garman also pushed staff to ensure that AWS customers attend Reinvent in person, saying the December 1-5 conference is “not interesting if customers aren’t there.” The goal is to have over 60,000 attendees, said Garman, which would roughly match last year’s total.
At the meeting, Garman demonstrated a new product for internal testing called Quick, a type of AI known as “agentic,” meaning it will perform tasks with minimal or no additional prompting.
It can analyze a variety of documents and web pages to improve productivity, he said. “You can actually build customized workflows for things that you do on a regular basis that you can automate.”
Quick will be available to all AWS employees to test soon, he said.
