Specialist
Former executive at Amazon Web Services Inc (AWS)
Agenda
- Update on AWS’s (NASDAQ: AMZN) full stack of AI and machine learning offerings, noting positioning as a market leader and competitive dynamics vs Microsoft Azure (NASDAQ: MSFT), Google Cloud Platform (NASDAQ: GOOGL) and others
- Compute power as a market growth barrier and AWS Graviton as a key differentiator
- Enterprise customer penetration and strategic positioning to leverage AI and machine learning offerings
- Impact of generative AI on the market, AWS’s positioning, collaboration with Hugging Face and competition with OpenAI
- Industry trends, innovation outlook and macroeconomic impact on customer spending habits
Questions
1.
How would you describe the AI and machine learning offerings being sold at AWS today across the technology stack?
2.
Could you give a rough percentage breakdown of how much AWS’s AI and machine learning offerings contribute in terms of revenue?
3.
What is your outlook on the growing market for large language models and generative AI technology and AWS’s positioning to capture that market and provide its own offerings?
4.
You mentioned AWS’s partnership with Hugging Face, which was announced in February 2023. How would you compare that to the OpenAI extended partnership with Microsoft and its product offerings, and Google’s Bard, which launched in March 2023? What are your expectations for a similar product introduction from AWS?
5.
Would you identify anything about AWS’s potential value proposition for generative AI technology as being specified or differentiated, given its positioning vs Microsoft and Google?
6.
How can AWS bring generative AI technology to the consumer market? What kinds of consumer applications or uses, perhaps through current subscription services, might represent potential inroads for consumer market penetration?
7.
You mentioned that, through SageMaker, AWS was really the first to implement generative AI technology. More recently, Google and Microsoft have been at least perceived as leading in AI and machine learning innovation. The rapid pace at which offerings with generative AI from Microsoft and Google have been deployed might be seen as evidence of this. How would you frame AWS’s positioning in the market?
8.
How might compute power be a market growth barrier? How important do you think Graviton is to AWS’s long-term AI market positioning? Nvidia announced a partnership with Oracle in October 2022 to accelerate the company’s AI strategy. What do you see as the real advantage gleaned by AWS from a technology perspective, in terms of performance and customisation, and from a financial perspective, in terms of a greater margin expansion opportunity?
9.
Where do you think the advantages that Graviton presents, in terms of performance and cost, are going to be most heavily felt vs Google or Microsoft across AI offerings?
10.
Do you think the performance and cost advantages you mentioned are already being felt in AWS’s analytics products, such as with SageMaker? Do you expect SageMaker’s advantage in terms of pricing to become more apparent in the near future? If so, when might that be?
11.
How would you characterise enterprise spending habits on AI over the past year, given the current macroeconomic climate? How would you anticipate those habits trending through 2023?
12.
We’ve heard that while enterprises are cutting their IT spending in a number of areas, AI is being prioritised. A lot of this priority is being given to in-house projects. How might this represent a tailwind for AWS among enterprises that run storage through the company or use SageMaker or any of its other tools?
13.
What do you think is most important to understand about AWS’s go-to-market strategy for increasing AI adoption at the enterprise level and expanding its AI revenue base?
14.
How would you describe the competitive positioning of SageMaker vs Google? What do you think AWS is doing well? Where do you see Google doing better?
15.
What can you tell us about AWS’s competitive positioning within the greater analytics market vs important competitors, such as Microsoft, Snowflake and Databricks?
16.
The more fragmented nature of AWS’s AI and machine learning analytics offering has been cited as a potential reason for customers churning or potential customers opting to go with a different solution for newer workloads. How sticky would you say the company’s AI and machine learning analytics offerings are? What reasons for churn are most commonly cited by customers?
17.
There are a lot of small, sophisticated private start-ups in the AI space as well as market leaders, such as Google. Which companies do you think of as AWS’s primary competitors right now in AI?
18.
Do you anticipate any potential acquisition opportunities for AWS related to AI and machine learning, whether with its current partners or any of the smaller companies out there?
19.
Do you think there’s a chance that AWS could acquire Hugging Face? If so, how likely do you see that being?
20.
Do you see any clear gap in AWS’s product roadmap that could be filled by an acquisition in the AI space?
21.
Is there anything regarding AWS’s operating environment for AI and machine learning that you’d like to share that we haven’t yet covered, or any thoughts on the company’s AI management team?