Amazon Looks For Its Cut of the AI Pie With $100 Million Investment Fund

Amazon has decided to dive into the AI race and start including it in its services, as its cloud unit is building a program that would help users develop and deploy new kinds of AI-based products. Amazon Web Services also invested $100 million to set up the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center to link customers with AI and ML experts.

Amazon is Chasing After Google and Microsoft

With AI as part of its service, Amazon hopes to match Google and Microsoft in the generative AI market. Both tech giants have already entered deep into the emerging sector, and Amazon does not want to be left behind. The company’s rising interest in AI indicates that Amazon sees huge potential in the field.

Amazon believes that AI and ML can help connect clients to financial, health care, manufacturing, and other services and applications. The company added that Lonely Planet, Twilio, Highspot, and Ryanair would be the early users of its innovation center.

Overall, Amazon’s goal is to help sell more cloud services and to do that, it needs to convince clients to use AWS for building new generative AI applications.

For now, Microsoft Corp.’s Azure and Alphabet Inc.’s Google dominate the market. Microsoft was quick to acquire OpenAI and its ChatGPT as soon as they emerged, and alongside Google, it pioneered a large portion of the early technology underpinning the generative AI frontier.

What Is Amazon Planning in the AI Sector?

Amazon is still not too late to join and become another major force in this field and potentially even outperform competitors, although the competition is tough. AWS CEO, Adam Selipsky, stated.

We will bring our internal AWS experts free-of-charge to a whole bunch of AWS customers, focusing on folks with significant AWS presence, and go help them turbocharge their efforts to get real with generative AI, get beyond the talk.

In its press release regarding the $100 million investment, Amazon said,

Through free workshops, engagements, and training, AWS will help customers imagine and scope the use cases that will create the greatest value for their businesses, based on best practices and industry expertise.

As for who will be able to participate in the program, the company’s officials said that the Generative AI Innovation Center would prioritize customers who previously reached out to AWS with requests for assistance or specific plans and goals involving AI.

Beyond that, the program will invite organizations in the financial services, life sciences, healthcare, media and entertainment, energy, automotive and manufacturing, utilities, and communications sectors.

Some have expressed concern that the company may have rushed its generative AI tools in an attempt to quickly bring them to market and not waste any time in catching up to Microsoft and Google. Amazon denied this, stating that its tools — unveiled earlier this year — are ready for customers to test and provide feedback.

Even so, one customer who supposedly tested the tools said that they were incomplete.

The Competition in AI is Growing

Amazon’s concern about not being left behind does make sense since ChatGPT immediately started attracting thousands of companies as soon as it emerged. Cloud giants are particularly positioning themselves to cash in, so Amazon does not have time to be idle, and it knows this.

Fortunately for the company, the market is large, and it continues to grow, and serious competitors are few in number. Even so, that doesn’t mean that other tech giants won’t try to enter and take their own cut of the AI pie.

Indeed, some have already started making plans to invest in the sector, including Salesforce Ventures, with plans to pour $500 million into startups developing generative AI.

There are also Workday ($250 million) and Dropbox ($50 million). Not to mention PwC and Accenture, which revealed that they intend to invest $1 billion and $3 billion, respectively.

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