AWS CEO Matt Garman sees huge business opportunity for Amazon in AI-powered software: ‘Everything is going to be remade’
· Fortune
AWS chief executive Matt Garman isn’t losing any sleep over talk of the “SaaSpocalypse.” In fact, he’s so confident companies will continue to buy software-as-a-service in the age of AI that he’s pushing Amazon Web Services into the SaaS business, and rolling out various products aimed directly at office workers and other professionals.
On Tuesday AWS unveiled Amazon Quick, a desktop application that lets users interact with an AI chatbot to handle personal productivity tasks like creating work presentations and arranging meetings. The company also announced a trio of new Connect applications to help workers with tasks in specialized fields such as hiring, healthcare, and supply chain management.
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For the world’s leading cloud computing provider, whose core business involves helping companies like Netflix, Adidas, and Pfizer run their websites and operations online, selling software for individual workers is quite a change of pace.
In an interview with Fortune on Tuesday, Garman described it as a “huge business opportunity” for AWS and said the advent of agentic AI is what prompted the company to dive in.
“As we look across applications, we see that so many applications are getting done with AI and agents. And we think that there is just such a massive change out there that everything is going to be remade,” Garman said.
“I don’t think personal productivity has really been remade for the last 30 years,” Garman said in reference to the new Quick application. Quick will be available to individual users even if they’re not AWS customers, with both a free tier and a premium tier.
“There are going to be millions of successful applications that people us; obviously the vast, vast majority of them will not be built by Amazon or AWS, but we think there are a handful of them that we can build that will be pretty successful and that customers will like,” said Garman.
AWS showed off the new products at an event in San Francisco Tuesday in which the company also announced details of a new partnership with OpenAI. For the first time, AWS business customers will be able to integrate OpenAI’s AI models directly into their products and services. Until now, OpenAI’s GPT models were only available via Microsoft’s cloud thanks to an exclusive partnership that Microsoft and OpenAI struck several years ago. That agreement was revised this week, opening the door for AWS to include the latest GPT models and OpenAI’s Codex coding tool for its cloud customers alongside other models such as Anthropic’s Claude and Meta’s Llama.
While Garman would not provide details of the financial terms of AWS’s new partnership with OpenAI, he noted that it includes a revenue share. Earlier this year, Amazon invested $50 billion in OpenAI, and the company has been working with OpenAI on training its models and in other areas.
The product announcements come one day before Amazon is set to report its first-quarter results, which will take place after the close of market on Wednesday. AWS is Amazon’s fastest-growing business segment, with revenue rising 20% to $128.7 billion in 2025, and the company’s most profitable, earning $45.6 billion in operating income last year.
Garman, who joined AWS as an intern in 2006, was appointed CEO of the business in May 2024. His leadership of Amazon’s cloud business has coincided with the AI boom and the remarkable scramble among cloud providers, including Microsoft, Google, and Oracle, to spend eye-popping sums building data centers and other AI infrastructure.
Amazon has said it plans to lay out $200 billion in capital expenditures this year, up more than 50% from its $131 billion in 2025 capex.
Asked if he could have imagined such massive investments when he took the CEO reins two years ago, Garman said that AWS has always been in a capital-intensive line of business.
“I don’t know if I would have exactly expected we would be at the rate we are now, but it’s heavily tied to how fast the business is growing,” he said. “So the faster the business grows the more capex we need to spend to make sure we have capacity for customers. But if you look at the economics of AWS you’re going to invest in that all day.”
Because of its experience and expertise operating data centers efficiently and at low cost, Garman said, AWS’s move to offer customers AI-powered software like Quick and Connect products would not weigh on profit margins.
“We get to run and benefit from all the efficiencies that we get from AWS,” Garman said. “We think many of these could have higher margins than just the infrastructure, where you add continuous value on top of those.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com