Amazon is forging a walled garden for enterprise AI

Re:Invent Amazon wants to make AI meaningful to enterprises, and it’s building yet another walled garden disguised as an easy button to do it.

During his keynote at Amazon Web Services’ annual re:Invent conference, CEO Matt Garman laid out the cloud titan’s vision for lowering the barriers to enterprise AI adoption, spanning infrastructure to custom models and pre-baked agents.

“When I speak to customers and many of you out there, you haven't yet seen the returns that match up to the promise of AI. The true value of AI has not yet been unlocked,” Garman said.

Garman’s comments broadly align with the results of an MIT study from August which found enterprises had invested between $35 and $40 billion in generative AI initiatives and, so far, have almost nothing to show for it. As damning as that appears, it suggests there’s still plenty ...