Amazon’s AI Service Gains Popularity as It Challenges Microsoft and Google

According to an executive who spoke to Reuters, Amazon.com’s cloud division has successfully attracted numerous customers to test its service, competing with Microsoft and Google in a crucial field of artificial intelligence.

The company also announced new AI tools on Wednesday, including a program to build more conversational customer service agents, access to technology from startup Cohere and to create clinical notes for the health system after a patient visit.

Organizations including Sony, Ryanair and Sun Life have been experimenting with Amazon Bedrock, a service the company announced in April that allows companies to create applications using different AI models, said vice president Swami Sivasubramanian. Such creative technology can produce new text, images and other content on command.

“Our mission is to make every company an AI company,” Sivasubramanian said in an interview on the sidelines of a summit hosted by the cloud services provider in New York.

Amazon Bedrock is the company’s response to services announced by Google and Microsoft, cloud rivals that have developed or marketed artificial intelligence that has received significant public attention. Microsoft has invested in OpenAI, the startup that created ChatGPT and the AI model known as GPT-4.

Amazon’s disclosure of thousands of previously unreported Bedrock users shows that its efforts are also generating interest. The company has said that its range of AI models, low prices and role as the largest cloud service provider by revenue – already hosting countless amounts of customer data – would help it compete to sell AI tools.

Amazon Bedrock will be generally available to all customers very “soon,” Sivasubramanian said. He declined to say when the company plans to first address the cost allocation and corporate control issues.

In the meantime, he said, the company was ramping up service. The cloud provider announced Agents for Amazon Bedrock, which allows companies to create chatbots that perform tasks and provide more personalized responses based on the data they own.

An airline could build a virtual agent that books a flight for a passenger based on, for example, the customer’s price, destination and seat requests. The business potential of such agents has taken Silicon Valley by storm recently.