AWS turns Amazon’s hiring and logistics technology into new AI products for other businesses – GeekWire
SAN FRANCISCO – Amazon carries more than 400 million products in its supply chain and hired 250,000 seasonal workers last season. Now its cloud division is incorporating what the company has learned and preparing to sell it to other businesses.
Amazon Web Services on Tuesday announced two new AI products: Connect Decisions, which uses Amazon’s supply chain models to help companies predict demand and manage disruptions; and Connect Talent, which conducts voice-based job interviews around the clock and finds candidates by skills rather than resumes.
They are part of a growing list of AWS business applications, which started with the Amazon Connect networking platform in 2017, which is now a multi-billion dollar business. The list has expanded significantly in health care with Connect Health, which it announced last month.
AWS event: Amazon is announcing the products at an event in San Francisco where AWS CEO Matt Garman is expected to detail the company’s expanded work with OpenAI, following Monday’s news that OpenAI models will be available for the first time on Amazon Bedrock.
That came about through a revised deal between Microsoft and OpenAI, and builds on Amazon’s previous investment of up to $50 billion in the ChatGPT maker.
Separately, AWS is rolling out a major update to Amazon Quick, its AI assistant for business users, adding a desktop app, the ability to create custom dashboards and portals, and expanded integration with Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Zoom, and Salesforce.
Extended steps: The new Connect applications push AWS beyond cloud infrastructure and into direct competition with enterprise software companies, including some AWS customers.
Colleen Aubrey, AWS senior vice president of Applied AI Solutions, acknowledged that selling competing applications to AWS customers is a “new dynamic” for the cloud business.
However, he noted that the general field of Amazon as a whole. He compared it to how the company sells its products alongside third-party vendors in its market, or produces original content for Prime Video while distributing programming from other studios.
Aubrey called the new applications “moment zero” for the AWS applications team after spending the past two years bringing the team together and doing work to decide where to focus.
“If we’re lucky, we’ll have hits in this batch of four,” he said in an interview, acknowledging that construction software products are inherently uncertain.
Asked why companies don’t simply build these capabilities themselves using AWS tools like Bedrock, Aubrey said the complexity of transforming an entire business’s work, not just an individual’s work, requires a purpose-built product that can be used across the organization.
New Amazon Connect apps: Connect Decisions draws on more than 25 specialized models and tools, including one of Amazon’s foundational models developed by its Supply Chain Optimization Technologies (SCOT) group.
If something goes wrong in the supply chain – a supplier falls behind, or demand spikes unexpectedly – they can find out what happened, plan the problems that need human attention, and suggest what to do about them, along with the costs and trade-offs of each option.
Connect Talent is aimed at recruiting more people in industries such as manufacturing, transportation, retail, and hospitality, rather than recruiting companies. AI agents conduct voice conversations that can be taken at any time, eliminating scheduling conflicts. The program outputs the words and restarts the program; employers see anonymous aptitude scores and transcripts.
One early customer has already started bringing Decisions to connect to business meetings for real-time updates, Aubrey said. That company’s procurement team has already asked to expand its use beyond supply chain planning, which AWS plans to do eventually.
