SAN FRANCISCO — Amazon manages more than 400 million products in its supply chain and hired 250,000 seasonal workers last peak season. Now its cloud division is packaging up what the company has learned and getting ready to sell it to other businesses.
Amazon Web Services on Tuesday announced two new agentic AI products: Connect Decisions, which uses Amazon’s own supply chain models to help companies forecast demand and manage disruptions; and Connect Talent, which conducts voice-based job interviews around the clock and scores candidates on skills rather than resumes.
They’re part of a growing lineup of AWS business applications, which started with the Amazon Connect contact-center platform in 2017, which has since become a billion-dollar business. The lineup expanded more to health care with Connect Health, 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’s models will be available on Amazon Bedrock for the first time.
That was made possible by a revamped deal between Microsoft and OpenAI, and builds on Amazon’s earlier investment of up to $50 billion in the ChatGPT maker.
Separately, AWS is releasing 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 integrations with Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Zoom, and Salesforce.
Expanded footprint: The new Connect apps push AWS further 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 applications that compete with AWS customers is “a newer dynamic” for the cloud business.
However, she noted that it’s familiar territory for Amazon overall. She compared it to the way the company sells its own products alongside third-party sellers on its marketplace, or produces original content for Prime Video while also distributing shows from other studios.
Aubrey called the new apps “a day zero” moment for the AWS applications team after spending the past two years assembling the group and doing the work to determine where to focus.
“If we’re lucky, we’ll have some hits in this collection of four,” she said in an interview, acknowledging that building enterprise software products is inherently uncertain.
Asked why companies wouldn’t simply build these capabilities themselves using AWS tools like Bedrock, Aubrey said the complexity of transforming an entire business function, not just an individual task, calls for a purpose-built product that can be used across an organization.
Amazon’s new Connect apps: Connect Decisions draws on more than 25 specialized supply chain models and tools, including one of Amazon’s own foundation models built by its Supply Chain Optimization Technologies (SCOT) team.
When something goes wrong in a supply chain — a supplier falls behind, or demand spikes unexpectedly — it can figure out what happened, rank the problems that need human attention, and suggest what to do about them, along with the cost and trade-offs of each option.
Connect Talent is aimed at high-volume hiring in industries like manufacturing, logistics, retail, and hospitality, rather than corporate recruiting. AI agents conduct voice interviews that candidates can take anytime, eliminating scheduling conflicts. The system strips names and resumes from the process; recruiters see anonymized competency scores and transcripts.
One early customer has started bringing Connect Decisions into business meetings to run what-if scenarios in real time, Aubrey said. That company’s procurement team has already asked to expand its use beyond supply chain planning, which AWS ultimately plans to do.
