Who are the Execs Leading Amazon’s Future AI Strategy?

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has announced that the brains behind the development of Alexa will be leaving the company at the end of 2025.

The leader in question is Rohit Prasad, who has led Amazon’s artificial general intelligence (AGI) team since 2023 and led the creation of Amazon Nova, a portfolio of AI offerings.

Making the announcement in a note to employees on 17 December, Andy said: “For the past two years, Rohit has led the creation of Amazon Nova and our AGI organisation, building 12 state-of-the-art foundation models with industry-leading price-performance that are now being used by tens of thousands of companies across almost all industries and use cases.

“Rohit has built a strong team, differentiated technology, growing customer momentum and a culture of ambitious invention,” he added.

Rohit previously served as the head scientist behind Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant, a role he held from the product’s earliest days.

He was appointed to lead Amazon’s new ambitious AGI effort after ChatGPT launched in November 2022, as part of a race to develop a competitive large language model (LLM).

In his new position, he will report directly to the CEO.

AI leadership restructure 

In the same announcement, Andy revealed that Peter DeSantis has been appointed to lead a new organisation to drive Amazon’s AI models, including Nova, silicon development, quantum computing and the AGI team.

The CEO said: “I cannot think of a better leader for this organisation than Peter. Peter has been at Amazon for over 27 years, and led some of the most transformative technologies in computing history.”

Throughout these 27 years, the exec has led Amazon EC2, a core Amazon Web Services (AWS) service offering secure, resizable, virtual servers, when it was launched in 2006.

Andy also outlined his contributions to Block Storage, File Storage, Load Balancing, Networking and Monitoring services “that AWS customers continue to rely on to run their infrastructure”.

In 2015, Peter is credited with spearheading the acquisition of Annapurna Labs, which is used to build the firm’s silicon, and in 2016 he started leading the AWS Infrastructure team, responsible for all of AWS’s data centres, networking, hardware and the associated supply chain.

“Peter combines unusual technical depth with a track record of solving problems at an edge of what’s technically possible,” Andy added, “and delivering technologies that operate reliably at massive scale.”

He also said that he embodies the leadership principles of the firm: “His ability to invent, think big but be neck-deep in details, insist on the highest standards, learn and be curious, focus on what matters to customers and be right much of the time are among the many traits that have made him so effective.”

Leading in Gen AI

A further development to Amazon’s AI team is the addition of Pieter Abbeel. He has been promoted to leading the frontier model research team in AGI.

Credited by Andy as being “one of the world’s leading AI researchers”, he co-founded Covariant, a robotics firm that pioneered the first commercial foundation model for robotics developments.

Pieter will also continue ongoing work with the robotics team, according to the memo.

Andy said: “His deep expertise in generative AI and reinforcement learning makes him well-suited to advance Amazon’s AI research as we push the boundaries of what’s possible for our customers.”

Concluding his memo to employees, he said: “The path ahead is full of opportunity. With the foundation that’s been built, the traction we’re seeing and Peter’s leadership bringing unified focus to these technologies, we’re well-positioned to lead and deliver meaningful capabilities for our customers.

“I’m excited about what this team will build and how these foundational technologies will help shape Amazon’s future.”