Fireside Chat with Matt Garman, CEO, AWS

Kim Majerus:
Alright, here we are. I think we’re rounding the bases.

Matt Garman:
Excellent.

Kim Majerus:
It's an exciting opportunity to have you out here and to address the industry leaders that we have. It's been my eighth re:Invent and obviously more than that for you, so it's a great honor to have-

Matt Garman:
Yeah, 13 for me.

Kim Majerus:
It's an honor to be able to have you address the audience and be a part of this.

Matt Garman:
Of course. Nice to see everyone.

Kim Majerus:
We're going to get right into it. Six months into the role as CEO, but you have been here since the beginning. I'm sure you have amazing stories on your journey, but really what I'd like the audience to hear about is the stories and what keeps you motivated, and more importantly, what's been the biggest surprise is taking on the new role.

Matt Garman:
Sure. Well, what keeps me motivated, I mean it is the customers. I think you come to an event like this and you can't help but be motivated. You can just feel the energy and the halls. You can feel the excitement from the customers. And honestly, one of my favorite things, I mean since the very beginning, has been sitting down with the customer and seeing them be able to go build something or accomplish something or do something for their business that they literally would not have been able to do before using AWS. And so that from the very earliest times was one of the more motivating things for me. Just seeing that like, "Holy crap, this would not have been possible if your services didn't exist."

And we still get that today and it's just as exciting. I also say is... Well, I've now working at AWS, I've been at AWS for 18 years, and the cool things is the business has been so different that even from we think about when we first started and there was startups and we were trying to convince people that cloud computing was a real thing and people wanted to know why they should trust a bookseller with their computers and to where we are now and we have 60,000 people here and it's still just the early stages of what it can be. And so it is both inspiring and it kind of makes you take a step back and realize there's still a ton of work to do, but that's awesome and it's fun and it's one of my favorite parts of the job for sure.

Kim Majerus:
I remember I was sitting on a flight out to Seattle and I looked over a gentleman was reading a newspaper, I remember staffing it over to you. It was an intern to CEO. And I think that's the exciting part about seeing what the company has become, but more importantly, the foundation that we're actually providing to those customers. So we talked a little bit in the back. In the keynote, you emphasized a strong foundation in the cloud, highlighting the innovations around compute, storage, databases, and now inference.

Kim Majerus:
What can you tell these industry leaders about what they should be taking back to their teams and asking them to think about with all the information that they received through the week?

Matt Garman:
Yeah, I think one… There's a couple of things. Number one is if you think about generative AI and how transformational it can be for your business, I think one of the things to take back to your teams is to actually push them to really expand the boundaries of what you think might even be possible for your company, for your industry, for your teams. And because the gains are massive, and a lot of times it does take a little bit of thinking outside of the box as to how you can go about really disrupting yourself. Because there's a worry and a real concern that if you don't go disrupt yourself, there is a startup or someone out there that will do it for you. Or if you're a startup in the audience is already doing it. And so that is something that you all should be really thinking about.

It's something we think about by the way, and you have to be very intentional about it. But really encouraging your teams to think broadly and kind of watch the trend line of where technology is going. And even if things aren't quite possible today, thinking about what's going to be possible in the near future is really important to getting your teams aligned. And there are some really needle moving things that you can do to help your teams be more effective and efficient today. Thinking about how you implement Q, both Q Developer and Q Business can have really material impacts and free your teams up. And even if you can save your teams 20 to 30% of your time, let alone 50 to 70% of your time, but freeing up half of your week by not having to do tedious repetitive tasks is an enormous efficiency boost for your organizations. It just means that you can move that much faster on some of the new initiatives.

Then I'd say a lot of times people forget about the core parts of our business that are so important. And one of the messages that I really wanted to emphasize is how much we as a business continue to invest in those services and thinking about storage and compute and databases. Because I think that generative AI is such a shiny object that people forget about all the innovation that can happen in those places. But if you think of something like a distributed SQL database that is a foundational building block that has never existed before. And if you can have a strongly consistent database that's consistent across all regions with zero maintenance time and five nines of availability, that has fundamental impacts to how you think about building global applications and building into your applications.

And those kind of building blocks really change how you think. Even things like S3, right? A lot of people just think, "Well, we built S3, it continues to scale. That's great." Thinking about things like table buckets and S3 metadata, that's a really, really powerful building block that your teams should really dive into and think about. Think about S3 metadata, having the ability for all of your analytics tools to search all of the information about all of the objects you have in S3 is a really, really powerful concept.

And being able to also put custom metadata in there so that you can tag all of your objects and think about them when you're thinking about doing analytics, when you're thinking about doing AI, you can have a built-in system that automatically and build workflows that'll automatically say, if you're thinking about building AI models, even when was the last time this piece of data was used to train a model, when was the last person that accessed it? You can store lots of interesting data that I think can completely change how you use all of the data that you have. And I encourage your teams to really dive in and think about how they can use some of these really powerful new capabilities because they are so core and fundamental that I think they can be used in a variety of different ways that we don't even imagine right now. And that's part of why I'm excited about some of those launches.

Kim Majerus:
I agree, and I think some of the customers that we've had the opportunity to talk to over the week, it's really getting back down to the basics and hearing about the advancements that we've seen in S3 and the opportunities, it's really sets the foundation. So when you started with your keynote and getting into the details and the opportunities of the new services and features, and as we build yesterday at the CIO council and then here today with the industry leaders, it's the exciting part to get all those builders to think about what they could do differently and more effectively and most importantly securely, which I'm going to transition to that topic.

Matt Garman:
Absolutely. Nice transition.

Kim Majerus:
It is. So I think the exciting part from an AWS-er's perspective is how much we are talking about what we're doing more publicly and what we're doing behind the scenes to ensure that people are confident with the security efforts that we have. Let me ask you, what stands out to you most about the work that we're doing to keep our customers secure?

Matt Garman:
And I like that we're being a little bit more public about some of the things that we do behind the scenes. I think it's interesting and it's useful for you all to understand just how much we invest in the security of the cloud. And this is a part that largely is hopefully both invisible and super important to you all, which is just this underlying... And this is an area that we spend billions of dollars a year where we're tracking down bad actors, we're looking for different fraud or access patterns that we can proactively protect you against. We're thinking about how do we build multiple layers of security and protection into our virtualization stacks and into our control planes and into everything that we do. And so that is where we spend an enormous amount of time. And I think we've exposed a couple of these through some of these projects.

There's like MadPot and others. There's some really cool blog posts if you haven't read those about how we go out there and intentionally look for folks that are building phishing schemes or building other things that we can actually try to find bad actors out there on the internet and route them away or proactively protect against them. And that's an area that I think we will look for opportunities. There's a balance there. We don't necessarily want to publish things where it may make them less effective. So we don't want to do anything that would cause us to be less secure by talking about the security. So there's sometimes a balance there, but I think it also helps to give a sense where we can find those examples.

Give a sense to you all about how much we really are spending in both time and money and resources to improve the security. And I think the part that you do see though is it's not an accident that you see fewer of these incidents and not with AWS, right? This is an area that we think about from the ground up every single day at the very beginning, about how do you think about security? And that is, it's got to be from the second that you architect a service... And you all should think about this too because then the very next part is not just security of the cloud, but it's security in the cloud. And that's the part where we have joint responsibility.

And so I'd encourage you all thinking really hard about all of your... Every piece about your development path, security is super important. Thinking about how you develop in a secure way, thinking about coding best practices, thinking about really how you think about isolation of roles and responsibilities inside of your environment is a super important area. A number of these... And our teams are happy to help. If anyone would like more assistance on that, we're happy to help too. But it's an area that it is not going away and it's not becoming less of a problem. And so it's a space that will help you on and that we'd love to keep investing together on, but it's something that we have to focus on and you have to focus on.

Kim Majerus:
I agree. And I think that's the other piece that customers talk about, especially with a lot of the legacy and on-prem environments that still exist in a lot of the, I would say, public sectors, so that's a part of my business. The opportunity to show and demonstrate and earn their trust not only with citizen data, health data, student data, but also the regulated industries. They're very keen to ensure that they're working faster than the bad actors that are trying to disrupt them.

Matt Garman:
This is a particular area where we have a really rich ecosystem of partners as well. And so I'm sure if you guys walk out on the show floor out there, there's a ton of our very good security partners that are out there and they can be a big help in helping as part of that solution as well, so it all come together.

Kim Majerus:
It all comes together. And just a reminder, the partner organization is having their keynote a little bit after this, so after you finish here, please join for that event.

Matt Garman:
I believe I'm partially in that, so I think I have to join.

Kim Majerus:
I'll send you along and you could grab some folks to go as well. I'm going to change a little bit. And you mentioned startups numerous times through the course of your keynote and the CIO and just now, and it's obvious, it's very near and dear to your heart. And I still like to think that AWS operates as the largest startup that's out there.

Matt Garman:
That's right.

Kim Majerus:
How are we helping... I'd like for you to share how are we helping those startups innovate on behalf and in partnership with the other organizations that are out here?

Matt Garman:
There's a couple of things we do. Number one is we provide a lot of support to startups. We said next year we'll fund more than a billion dollars in cloud credits, helping startups get off the ground, helping startups scale and grow. Look, it's not charity. These are the enterprises of tomorrow and we want them starting and building on AWS. We think we're the best platform and the best way for them to get started and for them to grow their businesses. And so we want to help. And actually, I was just at a VC round table this morning. Also, another important part of that whole ecosystem is getting... And we have a tight partnership with many of the venture capitalists as well as the startups. The other way though, and this is an area where I think AWS is uniquely helps startups, which is we've increasingly been spending a lot of our attention and focus on helping startups go to market and thinking about how they can reach a number of enterprises as well.

And I think that that matchmaking is incredibly important because there's a bunch of these startups that have really innovative solutions that could help many of the largest companies in the world, but just getting visibility, understanding how they work, integrating them in is something that they're often not scaled to do. And when we're able to make those connections, it's obviously great for the startups because they get customers and it's great for the enterprises because get exposure to incredible technologies or products that they otherwise wouldn't have. And so we've been spending a lot of time on getting that flywheel together and it's one of the things that I'm seeing more and more startups really value is that joint go-to-market effort where we can help them get connected in with the rest of the AWS ecosystem.

Kim Majerus:
I think it's the adjacencies and the opportunities for those established organizations. Do you have any recommendations for those leaders out here? How to get in touch or engage in that environment a little bit more effectively from your purview?

Matt Garman:
Well, I think that the partner organization does a fantastic job of making those connections. And for you all that are enterprises and established companies, your sales team can help connect you there, but marketplace is a fantastic place to find some of those and we make it easy to procure through the marketplace, but letting our teams know just what's interesting to you, the spaces that you're interested in, can help us try to do some of that matchmaking. And we've built some technology to help on that too so that we can do it at scale, but I think that's an area where we'd be delighted to help on that front. And then if you're a startup, the startup team has deep connections into the partner organization so you can get your products up on marketplace and start to be connected to customers that way.

Kim Majerus:
It's a great way and it's those proof of concepts and those opportunities, which then leads me back to generative AI. Over the past 18 months we've worked very closely with customers to help them understand the power of opportunity, what Gen AI can provide. What do you see from an enterprise perspective to actually get them to move from proof of concept to full production? And what are the commonalities in those enterprises or startups that you see?

Matt Garman:
Well, that is, I think the conversation has almost entirely shifted to that, which is we have a bunch of proof of concepts. We've done hundreds of maybe proof of concepts. And the interesting thing about when you do these proof of concepts is you didn't have to do a lot of the hard work to get those up and running. You did it quickly, you're able to get it up in your website or you get it into some internal app, but it's not necessarily plumbed into all of your enterprise data. It might not be plumbed into all of your permissioning and security and auditing because it wasn't part of your production systems. And now you have maybe 100 of these and you find the two or three or five or whatever that seem like they have high potential. The tricky part is it's not just, okay, let's do more of that one or keep that one.

You actually almost have to start over from scratch and think about how does it get integrated into your data? How do you really get value out of it? Because the key to getting value out of these applications is actually thinking about the ROI. It's not just throwing something out there and seeing what sticks. It is thinking about how do you drive costs down and how do you drive value up. It's not any different than the rest of the parts of your... It's how you think about which S3 skews to use. It's how you think about which database to use. It's how you think about which replication schemes to use, all of that kind of stuff you think about. And AI is a key part of that too. You want to think about where are you're going to deliver real value to your enterprise and to your customers.

And a lot of that is going to mean it's got to be plumbed into your sources of enterprise data. And so that data piece is where almost always where I see the most value coming back to is that it's deeply tied in to the sources of unique data that you all have. Because if it's not tied into your unique data, then it's just the same model that everybody else has access to. And maybe you have a unique way of using it, and maybe it's probably valuable, don't get me wrong, but it's not going to be the hugely differentiating thing if you're not bringing your own data. And so that is an incredibly important part of this, and it's where I actually see a lot of the focus going now to, okay, how do I make sure that all of my data is in a cloud environment?

How do I make sure that all of my data is labeled so that I understand where it is, what it is, that it's accessible, it's in a data lake that I can access and then in some sort of reg index or some way that I can then start to integrate that into the generative AI application where I think I'm going to get all that value. And so it's interesting because it's a lot of companies going back to the like, oh, I was going to do this whole migration and modernization thing. I paused it because I thought generative AI was going to be the new important thing. And I realized I still have to go do that first thing before I actually get most of the value out of the generative AI. You can do some of them in parallel by the way, so it doesn't have to be fully one or the other, but really getting all of that data into a great spot is incredibly important. And that's where I see a lot of that focus shifting back to.

Kim Majerus:
Right back down to the foundation of where it's at?

Matt Garman:
Yep.

Kim Majerus:
And I guess the question would be when you think about, when you talk to the customers and the stories that you get through the course of this re-invent activities that you've had this week, have you seen a key success factor in the organization or their approach that would be valuable to the audience today?

Matt Garman:
Well, I don't know if there's one, but I'm happy to go through a couple of them. One, on the data side, it definitely is if you can have your data in a queryable format in a single data lake, but also you need to have some organization and information about that. If you just have blobs of data without information or organization around that data, it actually is less useful. And so that metadata about your objects, the metadata about your enterprise data is actually super useful and important that you arrange that in the right way so that you can actually get value out of it. Otherwise, your AI systems, they're not going to be able to just understand the blobs of data without context to them or you're not going to know where to go after, so that's a super important part. I think we can help and we're starting to build capabilities for you to go add that data to your objects, your data that you don't have that. But that's an important one, and that's where I see a lot of success.

I do think that where the technology is right now, there is a huge opportunity to drive efficiencies in the organization with things like Q. It is, we are seeing leaps and bounds improvements into how effective those conversational assistants are to everyday work life. And if you're a developer, I think there is massive opportunity on the development side where we're talking maybe two, three, 4X the time, the efficiency that you could get out of a developer. In fact, out my keynote yesterday, I have a friend who's a developer at Amazon and he sent me a text and his text to me was literally, "I wish I had coded for an hour a day." It's actually less than an hour a day that he usually gets to code. And so it's actually, it's both not surprising and shocking at the same time, that is less, that's how much time that a developer or senior developer codes. And so if you can take an hour a day and make it three hours a day, it seems like that's a low bar, but you just gave 3X of productivity of what you're getting out of your development teams.

And development teams are not cheap. There's not developers falling off of trees. They're a scarce resource that are expensive. And if you can get two to 3X the value out of when they're delivering for you all, that is an enormous gain. Think about how much more you could do if you had three times the size of the development team, building generative AI applications for you, building the next generation experiences for your customer. It is a huge lever and I think that kind of savings is doable across many different roles. We see that huge wins in the contact center space. Connect has added a ton of generative AI capabilities, and if you look, most of our Connect launches happened over the last couple of weeks, but there's some real material wins there both in handling things like email, handling things like chat. It turns out that the customers actually like it better. It's not just cheaper and easier and faster for you, it's easier for the customers too. And so your CSAT will go way up by having these generative AI experiences where customers can quickly get the answer that they need because you don't have to wait on the phone, you don't have to wait for a person to bumble around for an answer, you can actually get it really quickly and move on. And as the systems get more and more information about your customers, they get better and better about answering those questions. So those are a couple of places where we've seen massive gains and where I encourage you all to lean in and see where you can build there.

Kim Majerus:
We have several use cases. Connect is a great example.

Matt Garman:
I know Connect, is one of your favorites.

Kim Majerus:
It's my favorite actually. PQ, if you're out there, thank you for all the great work you do there.

When I think about the citizen engagement and what we're able to achieve to ensure that people are getting the right information at the right time, effectively, not sitting on hold for hours or pausing. It has made a transformational experience for our citizens. And that's the beauty about being in public sector, you could see the immediate impact.

And when I think about GenAI, there's so many great programs that are available and Francesca talked yesterday at the CIO Summit or the Council about the work that the GenAI Cloud Innovation Center is doing. So if you have GenAI opportunities that you want to work with AWS, obviously we've got a team that is more than happy to jump in. Just a little plug from the Pub Sec Summit that we had in DC, we also did a two-year $50 million investment designed to help public sector organizations accelerate innovation and support their critical missions. It's a great opportunity to have those who are interested in the public sector space to embrace and engage with your AWS counterparts to help you get there as well.

Matt Garman:
It's a good point. Just one more to add to that, Kim, is the GenAI Innovation Team, if you all haven't taken advantage of that team I recommend reaching out to them because one of the things they're actually quite good at is that thing that I mentioned before, which is sparking that creativity of how you can really use this technology to transform your business. And they'll sit down with you for a half-day session or a day session and help bring ideas of what's even possible with the technology, what the technology is capable of, what they've seen it be successful in your particular industry. And that can be a really powerful tool if you haven't all used them. And so I encourage you to reach out if you haven't.

Kim Majerus:
Our customers love it and they want to continue to engage and grab more out of it. So we'll definitely make sure that we get that information out there.

Back to how we think about startups and the organizations and really seeing true value from the startup community or through those established organizations, what do you see as the needle mover from a GenAI with the startup organizations?

Matt Garman:
With startups in particular?

Kim Majerus:
Yeah, particularly.

Matt Garman:
I think that one of the benefits that startups have, I think that they don't have legacy or preconceived notions of exactly how things should work. And so, the hard part of re-imagining how your business should work is you know what works or has worked in the past. And so you have all of this kind of preconceived set of notions of, "Well, obviously I have to do this this way." And I think startup founders are, at least the good ones, are really good about seeing how something could be done differently. And so, they're very good at taking technology and looking around and saying, "If we apply it in a particular way," and they're always willing to really lean into new technologies too, which I think is fantastic. If there's a new model that comes out or there's a new framework that comes out, startups, like that they'll flip from the old one to the new one and they're going to try the latest thing that can help them move fast.

But that's why it's fun and exciting to work with the startups. And I think that's where the ones that shift quickly and really adapt those new technologies are often the ones that go really fast and do grow significantly. Because when you're a startup, the trickiest part is finding that product market fit, and as soon as you get that, and so you've got to kind of shift a little bit until you get that. But hopefully you saw from a couple of the videos yesterday, there's some people doing some fascinating things. These are startups, if you think about some of those, that really could completely change how manufacturing works or how software is written or how medicine is made. Those are incredibly ambitious and big things to change. It's pretty fun to see that where, as an incumbent or an established company, you don't as much lean in.

And I actually think one of the cool things that we try to encourage our teams to do is to think like startups. And I would encourage you all to push your teams a little bit to think like startups and push teams to figure out how they can go faster, how they can adopt new technologies more quickly. And think about mechanistically. It's different, you may not be in a... Assuming you're not a startup now, if you're in a larger company, you do have constraints, you have audits and requirements and other things like that. But it's useful to think about what is a mechanism where you can give your teams permission to experiment. You can give your teams permission to try new technologies. The cloud is a great place to do that. It's easy. You don't have to go buy a bunch of servers, you don't have to build a data center. You can experiment with stuff.

And so telling your teams, "Look, go experiment with Q Business and see if we can find some interesting things. Go experiment with Aurora DSQL and just play around with it and see if there's something interesting that you can come up with. Go play around with the new S3 metadata and think differently about where we might be able to use that." Thinking mechanistically about how you get your teams out of there, "This is how I've done it for 10 years or 20 years or 50 years, and so I'm always going to do it this way," is super important. And I think that is a lot of times that's the difference between enterprises that are on a flat to slow decline to ones that continue to grow. It's hard to do, it takes intentional work when you have a large established company, but super important.

Kim Majerus:
I guess re:Invent is the best place to start that.

Matt Garman:
That's right.

Kim Majerus:
I'm going to ask you a question. Yesterday we heard during Andy's fireside chat, where is Andy's spending his time, where he thought he was going to spend versus where he is? I guess that would be my question too. Is there a specific industry that you find yourself paying a little bit more attention to because you see the opportunity for innovation and change?

Matt Garman:
Well, there's two things that I'll say. One, from an outside perspective, I don't know if it's surprising or not but I do actually spend a good amount of time with our government customers because I think that there's an enormous potential in government to go... I mean, anyone thinks our government moves fast, maybe you do, but not many people think that the government is agile and at the leading edge of technology. But I think they can be and there's many folks inside of the government that are. And that's the actually cool part is that there's really talented forward-leaning folks inside of the government that are working hard to make changes, and it's fun to find those people and to really lean in and help them invent because I think we can together kind of power them to actually make really big changes across countries and across citizen groups and things like that.

So that has been fun to spend a bit more time at. And getting to meet with some of the world leaders and talk about that has been cool and an interesting and new experience for me that I get to do. I think, it's not exactly what you asked, but also one of the ways that I've been also spending time thinking about is exactly what I was just suggesting that you all do, which is think about mechanisms for our own internal AWS. How do we continue to make sure that we can invent at the speed that we are? And it's a large organization and we do move really fast, but it's still, even if things are going well, you can't be complacent about that.

I have spent a bunch of time just learning how teams are organized, learning where there are early signs of inefficiency or slowness or where things could be better, and thinking about how we identify mechanisms for that, how we push decision-making down so that people can go faster in the organization and not feel like they're burdened with having to have a bunch of people approve things before anything can get done.

And I think there's opportunities for us to do even more of that, but that's where I spend my time because I actually think that's where I can have leverage sometimes. I like to think... For those of you don't know, my first job at Amazon I was the product manager for AWS, so I was the only product manager for all of our AWS Services. And sometimes I like to think about myself still as product manager, but I have to remind myself that's maybe not the most leveraged place to do it, even though I enjoy doing it sometimes.

But anyway, so that's where I get to spend some time. But I also then sometimes cheat and actually do spend time in reviewing new product ideas as well because I like to do that as well.

Kim Majerus:
Well, we do know you like to dive deep, that is high on your list of superpowers. So it's exciting too. And thank you for spending the time with the public sector customers. We always enjoy having you provide them those innovation opportunities because you're absolutely right there's great innovators within the constraints of government and they just want to do mission work, and that's exciting.

Matt Garman:
That's right.

Kim Majerus:
When we think about opportunities for our customers, what are you most optimistic about for 2025?

Matt Garman:
I do think that one of the things that I'm most optimistic about is that if you rewind to probably two years ago, every single question that people at re:Invent were asking about was around cost optimization. And that's what people were focused on. And our team, being customer obsessed as we are, dove in and helped and we were all in there and helping. And I think, it was the right thing for us to do for sure. But I also think that what we did is we really helped you all make sure that you right-sized your investments, make sure that you are spending money where you're getting value out of it, make sure that you're running on the right instance types and using the right S3 SKUs and building mechanisms to get rid of infrastructure that you'd spun up that you didn't need anymore and things like that. And one of the things that did is give you a really solid foundation.

And now I think people are looking for sources of growth and they're looking for sources of revenue. And that means innovation, that means new products, that means you all are leaning in and that to me is a sense of optimism when you're thinking about how do we accelerate growth because frankly it's a little bit more of a fun problem. I mean, cost optimization is important, but it's not the fun reason why most of us work at the companies we do. It's about how do we go build interesting things for our customers and I do think that just the buzz that I feel in the hallway, that when I talk one-on-one with various customers, I get that sense that people are optimistic and they're very focused on how can they go take advantage of an idea and really build.

Kim Majerus:
I agree. It's about doing both, right? You have to find the efficiencies-

Matt Garman:
That’s right. You got to be able to afford and that's kind of where I was saying, is that optimization is one of the ways in which many customers have been able to afford to go and invest in new opportunities and so I think there's a good flywheel effect there, but it's a good reason for optimism for sure.

Kim Majerus:
Absolutely and it's exciting to be a part of. One of the things that we hear from our customers around skills and talent. When you think about the opportunity, whether it's through upskilling and re-skilling or the students that are coming out today, can you share some of the approaches that we've taken here at AWS to re-skill our builders and transform how we are looking at our own workforce?

Matt Garman:
Oh, sure. You mean internally too?

Kim Majerus:
Yeah.

Matt Garman:
This is a good point and if you think about the number of generative AI experts in the world four years ago was like two dozen or something. There was none and so everybody has to go through this, whether it's somebody like Amazon or somebody like any of you. Everybody was in the same boat of having to go learn how to use some of this new technology, outside of a handful of deep machine learning experts that have been working on these for years. It was a process that we had to do internally as well and it is a people and change management process. I'll say, we had to go through, it takes more. Even at Amazon, we had to do more work than you would expect to get the developers to start using things like Q Developer as an example and you would think developers would love to use tools that make them more efficient and they do, but there's still a hump you have to get over to make it a habit. Just with any tool or any capability, you have to get them over that hump and then you actually see it just take off, but it's just people aren't used to it or if you think about code suggestions, people are like, oh yeah, that's a good code suggestion, but then they forgot to use it or they wouldn't go back to it.

As we've gotten people to develop that habit on the developer side, we've seen a massive jump up in productivity and part of it also on our side was a lot of this learning too, of just teaching what the technology is capable of and teaching how to think about building inference into your everyday applications. Our internal developers, we really push them hard to do things like learning and sandboxing and going and building applications like Qapps, where you're not really learning how to code against it. You're just trying to see what does it mean to send a prompt and get a response back and play with it and do prompt engineering, so we spend a bunch of time internally. We have programs that we send people through, they're intentional learning programs where they're short sessions. There's also much longer sessions for people who want to become experts. Both our internal developers, as well as the field who's out there kind of needing to teach you all how to use the technology. We had to teach them first and so there's a bunch of efforts that we have making sure that we can upskill our solutions architects and our people that are meeting with you all every day, so that we can be as knowledgeable as you all need us to be and our pro-serving and all of those teams. Yeah, it's a big effort and it's one that I think we're never going to be done with and just like I hear from many of you all that one of the biggest challenges is keeping your teams up to speed and re-skilling, I think that that's something that we are all just going to have to regularly get good at because technology, even from internally, the technology does not slow down. There's huge jumps in what's possible and if our own teams are not constantly really leaning in. This is part of that, I promise you the startups are taking advantage of all of the latest technologies as soon as it drops and so if you don't have teams that are leaning in and willing to learn about these new technologies, it definitely leaves you at risk and us included. That's why we invest a bunch of time on our internal teams to make sure that we're getting them as up to speed as we can.

Kim Majerus:
As a reminder, our training and certification team, their skill builder is an amazing asset to all of our customers and the training partners that we have.

Matt Garman:
There's some really cool gamification skill builder stuff that's pretty cool, where you can go in and kind of learn in a 3D environment and it's a super fun. There's lots of different modalities that you can go into, but it's a great way to really engage people in learning some of the technologies for sure.

Kim Majerus:
Absolutely. From an education perspective, we're working very closely with institutions and governments across the globe to make sure that we're building the right bridge between the classes that students are taking for the next generation of talent and really bridging it to the skills that the organizations are looking for within their own companies.

Matt Garman:
We just announced the AWS education initiative this morning.

Kim Majerus:
Yes, we did. I look at it this way, the importance of ensuring that all demographics and underserved organizations are able to access content and provide students the opportunity to learn generation of future talent growth, is number one, so you'll see more about that.

Matt Garman:
I'm really excited about that program too. It's a very cool one and yeah, it's definitely one that I was excited to see come out.

Kim Majerus:
It's our future. That's the way we look at it in the education space, so thank you for the investment there and the opportunity to talk about it today, but we're coming close to the end for the executive forum here. Do you have any closing thoughts to the audience today about Reinvent and the future?

Matt Garman:
The future, okay. Well, number one is thank you. Reinvent would not be what it is without all of you, so I really mean that. I tell people that this is both the most energizing and most exhausting week of the year at the same time, but it's the most exhausting because literally like 8 A.M. until midnight every single night and it's the most energizing because just feeling the energy from you all, feeling the excitement from you all and getting a sense of what we are all building together as an AWS community, it just is really exciting for us and for the team and I know there's probably many of you out there in the audience that also were giving talks or doing sessions here or people from your teams were giving talks and sessions. I know it's a big investment of time from you all and resources, but we really thank you and hopefully you get as much out of it or more out of it even than we do, but we definitely appreciate you all being here, so thank you.

As I think about moving forward and into 2025, I really just think, I said this at the end of the keynote yesterday, there has never been a time where there is more opportunity to go build transformational applications, transformational experiences and the powerful tools out there just get better and better every day. Whether it's brand new models, whether it's Nova models or others, whether it's new Gen AI capabilities, whether it's core building block capabilities, whether it's launches from our partners. I was looking today at a list of press releases that were coming out from partners. This week actually turns out to be, it's an incredible launch, not just from us, but from the whole broader ecosystem. Many of our partners, this is their biggest week of the year and they have huge launches as well, so I encourage you all just to take advantage of that. The opportunity is massive and if you look historically, the change in technology and potential that we're seeing that's right there in front of us right now, is maybe unmatched and is really a great opportunity for us to go build some cool things. You should be excited about that and embrace that opportunity. It's not one that you get all the time.

Kim Majerus:
No, it's not. It's an opportunity of a lifetime. Full stop. This is going to be our last session on the main stage at the executive Summit and it's also your last chance to help an amazing organization, Women In Cybersecurity, so don't forget to fill out your session survey. Tomorrow this will be open again and we'll be live-streaming Werner's Keynote and a rebroadcast of Andy's Fireside chat, so please, you're welcome to return. Finally, there are some breakout sessions that you can attend, so please check at the concierge desk. They'll be able to give you a list of what is remaining and last but not least, thank you very much for taking the time. Matt, thank you so much for talking to the audience. It's always exciting to hear what's top of mind for you and more importantly, everything that we're doing to support our customers, so thank you.

Matt Garman:
Thank you, Kim. All right, thanks everyone.

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