E-commerce company Amazon.com has been dominating the cloud computing. There is one area that the company is still behind though, artificial intelligence tools that let customers parse data, understand speech and recognize images without buying their own expensive machinery. Unfortunately for Amazon, rivals Google and Microsoft have been dominating this sector.
The unit of Amazon that handles the cloud computer Amazon Web Services has quickly added AI enhancements. The unit has also hired experts in the field to ensure that they catch up to their rivals. This has made it easy for Google and Microsoft to poach customers away from AWS. According to analysts, the sales of software for creating AI applications will likely go up by more than 40% between now and 2021, with the overall market forecasted to be around $8 billion. This was revealed by the research conducted by IDC.
The research indicated that growth for AI software products in the cloud will even be higher as more businesses and companies across the globe now turning to internet-based services to help them manage and run complex programs that require AI.
With Amazon one of the biggest tech companies in the world, their Echo devices which are AI cloud services has witnessed slow growth in comparison to their rivals’ devices. Both Google and Microsoft are currently ahead of AWS in terms of launching new products. They also have a better advantage due to their large research labs that consist of AI experts with years of experience in the field. Being the last is an unusual position for Amazon’s AWS even though it leads the second position Microsoft by 5 to 1 in the overall cloud market share.
In their defense, Amazon maintained that it still has plenty of competitive edge over the others, especially in machine learning. Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president for AI at AWS stated that “When the world was still trying to learn how to build websites in 1995, we were using machine learning to run recommendation engines.”
Amazon has been the pioneer in the cloud computing filed as they have used AI for their warehouse robots. They have also used AI in Amazon Go, a concept that is built on the cashier-less supermarket. Sivasubramanian reiterated that the company currently has thousands of workers developing machine learning for internal uses.
To be able to match their rivals, AWS has hired machine-learning luminary Alex Smola, tasking him with building their staff base to ensure that their AI products become widely available and also easy to use for their customers.
