AWS boss steps down after 15 years at Amazon

The CEO of AWS, Adam Selipsky, has stepped down from his role as of May 14, ending what Amazon president and CEO Andy Jassy described as a successful three-year tenure and passing the torch to “the next generation of leadership,” according to an official blog post on the matter.

Selipsky was hired as a VP at Amazon in 2005, and spent 11 years as the boss of AWS sales and marketing before a stint as CEO of Tableau, Amazon’s statement said.

“[Selipsky] took over in the middle of the pandemic, which presented a wide array of leadership and business challenges,” Jassy wrote. “Under his direction, the team made the right long-term decision to help customers become more efficient in their spend, even if it meant less short-term revenue for AWS.”

The development and deployment of several of Amazon’s key generative AI features, including Bedrock and Amazon Q, were also overseen by Selipsky, Jassy noted. AWS is “in a a strong position,” he added, as it has topped $100 billion in annual revenue rates as of the previous quarter and continues to perform well in terms of reliability, security and performance.

Selipsky’s replacement, as of June 3, will be Matt Garman, who started at Amazon as an intern in 2005 and has been a product manager of various units, including EC2 and EBS, as well as general manager of AWS Compute. Most recently, Garman has worked on the demand generation side of AWS as leader of the worldwide sales and marketing team.

“Matt knows our customers and business as well as anybody in the world, and has senior leadership experience on both the product and demand generation sides,” Jassy wrote.

Garman has been intimately involved with AWS from the beginning of his Amazon career, according to the blog post, helping to create pricing plans, feature sets, and even service-level agreements at one of Amazon’s most important enterprise-facing business units.

AWS is also central to Amazon’s generative AI strategy, given cloud computing’s centrality to generative AI overall. Jassy has spoken recently about the importance of generative AI, along with his hopes to make it the next “pillar” of the Amazon’s lineup.

“If you asked me today, I’d lead with generative AI,” he said in his annual letter to shareholders in April. “We’re optimistic that much of this world-changing AI will be built on top of AWS.”