Amazon, The Robot King, Or: Amazon AI Services (AAIS)

This is Part 5 of a series of articles breaking down and ranking the AI strategies of the Magnificent 7.

“All these services allow you to kind of have variable cost ways of doing things that would have been very expensive to do at large scale. So the goal is to make it easier for people to build web-scale applications without having to worry about all of the kind of nuts and bolts of scaling that make it very difficult to go from your idea to a successful product.” — Jeff Bezos on Amazon Web Services, 2012.

Here’s a thought. Shouldn’t every human want to have a good portion of their capital invested in AI, automation, and robotics? These three technologies necessarily increase the portion of profits that go to capital over labor. Your primary form of generating revenue for yourself is through your labor. However, you may be at risk of losing that income-generating capability to AI and robotics at some point in the future. If you take the advancement of AI, automation, and robotics to its ultimate conclusion, then basically all valuable human effort will be replaced by machines. Therefore, the natural hedge to losing your job to a robot is to own the robot that replaces you.

In this article, we’re talking about the AI strategy of Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN).