Amazon saved millions of dollars after switching to Gen AI, says CEO Andy Jassy

Gen AI for the win: Amazon’s new approach to its business model could aggravate the concerns that generative artificial intelligence, popularly known as Gen AI, could be a threat to the existing human workforce across the globe. CEO Andy Jassy has revealed that the company’s generative AI assistant, Amazon Q, has saved the company millions of dollars, promoting better efficiency. He said the integration of Amazon Q into the company’s internal systems has been a “game changer,” providing an estimated $260 million in annualised efficiency gains.

“Amazon Q, our Gen AI assistant for software development, is trying to bring some light to this heaviness. We have a new code transformation capability, and here’s what we found when we integrated it into our internal systems and applied it to our needed Java upgrades, Jassy said in a post on LinkedIn. He mentioned that Amazon Q reduced the average time to upgrade an application to Java 17 from 50 developer-days to some hours. “We estimate this has saved us the equivalent of 4,500 developer-years of work (yes, that number is crazy but, real),” he added.

Jassy said the Gen AI chatbot has allowed the company to upgrade more than 50 per cent of its production Java systems to modernised Java versions at less than half of the time and effort the job usually takes. “And, our developers shipped 79 per cent of the auto-generated code reviews without any additional changes,” Jassy added. “This is a great example of how large-scale enterprises can gain significant efficiencies in foundational software hygiene work by leveraging Amazon Q.”

Not only has Amazon Q saved millions of the company’s dollars, but it also has “enhanced security and reduced infrastructure costs.” The company saved $260 million in annualised efficiency gains, according to recent estimates. “It’s been a game changer for us, and not only do our Amazon teams plan to use this transformation capability more, but our Q team plans to add more transformations for developers to leverage,” Jassy said.