Amazon Names New AI Chief Amid Battle to Take on Tech Rivals
Peter DeSantis Will Lead New Unit as AI Teams Are Reorganized
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Amazon.com Inc. is reorganizing teams working on artificial intelligence projects, putting a top leader from the company’s cloud division in charge of a new unit.
Peter DeSantis will lead the new group, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Dec. 17 in a message to employees, which was also posted on the .
The new organization will combine Amazon’s Artificial General Intelligence team — which oversees the company’s Nova-branded AI models and the digital brains of the Alexa voice assistant — with Amazon’s chipmaking unit and quantum computing research.
Amazon is the largest seller of rented computing power and data storage, but has struggled to replicate that dominance among AI developers given intense competition from the likes of Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google.
DeSantis, who joined the company in 1998, was previously senior vice president of utility computing, overseeing most of Amazon Web Services’ engineering teams. In his new role, he’ll report to Jassy.
Rohit Prasad, the current AGI unit’s chief and longtime leader of the speech science teams behind Alexa, will leave Amazon at the end of the year, Jassy said.
Amazon ranks No. 1 on the Transport Topics Top 100 list of the largest logistics companies in North America, No. 15 on the TT Top 100 list of the largest private carriers and No. 1 on the TT Top 50 list of the largest global freight companies.
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