Platform Wars (Part II): Amazon AI

How will The King of the Cloud incorporate machine learning and AI in every part of the platform?

In the last edition of Platform Wars, we examined Google’s recent moves to establish its AI products on the cloud. Today, we look at a company whose business model lies on the opposite spectrum of Google’s and has established itself as the King of the Cloud: Amazon.

While Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods has pundits buzzing about a possibility of a $1T valuation, the bigger news is how the Everything Store plans to incorporate machine learning and artificial intelligence in every part of its platform to get there.

Yes, the Whole Foods acquisition will transform retail as YouTube and Instagram have changed media when the respective tech giants acquired them. But look no further than Bezos’s annual letter to shareholders to see how important AI is to Amazon:

“Over the past decades, computers have broadly automated tasks that programmers could describe with clear rules and algorithms. Modern machine learning techniques now allow us to do the same for tasks where describing the precise rules is much harder.

At Amazon, we’ve been engaged in the practical application of machine learning for many years now. Some of this work is…