Adam Selipsky is stepping down from his role as CEO of AWS, Amazon PR has confirmed to TechCrunch.
In a memo shared internally by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and published this morning to the company’s blog, Jassy said that AWS sales chief Matt Garman will be promoted to CEO. Garman previously headed AWS’ EC2 cloud computing initiative.
“We were fortunate that Adam agreed to step in and lead AWS, and has deftly led the business, while also developing his leadership team,” Jassy wrote. “Adam is now going to move onto his next challenge (after taking a well-deserved respite), and Garman will become CEO of AWS, effective June 3.”
Selipsky was one of the first VPs Amazon hired at AWS in 2005, and spent 11 years leading AWS sales, marketing and support before leaving to become the CEO of data visualization software Tableau. He returned to AWS in 2021 to lead the division.
Before running EC2, Garman — who joined AWS in 2006 as one of the first product managers — eventually became the general manager of all AWS compute services in 2016. In 2020, he moved to the “demand generation” side of AWS to lead worldwide sales, marketing support and professional services.
Selipsky is perceived as missing the boat on generative AI — which might’ve contributed to his ouster.
According to reporting from The Information, AWS originally planned to unveil its own generative AI model akin to OpenAI’s ChatGPT code-named Bedrock — which eventually became Amazon’s Bedrock model hosting service — at its annual conference in November 2022. But technical issues forced the organization to postpone the launch.
Under Selipsky, AWS also passed on opportunities to invest in two leading AI startups, Cohere and Anthropic. AWS later tried to invest in Cohere, but was rejected — and had to settle for a co-investment (albeit a large one) in Anthropic alongside rival Google.
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