AWS re:Invent was a comprehensive AI showcase. Customers may not be ready.

If Amazon Web Services’ annual Re:Invent tech conference proves anything, it’s that the cloud infrastructure player is entirely focused on artificial intelligence.

AWS has made dozens of announcements, from new AI agents and updated large language models, to products with LLM and agent building capabilities. Enterprise AI has been everywhere. But are its customers equally enthusiastic?

Matt Jarman, CEO of AWS, admitted during his keynote that organizations have not seen a return on investment in AI yet. He believes this is about to change – and quickly.

“I think the emergence of AI agents has brought us to an inflection point in the trajectory of AI,” Jarman said. “It’s going from a technical marvel to something that gives us real value. This change will have as big an impact on your business as the Internet or the cloud.”

While analysts told TechCrunch they were impressed with some of AWS’s tech announcements this week, they’re not sure they’re enough to move the needle on enterprise AI adoption or change AWS’s position in the AI ​​race.

AWS is one of the market leaders when it comes to cloud infrastructure; The same cannot be said for enterprise AI offerings.

Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google have the lead when it comes to enterprise market share for actual AI models. AWS has the advantage of having everything in-house, including its infrastructure and AI training chips.

Naveen Chhabra, principal analyst at Forrester, told TechCrunch via email that while AWS is announcing a lot of cool new technologies, that doesn’t change the fact that many companies aren’t ready to embrace AI.

“AWS AI’s announcements show that AWS is thinking ahead and perhaps even further ahead,” Chhabra wrote. “Most organizations are still experimenting with AI projects and they rarely reach the maturity levels that AWS expects to take advantage of the offerings that come from these announcements.”

A widely cited study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in August found that 95% of companies do not see a return on investment from AI.

Ethan Feller, equity strategist at Zacks Investment Research, told TechCrunch in a phone interview that Nova AI’s new models, agents, and model building capabilities haven’t been interesting to him since this week — despite them being the products AWS is most excited about. Instead, it was infrastructure announcements.

“The AWS AI Factory is really impressive,” Feller said of a new initiative that lets customers run AWS AI in their own data centers. “AWS is a big player in where the models are running and is dominant in the cloud industry. I think that’s where Amazon’s expertise really lies. It’s good to double down on where they have expertise.”

Feller likes that AWS is looking to create a vertical AI play, but thinks it may make more sense to do so through partnerships with other AI players like Anthropic and Nvidia rather than using all of their own AI technology.

Despite all this, AWS is still well positioned to gain market share in the AI ​​sector, while continuing to grow its core business.

AWS’s position as an industry-leading cloud provider means it has a solid business foundation despite what’s happening in the AI ​​market because it provides the right path for industry technology – regardless of where AI is headed at the moment.

If the AI ​​industry ends up being the bubble that some say it is, AWS, which reported $11.4 billion in operating income in the third quarter, will likely be less affected by a negative change in AI market conditions than its peers.

This gives AWS room to experiment and iterate on what its place in the AI ​​market could look like in the future. That’s why, even if organizations aren’t ready for the technology they’re launching today, AWS must continue to work on improving it.

Follow all of TechCrunch’s coverage of the annual enterprise technology event here, and see all the announcements you may have missed so far here.