Amazon AI head Rohit Prasad says Jeff Bezos is 'very involved' even though he’s no longer CEO

Rohit Prasad, who oversees the tech giant’s Artificial General Intelligence division, said he was 'very fortunate for that partnership and mentorship.' (Image credit: (LinkedIn, AFP)

Amazon’s head of AI Rohit Prasad recently shared that founder and executive chair Jeff Bezos is “very involved” in the company's artificial intelligence efforts even though he’s no longer CEO. “He’s still very much connected with AI where I spend a lot of time and so I get to see him,” Prasad told Fortune, adding that he felt “very fortunate for that partnership and mentorship.”

Last week, Bezos had said in an interview that he's still deeply involved at Amazon and hasn't fully left the company he founded 30 years ago. He has been putting in the hours at the company to help it in the AI race.

"My heart is in Amazon, my curiosity is in Amazon, and my fears are there and my love is there," Business Insider quoted him as saying. "I'm never going to forget about Amazon. I'll always be there to help, and right now, I'm putting a lot of time into it. I can help, and it's super interesting, so why not?"

Bezos also said that 95 percent of his time at Amazon is spent focusing on the company's AI work since it's building 1,000 AI applications internally. In addition to this, as executive chairman, it is also Bezos's responsibility to ensure the success of CEO Andy Jassy and the leadership team.

In a podcast last year, the second-richest person in the world had said that the main reason he stepped down as the CEO of Amazon in 2021 was so he could focus his time on his rocket company, Blue Origin. But Bezos isn't the only tech founder to step in and run a company after taking a step back. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin returned to the tech giant to work on AI initiatives after quitting their executive roles in 2019.