Amazon CEO Andy Jassy explains how gen AI has saved the company millions of dollars

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy

Almost every big tech company has adopted artificial intelligence (AI) in a big way. One of those companies is Amazon. Recently, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy took to LinkedIn to reveal how the company’s generative AI assistant, Amazon Q, has significantly reduced costs and improved efficiency.

In the post, Jassy mentions that the integration of Amazon Q into the company’s internal systems has been a “game changer,” particularly in the realm of software upgrades.

“Amazon Q, our GenAI assistant for software development, is trying to bring some light to this heaviness. We have a new code transformation capability, and here’s what we found when we integrated it into our internal systems and applied it to our needed Java upgrades,” Jassy said in the LinkedIn post.

The Amazon CEO explained that the average time to upgrade an application to Java 17 has plummeted from 50 developer-days to just a few hours, thanks to Amazon Q. “We estimate this has saved us the equivalent of 4,500 developer-years of work (yes, that number is crazy but, real,” said Jassy.

That’s not all as according to Jassy the benefits go beyond how much effort Amazon has saved developers. “The upgrades have enhanced security and reduced infrastructure costs, providing an estimated $260M in annualised efficiency gains,” he added in the LinkedIn post.

Amazon, as per Jassy, has been able to upgrade more than 50% of its production Java systems to modernised Java versions at a fraction of the usual time and effort. “And, our developers shipped 79% of the auto-generated code reviews without any additional changes,” he said highlighting the efficiency of its generative AI assistant. "This is a great example of how large-scale enterprises can gain significant efficiencies in foundational software hygiene work by leveraging Amazon Q,” he said.