As part of CRN’s 2025 CEO Outlook report, AWS’ Matt Garman dives deep into his strategy this year working alongside channel partners, the impact AI will have, what AWS’ biggest technology investments will be and his top priority for 2025.
AWS CEO Matt Garman takes a deep dive with CRN about his company’s biggest investments in 2025, the impact AI will have on AWS, the keys to success for channel partners and his top priority this year.
“In 2025, we will continue to invest heavily in a number of areas including: generative AI, custom silicon, and global infrastructure expansion, as well as compute, databases, analytics, storage, and security,” said Garman as part of CRN’s 2025 CEO Outlook report.
“We’re doubling down on our AI capabilities, including expanding Amazon Bedrock’s features and integrating more foundation models, such as our new family of Amazon Nova foundation models,” he said. “We’ll also continue to advance our custom chip designs like AWS Graviton, AWS Trainium, and AWS Inferentia to deliver even greater performance and energy efficiency.”
[Related: AWS, Microsoft, Google Fight For $90B Q4 2024 Cloud Market Share]
Garman said AWS will work closely with channel partners this year to drive AI solutions that help customers successfully achieve the business outcomes they desire.
“[AI] will open up enormous new opportunities to innovate on behalf of customers across every industry. Our AWS Generative AI Competency partners are already seeing higher proof-of-concept (POC) to production conversion rates, often above 50 percent, with some as high as 70 percent—well above industry averages,” the AWS CEO said.
AWS Earnings Results And Market Share
Before jumping into Garman’s strategy in 2025 around AI, investments and channel partner initiatives—let’s take a quick look at the Seattle-based company’s most recent quarterly earnings results and current global cloud market share position.
AWS generated $28.8 billion in revenue during the fourth quarter of 2024, representing a 19 percent sales increase year over year. The AWS annual revenue run rate is now over $115 billion.
Operating income for AWS during Q4 2024 was $10.6 billion, an increase of 48 percent year over year.
In terms of global cloud market share, AWS retained its long-time leadership position during the fourth quarter of 2024. Worldwide enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services reached nearly $91 billion for Q4 2024, an increase of 22 percent or $17 billion year over year, according to new cloud market data from Synergy Research Group.
AWS remained the global market share leader in Q4 2024 by winning a 30 percent share of the $91 billion market. Microsoft placed No. 2 with a 21 percent share, followed by Google Cloud in third place at 12 percent share.
As part of CRN’s 2025 CEO Outlook special report, here is what CEO Matt Garman said about AWS’ biggest market opportunity for channel partners in 2025, what impact he expects AI to have this year, key technology investments, and his top priority as CEO of AWS in 2025.
My top priority for 2025 is:
My top priority for 2025 is accelerating customer success with generative AI by empowering our partner ecosystem to innovate, scale, and drive business transformation across industries.
We’re committed to delivering cutting-edge technologies while involving our partners in everything we do.
This means not just providing the technology, but also the tools, training, and support our partners need to be trusted advisors across industries.
We’re focusing on long-term partnerships, joint innovation, and creating opportunities for partners to grow their businesses alongside AWS. Whether it’s through our AWS Generative AI Innovation Center, enhanced [AWS] Marketplace offerings, or expanded services opportunities, we’re dedicated to our partners’ success.
By strengthening these partnerships, we aim to help organizations of all sizes harness the latest technologies to solve their most pressing challenges faster, operate more efficiently, and create new possibilities that were previously unimaginable.
What impact do you expect AI to have on the business you and your partners do together in 2025?
AI is already transformative, and in 2025 it’ll be even more so. It will open up enormous new opportunities to innovate on behalf of customers across every industry. Our AWS Generative AI Competency partners are already seeing higher proof-of-concept (POC) to production conversion rates, often above 50 percent, with some as high as 70 percent—well above industry averages.
Gartner cites that just over 21 percent of generative AI POCs move into production. That tells me customers are finding real value, not just running experiments.
We’re also seeing partners integrate generative AI into their own operations. Early indications show Amazon Q can help employees become more than 80 percent more productive. That’s a huge efficiency gain.
By 2025, I expect we’ll see a lot more partners building AI-powered solutions, integrating generative AI capabilities into their existing offerings, and developing specialized AI consulting practices. This will accelerate AI adoption among our customers and drive growth for our partners.
What are the key technology investments you plan to make in 2025?
In 2025, we will continue to invest heavily in a number of areas including: generative AI, custom silicon, and global infrastructure expansion, as well as compute, databases, analytics, storage, and security.
We’re doubling down on our AI capabilities, including expanding Amazon Bedrock’s features and integrating more foundation models, such as our new family of Amazon Nova foundation models.
We’ll also continue to advance our custom chip designs like AWS Graviton, AWS Trainium, and AWS Inferentia to deliver even greater performance and energy efficiency.
Additionally, we’re committed to expanding our global cloud infrastructure and advancing technologies that enable modern data analytics at scale.
Importantly, we’ll keep investing in making our partner ecosystem successful through increasing Strategic Collaboration Agreements, programs and tools that help partners build and sell solutions on AWS. As always, we continue to keep sustainability in mind and will continue to explore clean energy solutions to support the growing demands for our technology.
What is the biggest market opportunity you and your channel partners will tackle together in 2025?
The biggest market opportunity we’ll tackle with our partners in 2025 is helping organizations of all sizes modernize their workloads to take advantage of and scale generative AI.
This isn’t just about running proof of concepts anymore, customers want real business value. We’re seeing incredible momentum already. Amazon Bedrock is one of our fastest-growing services ever and our AI business has hit a multi-billion-dollar run rate.
But to unlock the potential of generative AI, most customers first need to move their workloads to the cloud and modernize their infrastructure. That’s where our partners play a crucial role. They bring deep industry expertise and can guide customers through this transformation, leveraging our expanding AI capabilities to help reimagine business processes.
We’re investing heavily to support our partners in this. In 2024, we introduced the Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) to help more partners accelerate and streamline these projects, and at [AWS] re:Invent [2024] we removed the financial caps to help partners make more money and drive better customer outcomes.
It’s all about helping partners drive better customer outcomes and grow their businesses alongside us. It’s a massive opportunity for our partners to help enterprises move more workloads to the cloud, integrate AI into legacy systems, and build innovative AI applications. We’re just at the beginning of this transformation.
What do you see as the toughest challenges facing customers in 2025?
The pace of AI innovation is incredible, but it also creates challenges. Customers need to figure out how to responsibly use these technologies at scale.
This isn’t just about technical implementation, it’s about addressing concerns around AI bias, transparency, data privacy, and more.
Another big challenge is integrating AI into existing systems and workflows. This requires significant organizational change and upskilling.
It’s not just a technology challenge; it’s a people and process challenge too. Customers will also need help optimizing their cloud spend and maximizing the value of their tech investments.
As they adopt more advanced technologies like AI, cost management becomes even more critical.
In 2025, we’ll be working alongside our partners to solve these challenges to help customers realize the full potential of AI in their businesses.
What is the key to success for your channel partners in 2025?
The key to success for our channel partners in 2025 will be their ability to combine deep AI expertise with industry-specific knowledge.
As AI becomes more pervasive, customers need partners who can not only implement the technology but also understand their unique business challenges and regulatory environments.
Successful partners will invest in upskilling their teams, develop specialized AI solutions for specific industries, and guide customers through the entire AI journey—from strategy to implementation and ongoing optimization.
It’s also about helping customers move beyond proofs of concept to production deployments that deliver real business value. That’s where the rubber meets the road.
