Amazon has recorded a 13 per cent sales hike in the first quarter of 2024, which the company says was largely driven by its success across AI development and advertising.
Sales jumped from $127.4 billion during the same period of last year to $143.3 billion, while income more than tripled to $10.4 billion.
Amazon boss Andy Jassy said that AI capabilities from Amazon Web Services (AWS) are “reaccelerating” the subsidiary’s growth rate, with the cloud-computing arm anticipating £100 billion in annual revenue.
Sales across AWS jumped by 17 per cent to $25 billion during the quarter, with the division making up around 61 per cent of Amazon’s total operating income.
The Amazon chief executive and president also said that the Amazon’s advertising efforts have continued to benefit from the growth of its Stores and Prime Video businesses.
“It was a good start to the year across the business, and you can see that in both our customer experience improvements and financial results,” continued Jassy.
The figures come weeks after Amazon announced it was adding artificial intelligence (AI) specialist Dr. Andrew Ng to its board of directors.
Ng, currently managing general partner of AI Fund, was the founding lead of Google’s Google Brain (Deep Learning) Project, and served as chief scientist and vice president of China’s Baidu for three years.
The appointment of Ng to the Amazon board underpins the company’s commitment to generative AI development and the tech’s role as a difference maker among Big Tech firms who are facing pressure to implement solutions.
A number of high-profile companies have recently adopted Amazon’s AI technology, including Accenture and Anthropic who are collaborating with AWS to help highly-regulated industries like healthcare, public sector, banking, and insurance adopt and scale generative AI (genAI) technology with Amazon Bedrock.
Audi has also used Amazon SageMaker and Amazon OpenSearch Service to build a genAI chatbot to improve its enterprise search experience and help employees find and navigate internal documentation.
