Amazon Installs New AI Leader, Prasad Set to Depart
Amazon has made a major change to its AI program by moving the function under the umbrella of AWS Utility Computing. Andy Jassy, in a memo issued on December 18, announced that Peter DeSantis, the Senior Vice President of AWS Utility Computing and a 27-year Amazon veteran, will head a unified organization covering the company's major AI initiatives.
These initiatives include its AI models (now anchored around Nova 2), its custom silicon program, and quantum computing. Jassy called the moment an “inflection point” for the company.
The same memo also makes this definitive point: Rohit Prasad will leave Amazon at the end of 2025. Prasad has been a central figure in the transition of Amazon from the Alexa voice-AI era to its generative AI push, including Nova and the AGI organization. The move was Prasad’s own decision, not outside speculation, according to Jassy.
Why this leadership transition matters is simple: Amazon is putting its AI roadmap under an executive whose day job is running AWS like a utility and focusing on capacity, reliability, cost, and delivery speed. For enterprise buyers, this translates into the language that actually drives adoption: SLAs (service level agreements), steady performance, and infrastructure that can run at scale.
As for products, this lands just after the launch of the Nova 2 family at re:Invent. For most enterprise readers, the practical names to know are Nova 2 Lite and Nova 2 Pro, the general-purpose options teams will likely evaluate first.
Bottom line: This is a leadership handoff with a clear shift in approach— AI is now a utility-level priority under DeSantis, and Prasad’s departure is locked to a date.
The timing is notable, too: Amazon is reportedly in talks about a roughly $10 billion investment in OpenAI, underscoring how much this moment is about AI capacity and infrastructure.
In the enterprise platform race, it reads like Amazon tightening its answer to competing build-and-deploy stacks such as Azure AI Foundry and Google Vertex AI.
Y. Anush Reddy is a contributor to this blog.
