Amazon Hires Former Copilot CTO to Take on OpenAI and Meta

Looking at where the AI industry is headed, the AI agent era is clearly here, and Amazon isn't willing to let the opportunity slip by.

For years, the shopping platform has built AI products to help users manage tasks while making workflows easier by automating them.

Now, the retail giant is looking to turn its AI investments into used products by expanding its AI agent Offerings. This, the company is doing to compete with Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots, both of which have gained traction in recent months.

Why Anthropic Researcher Jacob Coxon Quit, and Who AgreedCoxon’s warning comes as both OpenAI and Anthropic have faced incidents involving their AI systems gaining access to other organisations’ systems.

How Amazon plans to compete

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company's cloud computing division, has hired Pedram Rezaei, the CTO of Microsoft Copilot, to help the e-commerce and cloud giant build out its agentic AI business.

According to details revealed by a Business Insider report, Rezaei will initially work on Quick and Kiro, two of Amazon's products central to its AI agent strategy.

Quick is AWS's AI assistant and productivity app launched in early 2026 as the successor to Amazon Q Business. Unlike Amazon Quick, which is a broad, cross-application AI assistant designed to connect files and business workflows, Kiro is a specialized, agentic AI-powered IDE focused on structured software engineering.

According BI report, both have seen their user base grow, with Quick's monthly AI users increasing fourfold from the first quarter to the second. Kiro, meanwhile, has its user base doubling over the same period.

These two sit within a wider portfolio that Amazon has been building, including its Bedrock model platform, coding assistants and other agentic software.