AWS re:Invent was an all-in pitch for AI. Customers might not be ready.

If Amazon Web Services’ annual re:Invent technology conference proves anything, it’s that the cloud infrastructure player is going all-in on AI.

AWS has made dozens of announcements, from new AI agents and updated large language models to products with LLM and agent-building capabilities. Enterprise AI was everywhere. But are the customers just as enthusiastic?

AWS CEO Matt Garman acknowledged during his keynote that companies have not yet seen a return on AI investments. He thinks this is going to change – and quickly.

“I believe the advent of AI agents has brought us to an inflection point in the trajectory of AI,” Garman said. “It’s going from being a technical marvel to something that brings us real value. This change will have as much impact on your business as the Internet or the cloud.”

While analysts told TechCrunch they were impressed by some of AWS’s technical announcements this week, they aren’t sure if it’s enough to change the adoption of enterprise AI or change AWS’s position in the AI ​​race.

AWS is one of the market leaders when it comes to cloud infrastructure; the same can’t be said for its business AI offerings.

Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google have a leading edge when it comes to companies’ market share for actual AI models. AWS does have the advantage of having everything in-house, including infrastructure and its own AI training chips.

Naveen Chhabra, principal analyst at Forrester, told TechCrunch via email that while AWS has announced a lot of cool new technology, it doesn’t change the fact that many companies aren’t ready to adopt AI.

“AWS AI announcements show that AWS is thinking ahead and perhaps way too ahead,” Chhabra wrote. “Most companies are still testing AI projects and are rarely at the maturity level that AWS expects to benefit from the offerings resulting from these announcements.”

A much quoted one MIT study August showed that 95% of companies see no return on their investments in AI.

Ethan Feller, an equity strategist at Zacks Investment Research, told TechCrunch in a phone interview that the new Nova AI models, agents and model building capabilities didn’t strike him as interesting this week — despite them being the products AWS is hyping the most. Instead, it was the infrastructure announcements.

“The AWS AI Factory is really compelling,” Feller said of a new initiative that allows customers to run AWS AI in their own data centers. “AWS is a big player in where the models are run and is dominant in the cloud industry. I think that’s where Amazon’s expertise really lies. It’s a good thing to double down on where they have expertise.”

Feller likes that AWS wants to make a vertical AI play, but he thinks it might make more sense to do so through partnerships with other AI players like Anthropic and Nvidia, rather than using all their own AI technology.

Despite all this, AWS is still well positioned to gain market share in the AI ​​sector as it continues to expand its core business.

AWS’s position as a leading cloud provider means it has a solid business foundation despite what’s happening in the AI ​​market, because it provides the rails for the industry’s technology – no matter what the AI ​​trend of the moment is.

If the AI ​​industry ultimately becomes the bubble that some say it is, AWS, which posted operating income of $11.4 billion in the third quarter, will likely be less affected by a negative change in AI market conditions than its peers.

This gives AWS room to experiment and iterate on what its place in the AI ​​market could look like down the road. That’s why even if companies aren’t ready for the technology they’re releasing today, AWS should continue to work on improving it.

Follow all of TechCrunch’s coverage of the annual business technology event here, and see all the announcements you may have missed so far here.