Amazon Sees Agentic AI Customers Shaping Future Growth

Jeff Bezos’ old maxim framed Amazon’s earliest days: “We’re not competitor‑obsessed, we’re customer‑obsessed.”

Back then, a “customer” meant an online book buyer. Two decades later, that constituency is sprawling. It ranges from the home cook ordering spatulas, the chief technology officer spinning up cloud servers, the chief marketing officer buying ads or the shopper talking to an Alexa speaker.

As of this quarter there’s another customer: Software agents making decisions on their own.

On Amazon’s second‑quarter earnings call on Thursday (July 31), CEO Andy Jassy said the company now designs products for “non‑human” patrons that “will hit ‘buy’ without a person in the loop.” That shift dominated a call that otherwise could have been a standard victory lap: solid retail trends, a sturdy ad business and double‑digit cloud growth.

Following up on a hint dropped during the Q1 earnings concerns about agentic AI architecture, Jassy confirmed that he wants Amazon to be the leader in agentic AI development and infrastructure. And not only can agentic AI plan a trip, reconcile invoices or write code, it also burns through computing power.

“As people have become excited about building agents, they’re realizing they lack the tools to build them,” Jassy told analysts. “Customers are struggling with deploying agents into production in a secure and scalable way.”

Amazon’s answer is a suite of plumbing rather than flash. In May, it open‑sourced “Strands,” a toolkit for creating agents. Last week it rolled out “AgentCore,” a server‑less runtime Jassy called “the industry’s first secure, scalable way to give agents memory, identity and observability.” The clear subtext: AWS aims to be the place where enterprise agents live, not merely where they train.

Tough Question

Wall Street still worries that Amazon is chasing Microsoft and Google, whose tie‑ups with OpenAI and Anthropic have hogged headlines. One analyst on the call confronted Jassy about a perceived lack of Wall Street confidence in his cloud and AI strategy. Jassy’s retort was brisk.

“It is so early right now in AI … We have a very significant number of enterprises and start‑ups running applications on AWS AI services,” he said, adding that the company has “more demand than we have capacity right now.”

Asked point‑blank if AWS is losing share, he said market‑share snapshots are “moments in time” and argued that AWS still leads on security, breadth of services and operational reliability.

Jassy said power availability, not chips, is now the biggest constraint on adding AI capacity, a reminder that the cloud’s real bottleneck lies in concrete, copper and kilowatts.

Amazon’s own consumer‑facing device is Alexa+, a Gen AI upgrade now in early access to millions of U.S. households. Jassy called it “much more intelligent than her prior self,” capable of stringing together multi‑step requests like dimming lights, queuing dinner music and adjusting the thermostat. Engagement, he said, is “meaningfully higher,” and over time could unlock new subscription or advertising revenue streams.

Tariffs and Metrics

The CEO also fielded questions about U.S.–China tariffs. So far, Amazon hasn’t “seen diminished demand nor prices meaningfully appreciating,” Jassy said, but he cautioned that inventories bought ahead of tariff deadlines are masking real costs. Who ultimately eats higher import bills — Amazon, its third‑party sellers or consumers — “is still hard to know,” he added.

All the futurism rests on healthy basics. Second‑quarter net sales rose 13% to $167.7 billion, while operating income jumped 31% to $19.2 billion. North America retail grew 11%, and advertising revenue climbed 22% to $15.7 billion. AWS notched 17.5% growth, hitting a $123 billion annualized run‑rate, though its margin slipped to 32.9% as stock‑based compensation and depreciation ticked up.

Free cash flow over the past 12 months was $18.2 billion, down sharply as Amazon pours capital into data centers and custom AI chips such as its Trainium processors. Management expects capital‑expenditure levels to hold steady in the back half of 2025. Amazon guided third‑quarter revenue to $174 billion–$179.5 billion, implying high‑single‑digit to low‑double‑digit growth, and projected operating income of $15.5 billion–$20.5 billion.

Asked how long the AI land‑grab will last, Jassy reached for scale: “How often do you have an opportunity that’s a $123‑billion annual‑revenue run rate where you can still say it’s early?”

Early days, perhaps, but Amazon is betting those non‑human customers will be spending real money soon.