Amazon’s stock price had already been dropping in after-hours trading on Thursday despite better-than-expected results when Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak prefaced his questions on an earnings call with a disclaimer that made it clear this wasn’t going to be a “Congrats on the quarter, guys” type of analyst-CEO interaction.
“I have two [questions] for you on AWS; they’re a little tough, but I’m going to throw them at you,” Nowak told Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. “There is a Wall Street finance person narrative right now that AWS is falling behind in gen AI with concerns about share loss to peers. What is your rebuttal to that, and talk to us about your and the team’s most important focal points, just to ensure that AWS stays on the knife’s edge of innovation versus hyperscaler peers.”
