Amazon has hired Pedram Rezaei, the former chief technology officer of Microsoft Copilot, to help build its agentic AI business, Business Insider’s Eugene Kim and Ashley Stewart reported on Oct. 5. He joined AWS as a distinguished engineer in its Agentic AI and Emerging Technologies group, according to an internal email.
The email came from Swami Sivasubramanian, Amazon’s vice president of agentic AI, and an Amazon spokesperson shared it with Business Insider. GeekWire’s Todd Bishop also reported the memo.
Rezaei will start on Quick, AWS’s AI assistant for workplace tasks, and Kiro, its AI coding tool. “He is a hands-on engineer who is still in the code every day, and he plans to keep it that way here,” Sivasubramanian wrote. His plan for the first few months is to “meet people, learn how things work here, and ship something real.”
His time at Microsoft
Rezaei joined Microsoft in 2006 and held senior technical roles on Power BI, Dynamics 365, Cortana, Bing and Azure Maps before moving to Copilot, GeekWire reported, citing his LinkedIn profile. He became Copilot’s CTO in February and moved to the Microsoft Superintelligence team in June, according to GeekWire, where he was a corporate vice president. Business Insider reported that he most recently trained foundation models there.
In a LinkedIn post, Rezaei wrote that he left Microsoft after 20 years and that it was “where I learned how to build things, how to lead, and how much the people around you matter.” He said more on what’s next would come soon. GeekWire said it had asked Microsoft for comment.
Why Amazon wants him
Sivasubramanian wrote that Kiro’s user count doubled from the first quarter to the second and that monthly AI users for Quick grew fourfold. Those are Amazon’s internal figures, and the memo didn’t give totals.
“Pedram joins at an exciting time for our organization as we continue to build out our technical leadership team to help take on the ambitious work we have planned,” he wrote.
The hire comes as Amazon and Microsoft compete more directly on AI tools for work, GeekWire reported. Microsoft unveiled an all-in-one Copilot app in September, and Amazon made its Quick desktop app generally available that month. Business Insider noted that other agent products, such as OpenAI’s dots and Meta’s Muse, are also gaining users.
The same memo said two longtime AWS engineers, Marvin Theimer and Reto Kramer, have returned to work on neurosymbolic AI and automated reasoning, which Sivasubramanian called “one of our biggest bets for the future.” Both came back from Microsoft, according to GeekWire. Neurosymbolic AI pairs language models with rule-based systems that can check whether an agent is following a company’s policies.
Rezaei is the latest Microsoft executive to move to AWS this year, GeekWire reported. Business Insider noted that Microsoft has seen other senior departures, including AI research leader Peter Lee and Office chief Ryan Roslansky.
Source: Business Insider, “Amazon Hires Former Microsoft Copilot CTO for AI Agent Push”
Additional sources: GeekWire, Todd Bishop, “Amazon hires a veteran Microsoft AI leader to help build its tools for coding and work”
