AWS AI Chief Matt Wood explains to CRN why AWS has the best channel partner strategy and opportunity for partners in the AI era, as well as his company’s ‘secret sauce.’
When asked why channel partners should choose Amazon Web Services versus competitors like Google and Microsoft in the AI era, AWS’ AI leader Matt Wood didn’t hesitate.
“AWS has, by far, the broadest set of AI capabilities—whether you are training a model, fine-tuning a model, whether you are running inference, whether you are building and running agents,” said Wood, AWS’ chief AI and technology officer.
“We have, by far, the largest set of models available compared to anybody. And all of that happens inside a robust, secure environment,” he told CRN.
Wood also said AWS has some AI “special sauce” for channel partners that isn’t available anywhere else, “in combining AI systems with verification and formal reasoning systems, which allows you to bring consistency and quality and explainability to AI systems for building guardrails or core production workloads that just don’t exist anywhere else.”
[Related: Sentinel CTO On AI Driving Security Sales, VMware And AWS Marketplace]
The Seattle-based $169 billion cloud and AI provider also has “the largest number of customers that are already running on AWS” versus the competition.
AWS is the leader in cloud infrastructure services with a global market share of 28 percent, followed by Microsoft at 20 percent share, then Google at 15 percent share.
“And the ability to be able to just quickly, easily turn on a context layer, start building an agent that runs inside AWS against your existing applications and existing data—is remarkably compelling for a very, very large number of customers,” Wood said.
Partners Make $7 For Every $1 Of AWS Sold
Another key reason why solution providers should bet on AWS versus the competition is AWS partners’ ability to make up to a 7X multiplier for each AI sale.
“The opportunity associated to artificial intelligence and AWS for our partners is also extremely large. So what we found in a recent study was that there’s actually a 7X multiplier on AWS spend, which is available for our partners,” said Wood.
“So for every $1 that a partner charges for AWS services, they earn $7 for themselves. And that multiplier just doesn’t exist anywhere else,” Wood said.
“And it is because of the range, breadth and depth of capabilities that we offer on AI at AWS,” he added.
Partner Sees Over 60 Percent AWS Growth
Intuitive.ai is a top cloud and AI solution provider whose AWS business has skyrocketed more than 60 percent in 2026 so far.
“Where AWS excels the most is their partner ecosystem and the partner support model,” said Inituitive.AI CEO and founder Jay Modh.
“Today, it is very easy and comfortable for me to reach out to AWS leadership, seek their support on a strategic initiative, add a customer—and without bias—they would be happy to collaborate, partner, co-invest with us, and co-sell with us to drive significant adoption and measurable outcomes,” Modh said.
The fast-growing Edison, N.J.-based AWS Premier partner said AWS’ channel partner strategy and programs are “its biggest advantage” when it comes to AI revenue growth.
“There’s times that they actually push the envelope on how much they support us and the customer. So that whole partner ecosystem and the partner support model AWS has created, that is unlike any other company,” said Modh.
CEO Touts AWS AI R&D And Data Prowess
Modh is a longtime IT leader with decades of executive leadership and investing history.
“We were the early investors in OpenAI, Databricks, Anthropic. Way back in 2018 with DataBricks, OpenAI in 2021, Anthropic in 2022. All of this adoption we brought up front to our customers,” said Modh.
With such a keen IT foresight, Modh said AWS has a leg up on the AI competition when it comes to investments and data.
“Like how Tesla has lot of data that others cannot catch up to, AWS has that first-to-market advantage for AI adoption and for the amount of data they have. A lot of early enterprises went full on with AWS,” he said.
“And this AI war is going to be led by a company that has the highest amount of data,” he said.
‘AWS Edge’ In The Market
Another reason why Intuitive.ai is placing much of its AI bets on AWS is the company’s massive AI investment, which includes hundreds of billions in new AI infrastructure and partnerships with the likes of AI companies like Anthropic.
“To sum it up, AWS’ edge is: largest enterprise adoption and the amount of data they have for these enterprises that makes them an obvious landing pad for AI adoption.”
“Then their partner ecosystem, partner support, and the co-sell, co-invest momentum model,” he said. “And the funding mechanism that is unlike anyone else. Those are the biggest drivers that everybody is drawn to AWS. “
For Q2 2026, AWS generated $42.2 billion in total revenue, representing an increase of 37 percent year over year. This marked AWS’ highest growth rate in 18 quarters.
Amazon’s cloud unit now has a $169 billion annual run rate.
