Adam Selipsky's exit as Amazon Web Services CEO seemed inevitable to current and former employees who spoke to Business Insider about his departure.
Over the past few months, Selipsky has appeared inconsistently at Weekly Business Review meetings, during which teams provide updates about their performance, a person familiar with the meetings told Business Insider.
"A lot of people were confused about why — the idea that Jassy wouldn't have shown up is just crazy," this person said. "Now it makes sense."
Selipsky's three years as AWS CEO were marked by mixed results.
He steered through some of the cloud business' slowest growth rates, largest layoffs, and biggest challenges in the artificial intelligence space.
The CEO shakeup comes as AWS trails competition in the explosive generative AI market.
Projects delayed and rushed
Amazon's AI products have faced challenges under Selipsky and some of his initiatives haven't "panned out," an employee familiar with the company's product roadmap said.
Amazon's generative AI service Bedrock was delayed after originally being scheduled to launch in the fall of 2022, the person said. Amazon has previously denied the delay.
Meanwhile, Amazon Q, the company's most ambitious generative AI product, launched with little time to test the chatbot properly as the team was under pressure to rush its launch, BI previously reported. Early users have pointed out its shortcomings as an AI chatbot and questioned Amazon's "lack of leadership" in the broader AI space. An employee called the service "underwhelming."
On Tuesday, Amazon announced that Matt Garman, AWS's sales and marketing chief, is replacing Selispky as CEO.
Garman was once considered a frontrunner to replace former AWS CEO Andy Jassy in 2021 when Jassy took over as Amazon's CEO. At the time, insiders told BI that Garman was the right pick for the job because he had a combination of tech-savvy and strong business acumen.
"They're just three years late giving the right person the job honestly," one former executive said.
Selipsky's hiring was somewhat of a shock to many company insiders at the time, who expected an internal hire, even though Selipsky had remained close with Jassy since leaving AWS for the first time in 2016 to run Tableau.
Some insiders referred to Selipsky as "just a sales guy" and "uninspiring," as the cloud leader faced unprecedented competition in generative AI.
Under Selipsky, AWS saw some of its slowest growth rates, as customers cut back on their cloud spending because of the pandemic and an uncertain economy. But in its most recent quarter, Amazon said those "cost-optimization" efforts are largely finished and it expects cloud revenue to bounce back, as AWS grew 17% year over year.
AWS also cut hundreds of jobs in early April, as part of Amazon's broader cost-cutting campaign.