The CEO checkbox

Schwartz’s role at AWS is to work with large customers, to help them with what are usually non-technical challenges. Here are some of his pointers

Transformation

• Digital transformation is about building agility and responsiveness and resilience.

• What you want is the ability to respond to changes in the environment quickly and appropriately.

• The way our customers seem to be defining it, is building agility to be able to respond to whatever happens.

• You do not yet know what it is going to be, but you need the flexibility.

• It is framed as the ability to innovate or disrupt or respond to disruption.

• With digital transformation, the goal is to reduce the risk of trying out innovations.

• Amazon created the idea of chaos engineering, trying to cause failures in components.

Pain points

• CEOs are very much focused on things like innovation, getting the right skills into their organisation, driving change.

• A very common topic of conversation is, do we have the right people to operate in the new ways, and do we have the right culture.

• Cultural change, organisational structure, governance models, investment strategies, change leadership, often get in the way.

• One reason why companies do not innovate as much as they want to is because innovations are new and they have challenges and risks.

Macro environment

• It is not bad news it is just less growth than people were expecting.

• There is a realisation now that things are not going to grow quite as much as expected.

• One of the lessons of the pandemic is you just do not know what the world is going to throw at you next.

• What they really need to do is align their costs with their revenues or their volume of business.

Cloud

• The cloud is a big part of transformation.

• CEOs are not focused on details of cloud architecture or anything like that.

• We believe the cloud plays a really important role in building resilience and agility.

• One of the powerful things about cloud is you can quickly align with whichever direction the economy is going.

But when I talk to executives, I am talking in terms of those business outcomes that they’re looking for. I rarely talk in terms of specific AWS services.

I have a lot of confidence that the cloud will be part of that picture. It usually is part of the underpinnings, especially because digital technology is so important to company strategy these days.

A big concern right now is cost optimisation or cost control. Given the financial situation around the world, a lot of company leaders are talking about how do we make sure we have control of costs.

[BT] How do you address the questions that CEOs may have about AWS offerings, innovation, digital transformation, among other things?

[Schwartz] Our customers at AWS include companies in pretty much every sector of the economy. The cloud underpins a lot of what businesses can do with digital technology these days.

We are constantly innovating and adding new things. We are always listening to customers, and we are driving our roadmap for the services we think they need based on what they tell us they need. About 90% of our roadmap is driven by the things we hear straight from customers. About 10% are the things that, because we know our customers well, we are pretty sure are things they need even if they have not come up with it themselves.

We created serverless computing. That was not really something customers knew they needed, but it has become important now, especially when we talk about cost control. Serverless computing is often one of those things that can help a lot.

Increasingly, goals that we hear from customers are around sustainability and ESG goals. Services like serverless computing, help a lot to manage carbon footprint and reduce carbon footprint.

It is kind of an interesting thing we have noticed that a lot of the things that help control costs in the cloud also help control carbon footprint in the cloud. Things that reduce intensity of computing, also reduce the intensity of carbon emissions.

We are talking to customers and trying to figure out what it is that they need in order to reach their business outcomes. And those are the things that we are building or innovating on behalf of customers.

[BT] Does the C-Suite understand the journey of digital transformation that the organisation has embarked into? Do they understand that they are being accelerated into becoming digital enterprises?

[Schwartz] Digital transformation is about building agility and responsiveness and resilience and some of the things that come with that. One of the lessons of the pandemic is you just do not know what the world is going to throw at you next. It could be a pandemic, it could be the impact of a war, it could be the impact of supply chain disruptions.

There are so many things that can happen, and part of digital transformation, the way we define it, the way our customers seem to be defining it, is building that agility to be able to respond to whatever happens. You do not know yet what it is going to be, but you need the flexibility.

And building that to be able to take advantage of business opportunities that appear, to survive disruption or make it through disruption, also to be resilient in the face of disasters and unexpected. We believe the cloud plays a really important role in building that kind of resilience and agility.

What they really need to do is align their costs with their revenues or their volume of business so that when the economy picks up, they will be able to grow as well. What you want is the ability to respond to changes in the economic environment and other aspects of the environment quickly and appropriately.

There is a realisation now that things are not going to grow quite as much as