‘It’s going to have an effect on performance’, Amazon Web Service outage has experts worried about the future of AI
When Amazon Web Services experienced an outage last week, businesses around the world were affected. The episode illustrates how dependent we have become on a handful of internet infrastructure providers, but that pales in comparison to what could happen with the rise of AI, CNN experts warn.
It is becoming increasingly clear that we are witnessing the beginning of a rapid transition to AI agents doing work traditionally done by humans. Some 78% of companies were using AI in at least one business function, up from 55% in 2023, according to a survey of 1,500 companies by McKinsey & Company published in March.
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While this shift may be a good thing for businesses, it will also make us more dependent on cloud-based services. Instead of humans diagnosing patients in healthcare settings or facilitating financial transactions, we appear to be heading toward a possible world where AI agents, powered by the cloud, take care of these tasks.
“If there’s an outage and you’re relying on AI to make your decisions and you can’t access it, that’s going to have an effect on performance,” Tim DeStefano, a research associate professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, told CNN. “Cloud computing represents a technological prerequisite for the use of AI.”
Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) held nearly 38% of the cloud computing market in 2024, according to a report from research and advisory firm Gartner (NYSE:IT). Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), with 24% of the market, and Google with 9%, complete the top three. This consolidation of internet infrastructure explains how a simple outage like last week can have such massive effects.
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Jacob Bourne, technology analyst at Emarketer, says these three companies are also the leading cloud computing providers for AI applications. Despite billions of dollars being invested in data centers to meet the growing demand for AI power, it is questionable whether or not this will be enough.
“[AI usage] That’s the dream, but if something goes wrong and you don’t have that human intelligence to match, then we hand all these critical tasks over to AI and put a lot of trust in the technology,” Bourne told CNN.
