Amazon CTO Werner Vogels says companies should not decide on AI out of fear

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels tells companies not to make AI decisions out of fear, urging them first to define the problem AI would solve and to let engineers and managers learn what the technology can do.

He says companies will not go out of business for not using AI right now, and he cites Amazon's 2004 database outage and the shift to key-value designs such as DynamoDB as lessons in matching tools to actual needs.

Vogels also argues that AI agents need explicit permission limits and clear ownership, and that teams must verify AI-generated code.