'That's Going To Have An Effect On Performance,' Amazon Web Service Outage Has Experts Worried About AI-Reliant Future
When Amazon Web Services experienced an outage last week, companies across the globe were affected. The episode illustrated how reliant we've become on a handful of internet infrastructure providers, but pales in comparison to what could happen with the rise of AI, experts warn CNN.
It's become increasingly clear that we are witnessing the onset of a rapid shift towards AI agents doing work that has traditionally been handled 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 firms 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 reliant on cloud-based services. Instead of humans diagnosing patients in health settings or facilitating financial transactions, we appear to be heading towards a possible world where AI agents, powered by the cloud, are handling those tasks.
"If there's an outage and you rely on AI to make your decisions and you can't access it, that's going to have an effect on performance," Georgetown University McDonough School of Business Associate Research Professor Tim DeStefano told CNN. "Cloud computing represents a technological prerequisite for using 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 at 9%, rounded out the top three. This consolidation of internet infrastructure explains how a single outage like last week's can have such massive effects.
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Jacob Bourne, a technology analyst at Emarketer, says that these three companies are also the most prominent cloud computing providers for AI applications. Despite the billions of dollars they have invested in data centers to fulfill the growing demand for AI power, there remains some question as to whether or not it will be enough.
"[AI usage] is the dream, but if something goes wrong and you don't have that human intelligence that's up to speed, then we're really offloading all of these critical tasks to AI and putting a lot of trust in the technology," Bourne told CNN.
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