Matt Wood, who spent more than 14 years helping to lead Amazon Web Services’ artificial intelligence and machine learning initiatives before leaving the company in 2024, is returning to the company in a newly created role as chief AI and technology officer.
Wood had spent the past 19 months as chief technology and innovation officer at PwC, where he led AI strategy and implementation for the professional services firm’s enterprise clients.
His return to AWS was announced internally Monday morning by Julia White, the AWS chief marketing officer, in a memo viewed by GeekWire. Wood will report directly to White, according to the memo, reflecting the customer-facing nature of the role.
“In this role, Matt will be both deeply engaged with our AWS services innovation teams and work directly with customers to help them realize the full value from AWS AI and cloud services,” White wrote in the memo. Wood will also relay customer and developer needs back to AWS product teams and represent the company at industry events.
White cited Wood’s PwC tenure in the memo as a key part of what he brings back to AWS. She added that his “combination of deep technical knowledge and hands-on enterprise experience” will help customers move from AI experimentation to production.
In his previous tenure, Wood was AWS vice president of AI, focused on building and scaling the company’s AI and machine learning business, including services such as Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Bedrock, and Amazon Q.
In a comment that accompanied the internal memo, Wood said he was excited to return to AWS and help do for AI what the company did for cloud computing: making powerful technology broadly accessible to anyone building with it.
The hire is the latest reshuffling of Amazon’s AI leadership ranks.
- Rohit Prasad, who led Amazon’s artificial general intelligence team and oversaw development of the company’s Nova models, departed at the end of 2025 after 12 years.
- David Luan, who ran Amazon’s AGI Lab in San Francisco, left earlier this year.
At the same time, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy named longtime AWS executive Peter DeSantis to lead a reorganized division combining AI models, custom silicon, and quantum computing.
AWS growth accelerated to 28% in the first quarter, its fastest pace in nearly four years, and the company disclosed a revenue backlog of $364 billion. Amazon plans to spend about $200 billion in capital expenditures this year, most of it on AI infrastructure.
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