Amazon and Google look to hook enterprise AI buyers with new tools

While OpenAI has been making headlines with a constant stream of new partnerships, massive data center and chip deals, and a steady flow of feature enhancements, many large organizations may still lean toward established vendors like Amazon or Google for their agentic AI solutions.

Last week, each company introduced an enterprise-focused tool with Amazon releasing Quick Suite and Google announcing Gemini Enterprise. Both are a reminder for enterprise tech buyers that OpenAI isn’t the only game in town, even if their persistent news bombardment would suggest otherwise.

Both offer pre-built agents that connect to business systems like Salesforce or SAP to answer questions and complete tasks. The idea with these suites is to be able to tackle the same kinds of tasks as the OpenAI Apps SDK, announced last week, which lets companies connect to third-party enterprise applications inside ChatGPT. 

David Linthicum, former chief of cloud strategy at Deloitte and a long-time consultant, says that while the two offerings are similar, there are still differences. For instance, Google’s offering is closely tied to Google Workspace, and could compete more with Microsoft Copilot than ChatGPT’s enterprise offerings given how closely they are tied to Google’s productivity tools suite.

“Gemini for Enterprise stands out for its integration of advanced AI into Google Workspace, prioritizing security, compliance and centralized administrative controls,” Linthicum told FastForward. Meanwhile, Amazon is focused more on managing and integrating with Amazon infrastructure. “Amazon focuses on modularity, infrastructure-first tools and deep integration across the AWS ecosystem, which is a strong story. The emphasis here is on flexibility,” he said.

He believes that this is indeed a reaction to OpenAI’s growing power in the marketplace. “OpenAI set the new standard for generative AI utility and pace of innovation. Google and AWS are both racing to catch up in mindshare,” he said. But he adds that doesn’t mean they are simply copying OpenAI. “Instead they are each leveraging their unique strengths in infrastructure, global reach and enterprise trust.”

Still, OpenAI’s technical leadership doesn’t automatically translate into enterprise readiness, an area where the traditional cloud providers still hold an advantage. A big question is whether OpenAI is truly enterprise-grade, and Linthicum says while they are making progress, they haven’t caught up to the hyperscalers like Amazon and Google quite yet when it comes to things like data residency, support of SLAs, strict governance and integration with legacy systems. 

“OpenAI still trails the hyperscalers, at least when not directly connected with Microsoft. It’s a fantastic platform for innovation, but most risk-averse large enterprises will still default to Google or AWS for core, mission-critical workloads, at least for the time being,” he said.