“People are rethinking how they build in this unprecedented era of data growth,” Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Andy Jassy said during this week's AWS Summit Online.

Despite that, “there’s still a segment of companies who I think are trying to fight gravity,” he said. “They argue that they can still do the infrastructure less expensively than it can be done in the cloud or they have enough services to allow their organizations to move as quickly as people can in the cloud.”

AWS has conducted thousands of comparisons based on these claims and it has yet to find a company “that can move at the cost structure and the pace of changing their customer experience that you can in AWS and in the cloud,” Jassy said. 

Resistance to the cloud is futile, he argued, but the reasons for hesitation are still abundant. Some enterprises are proud of the infrastructure it has built, there’s the notion of “if it ain’t broke, why fix it,” and many IT professionals have concerns about what the cloud means for their job or scope of responsibilities, according to Jassy. 

“I’ve had a number of CIOs tell me: ‘Look, I know I’m going to have to do a data center refresh shortly, or a tech refresh, and you’re right the cloud is going to allow us to move much more quickly over time but that will be the next person's problem, not mine,’” he said. “At the end of the day, you can not want something to happen all you want but you can’t fight gravity.”

Somewhere in between those groups sits the “toe dippers,” IT professionals that might try to appease others by experimenting with cloud computing but never fully commit and don’t make much progress as a result, Jassy explained. 

“The problem with that is that while all your competitors have really gone all the way in and are moving much more quickly and much more cost effectively, you're still kind of in this experimental phase where you haven't transformed your company,” he said.

Amazon’s heritage as a retailer operating in an extremely low-margin business has benefitted AWS in a way that other cloud providers don’t enjoy, Jassy said in making the case for AWS. “Just look year to date or even more so in the COVID crisis [during] the last eight weeks, the operational performance and availability of AWS is many, many times higher than the next biggest provider — it’s a pretty substantial difference.”

While certain companies have greater challenges than others in moving to the cloud and organizing for rapid development, the AWS CEO does not buy that as an excuse for any company. “I think it’s up to us as leaders and as teams to not accept the world the way it’s been, but to actually change the world,” he said. 

“If you are not moving quickly, you are going to have competitors who are moving quickly and then you're going to find yourself chasing them as opposed to leading,” Jassy said.

People play a major role in equipping enterprises to move quickly, and as such, it’s important to hire builders, people who like to invent, look at broken customer experiences and figure out how to reinvent them, he said. “Every single company in the world can move fast if they’re committed to it.”

Tools like Amazon Connect, which is AWS’ call center service, are gaining considerable traction across a broad array of enterprises, including Capital One, Intuit, John Hancock, Citigroup, Johnson & Johnson, Hilton, and Best Western, Jassy said. 

“If you look at what's happened in the COVID crisis, where so many companies had to have their customer service agents work at home, it’s incredible how many companies have spun up Connect to help them deal with all their calls from customers as times are changing,” he said. “It totally changes what customer service agents can do and where they do it from.”

Many companies are also coming to AWS to explore ways to improve supply chain logistics and manufacturing processes, Jassy added. “I think you’re going to see a huge change in manufacturing industrial companies and what they do in their facilities with their supply chains.”

Finally, Jassy boasted that AWS powers many of the applications “that are allowing us to deal with the crisis,” including streaming platforms like Netflix, Disney+, and Hulu; gaming platforms from Fortnight and PlayStation Now; e-learning platforms from Blackboard and Canvas; and the vast majority of Zoom’s cloud infrastructure. 

Taking a more direct approach to the global pandemic, the company is also putting AWS to use for health screening and the development of vaccines for the virus, and investing in a testing and lab capability for all of the employees in its facilities. 

“As we talked about in our Q1 earnings call, we anticipate spending most if not all the approximately $4 billion of profit we expect to generate in Q2 as a company on the COVID crisis,” the AWS CEO said. 

Amazon has hired more than 175,000 people during the crisis and changed more than 150 policies to help ensure the safety of its employees, largely around the cleansing of facilities, physical distancing, face coverings, and temperature check, he said.