Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
On Amazon Web Services experienced a failure Last week, businesses around the world were affected. The episode highlighted how dependent we have 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 is becoming increasingly clear that we are witnessing a rapid shift toward AI agents doing work that has traditionally been done by humans. According to a study, around 78% of companies use AI in at least one business function, up from 55% in 2023 Opinion poll of 1,500 companies from McKinsey & Company, published in March.
Don’t miss:
While this shift may be a good thing for businesses, it will also make us rely more heavily on cloud-based services. Instead of humans diagnosing patients or facilitating financial transactions in healthcare, we appear to be moving toward a possible world in which AI agents, supported by the cloud, take over these tasks.
“If there’s an outage and you’re relying on AI to make your decisions and you don’t have access to it, that impacts performance,” Tim DeStefano, associate research professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, told CNN. “Cloud computing represents a technological prerequisite for the use of 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 a market share of 24% and Google with 9% completed the top three. This consolidation of Internet infrastructure explains why a single outage like the one last week can have such a massive impact.
Trending: Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund Just Backed This Farmland Manager – And accredited investors can join the same fund
Jacob Bourne, technology analyst at Emarketer, says these three companies are also the best-known cloud computing providers for AI applications. Despite the billions of dollars they have invested in data centers to meet the growing need for AI power, the question remains whether or not it will be enough.
“(Using AI) is the dream, but when something goes wrong and you don’t have the human intelligence that’s up to par, then we really shift all of those critical tasks to AI and put a lot of trust in the technology,” Bourne told CNN.