Amazon seeks more grassroots adoption of its AI products, relying less on salespeople (www.businessinsider.com)

Amazon Web Services is pushing to grow adoption of its AI apps organically rather than through heavy-handed sales efforts, after internal documents (reported by Business Insider) showed its coding assistant, Q Developer, trails rivals like Cursor and Windsurf in grassroots uptake. AWS has launched Kiro — debuted in July — to attract self-serve developers, and plans to move parts of its Q Business chatbot to a new internal “Quick” agentic platform to shorten sales cycles and encourage user-led adoption. AWS says Q Developer usage has risen “9-fold per person” this year, but still generates only a fraction of the revenue of competitors; users of Kiro have asked for stronger controls, prompting a push for “enterprise-ready” features. This shift matters because AI tooling today often spreads bottom-up: viral, user-driven growth (ChatGPT, Cursor) can outpace traditional top-down enterprise sales. AWS’s strength remains infrastructure (SageMaker, Bedrock, Connect), but a weaker application layer could be a strategic vulnerability versus Microsoft and Google, according to analysts and some AWS staff. Technically, AWS is betting that a self-serve-friendly coding assistant plus an agentic backend (Quick) and added enterprise controls will increase virality and shorten procurement paths—while acknowledging that top-down sales still matter in regulated settings. The outcome will influence how cloud incumbents compete on developer mindshare versus pure enterprise deals.