The news
Amazon (AMZN) has hired Pedram Rezaei, a nearly 20-year Microsoft (MSFT) veteran and former chief technology officer of Copilot, to work on its AI tools for coding and office work. He started at Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday, October 5, 2026, GeekWire reported.
Rezaei joins as a distinguished engineer, a senior technical title, in the AWS Agentic AI and Emerging Technologies organization led by Swami Sivasubramanian. Sivasubramanian announced the hire in a memo to his team on October 5, according to GeekWire.
According to the memo as reported by GeekWire, Rezaei will work first on Kiro, the AWS coding tool, and Quick, Amazon's AI assistant for workplace tasks. Sivasubramanian described him as a hands-on engineer "still in the code every day" and said Rezaei's plan for his first months is to meet people, learn how AWS works and ship a working product.
At Microsoft, Rezaei was most recently a corporate vice president on the Microsoft Superintelligence team, where the memo said he was working on training foundation models, the large general-purpose models behind AI assistants. He joined Microsoft in 2006 and held senior technical roles on Power BI, Dynamics 365, Cortana, Bing and Azure Maps before moving to Copilot, GeekWire reported, citing his LinkedIn profile. The profile says he became Copilot's CTO in February and moved to the Superintelligence team in June.
The memo also gave growth figures for both products: Kiro's user count doubled from the first quarter to the second, and monthly AI users for Quick grew fourfold. GeekWire's report did not include absolute user numbers.
Rezaei is the latest Microsoft executive to move to AWS in 2026, GeekWire said. Shawn Bice returned to AWS in May from a security role at Microsoft to lead its Automated Reasoning Group. In the same memo, Sivasubramanian said longtime AWS engineers Marvin Theimer and Reto Kramer have returned to work on neurosymbolic AI and automated reasoning; both came back from Microsoft, according to their LinkedIn profiles as cited by GeekWire.
The numbers
- Rezaei's time at Microsoft
- Nearly 20 years (joined 2006)
- Kiro user count, Q1 to Q2
- Doubled (AWS memo)
- Quick monthly AI users, Q1 to Q2
- Grew fourfold (AWS memo)
- Amazon Quick paid plans (list price)
- $20 to $100 per user per month, plus an infrastructure fee on some plans
Why CEOs should care
For engineering leaders choosing AI coding tools, the hire is a signal that AWS is putting senior talent behind Kiro, its development platform with an editor, command-line tool and agents built around what AWS calls spec-driven development: turning a prompt into written requirements and a design before code is generated. Teams standardizing on one coding assistant should run a short pilot of more than one product, compare output quality on their own code, and check how each vendor's credit-based pricing behaves at scale.
For CIOs and CFOs weighing workplace assistants, Quick competes with Microsoft's Copilot for the same budget. Amazon lists Quick from free for individuals to paid plans of $20 to $100 per user per month, some with an added infrastructure fee, with connectors to apps such as Salesforce, Slack, Jira and QuickBooks. Companies facing a Copilot renewal can use a Quick trial as a benchmark, and should ask both vendors where conversation data is stored and which admin controls come with each tier.
For CHROs and CTOs, the pattern matters as much as the person. Senior AI engineers are moving between the biggest cloud providers, and a builder of one company's assistant now works on a rival's. Expect sharper competition for people with experience training foundation models, and review retention plans for your own senior AI staff.
The bigger picture
The move lands days after a major change at the top of Microsoft's productivity business. On October 1, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that Ryan Roslansky, executive vice president of LinkedIn and Microsoft 365, will leave at the end of 2026, and split his reporting lines among other executives. Nadella's message described Microsoft's next phase of work software as Office and Copilot built into each other.
AWS is chasing the same customers with Kiro and Quick. Kiro lets users choose among AI models, including Anthropic's Claude models, and Quick bundles agents for research, business insights and task automation in one assistant that connects to other business apps, according to AWS's product pages.
What’s next
Watch for the first Kiro and Quick releases that carry Rezaei's work, and for whether AWS discloses absolute user numbers for either product. On the Microsoft side, the departures of Roslansky and Rezaei put attention on who leads Copilot engineering and whether more senior staff follow them out.
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