Raejeanne Skillern, a former executive at Flex and Intel, joined Amazon Web Services as its new chief marketing officer and vice president, GeekWire has learned.
AWS announced Skillern’s role internally Tuesday. Amazon confirmed her appointment.
Skillern spent more than a decade at Intel, most recently as vice president of the chip giant’s cloud service provider business. She joined manufacturing giant Flex in 2019 and led its Communications and Enterprise Compute group.
Skillern replaces Rachel Thornton, who left in September of last year and is now CMO of Fivetran.
Skillern will report to Matt Garman, senior vice president and sales chief at AWS.
“In her new role, she will play a pivotal part in driving AWS’s growth, ensuring a customer-centric approach, while also continuing to build and cultivate a high-performing, multi-disciplinary marketing team,” Garman wrote in a memo to AWS employees Tuesday.
Skillern will face challenges with the perception that Amazon is behind cloud rivals Microsoft and Google in the race to capitalize on breakthroughs in large language models and emerging forms of artificial intelligence, such as generative AI.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy in April dedicated a chunk of his annual letter to shareholders planting the company’s flag in generative AI, and making the case that Amazon actually has a longstanding beachhead in this realm through its investments in machine learning.
Last month AWS said it would invest $100 million in a new initiative to connect its machine learning and artificial intelligence experts with customers and partners to encourage and accelerate the development of generative AI applications and products on the company’s widely used cloud platform.
Skillern is based in the Portland, Ore., region. She joined the board of Lattice Semiconductor last year.
