E-commerce giant Amazon (AMZN) has added computer scientist and artificial intelligence (A.I.) expert Andrew Ng to its board of directors.
Ng previously led A.I. projects at Google parent company Alphabet (GOOG/GOOGL) and China’s Baidu (BIDU).
He is also currently an adjunct professor at Stanford University and runs an A.I. venture studio.
The appointment of Andrew Ng to Amazon’s board comes as the company’s cloud unit faces pressure from Microsoft’s competing Azure product, and as the race to develop generative A.I. assistants and other technologies heats up.
The appointment of Ng also comes amid continuing job cuts at Amazon, which has seen its spending on enterprise cloud and e-commerce sales decline due to inflation and interest rates.
Since the start of this year, Amazon has laid off hundreds of employees in divisions such as Amazon Web Services, Prime Video, and its healthcare unit.
The stock of Amazon has increased 93% over the last 12 months and currently trades at $189.05 U.S. per share.