Amazon is enhancing its AI capabilities by hiring top talent from AI agent startup Adept and licensing its technology. David Luan — Adept co-founder and CEO — will lead Amazon’s “AGI Autonomy” division, reporting to Rohit Prasad, as confirmed by Amazon and first reported by Geekwire.

Prasad, Amazon’s senior vice president and head scientist for the artificial general intelligence unit, announced in a Friday memo that the company has hired Adept co-founder and CEO David Luan along with “a few other deeply talented team members to our AGI team.”

Facing competition from Microsoft and Google, Amazon’s cloud unit, viewed as lagging, is boosting its AI services. Amazon has invested in OpenAI competitor Anthropic and plans a generative AI-enhanced Alexa.

In the industry talent war, Microsoft recently hired Mustafa Suleyman and top executives from Inflection AI, drawing FTC scrutiny.

Founded in 2022 by ex-OpenAI and Google engineers, Adept quickly gained backing and a $1 billion valuation. Adept’s AI agents perform complex tasks autonomously. Amazon will license Adept’s technology to accelerate its digital agents’ roadmap. Adept will continue as a standalone company.

“David and his team’s expertise in training state-of-the-art multimodal foundational models and building real-world digital agents aligns with our vision to delight consumer and enterprise customers with practical AI solutions,” Prasad said.