OpenAI Hires AWS AI Sales Leader; AI Boom Is ‘So Similar’ To What Cloud Was, He Says

“It’s a little-known fact that OpenAI has over 1 million business customers already and I look forward to helping those customers drive the next wave of innovation, as well as helping bring new customers onto the platform,” said OpenAI’s Scott Rosecrans, who is now AWS’ former vice president of AI sales and strategic pursuits.

One of Amazon Web Services’ top AI sales leaders has left the cloud giant to join red-hot AI startup OpenAI aiming to bring new customers to OpenAI’s platform and “drive the next wave of innovation.”

“What is happening in AI right now is so similar to where cloud was when I joined AWS in 2016 and there is so much growth potential,” said Scott Rosecrans, AWS’ now-former vice president of AI sales and strategic pursuits.

“It’s a little-known fact that OpenAI has over 1 million business customers already and I look forward to helping those customers drive the next wave of innovation, as well as helping bring new customers onto the platform,” Rosecrans said.

[Related: AWS’ Data Center Network Lead Jumps To xAI To Run ML Infrastructure]

Rosecrans left AWS this month and was hired by OpenAI as its new vice president, strategic pursuits.

He said his goal is to help “drive enterprise scale, global expansion and transformative customer relationships” at San Francisco-based OpenAI.

OpenAI’s latest valuation was $500 billion following a secondary share sale in late 2025.

Amazon And OpenAI’s New $38 Billion Deal

Amazon and OpenAI signed a massive $38 billion multi-year deal in late 2025 in which OpenAI uses AWS for its massive AI computing needs, including Nvidia GPUs and Amazon’s own Trainium chips. OpenAI immediately started running large amounts of workloads on AWS’ cloud infrastructure with huge capacity expansions planned over the next several years.

The deal also involves integrating OpenAI’s models into Amazon’s Bedrock platform for AWS customers and potential investments from Amazon into OpenAI.

Additionally, OpenAI’s new advanced open weight models became available in 2025 for AWS customers in Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker AI.

The startup could not be reached for comment by press time on the hiring of Rosecrans.

‘AWS Has The Strongest Set Of Services’

Rosecrans first joined the Seattle-based $132 billion cloud market share leader in 2016 as vice president of strategic pursuits and stayed for over five years.

After a brief stint with financial software firm Stripe, he rejoined AWS in 2022 VP of AI sales and strategic pursuits.

Rosecrans said AWS “was by far the best” company he’s worked for over his 32-year career.

“AWS has the strongest set of services, amazing leadership, and more importantly, a relentless focus on customers that is entirely unmatched in the industry,” he said on LinkedIn. “I am very grateful for my time there and all of the incredible people I was able to work with and learn from.”

AWS currently has an annual run rate of $132 billion with parent company Amazon currently at a $2.54 trillion market cap.