Microsoft security exec Shawn Bice is returning to Amazon Web Services as VP of AI Services, leading the company’s Automated Reasoning Group as AWS doubles down on making AI agents more reliable.
Bice will report to Swami Sivasubramanian, Amazon’s VP of Agentic AI, according to an internal AWS email Monday afternoon, viewed by GeekWire.
“We are at an inflection point with Agentic AI,” Sivasubramanian wrote in the email, explaining that bringing AI and automated reasoning together is essential to building trustworthy agents.
It’s a full-circle move for Bice. He worked at Microsoft early in his career and spent five years running AWS’s database portfolio before another former AWS leader, Charlie Bell, recruited him back to Microsoft in 2022 to help build the Redmond company’s revamped security organization.
At Microsoft, Bell stepped down from that security leadership role in February to become an individual contributor.
Amazon’s Automated Reasoning Group uses a discipline known as neurosymbolic AI, which combines traditional AI’s pattern-matching abilities with mathematical techniques that can prove whether software is doing what it’s supposed to do.
In the email, Sivasubramanian wrote that bringing automated reasoning and AI together is “the fundamental premise” behind AWS’s investment in the field, calling it critical to building agents that businesses can trust to act on their own.
AWS has been facing questions about the reliability of AI agents in its own operations. In February, Amazon pushed back on a Financial Times report that its Kiro AI coding tool had caused AWS outages, though it acknowledged a limited disruption to a single service after an AI agent was allowed to make changes without human oversight.
At Microsoft, Bice’s role had expanded to Corporate Vice President of Security Platform & AI, overseeing Microsoft Security Copilot, Microsoft Sentinel, and AI security research, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Before that, he spent a year as president of products and technology at Splunk, sandwiched between his two stints at the larger companies.
Bice originally joined Microsoft in 1997 and spent more than 17 years there across two stints, in roles that included managing SQL Server and Azure cloud data services. He left for AWS in 2016, where he ran the database portfolio — including Amazon Aurora, DynamoDB, and RDS — for five years before departing in 2021.
He also serves on the board of WaFd Bank, where he chairs the technology committee.
