Mark Relph

Managing Director, Data & AI Partner GTM @ AWS | Agentic AI, Foundation Models, Partner Ecosystems | Qlik AI Council

Microsoftex-Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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The companies winning at AI have something in common. It isn't the best models or the biggest budgets.

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It's the bridges they build between innovation and implementation. I've had a front-row seat to that pattern across 25+ years in technology. At AWS, I've been part of launching 32 services from inception to scale, including Lambda, IoT, and Amazon Bedrock. Lambda sparked the serverless movement and grew into a billion-dollar business. Bedrock became the fastest-growing service in AWS history. Each launch reinforced the same truth: technology alone doesn't change how businesses operate. The hard part is turning capability into business I came into this from the technical side. I started in solutions architecture and pre-sales engineering, spent years in developer relations, and I still work directly with service engineering teams on architecture and roadmap. You can't help someone deploy what you don't Before AWS, I spent 16 years at Microsoft, leading platform strategy and then Venture Capital engagement, plus a year independent advising early-stage startups. Big company scale and startup scrappiness aren't opposites. The best GTM thinking borrows from Today I lead AWS's worldwide partner strategy for Data and AI. We bring together global SIs like Accenture and Deloitte, ISVs like Databricks, Snowflake, and Qlik, frontier model providers like Anthropic and OpenAI, and startups building the next generation of AI Most of our energy now goes to agentic AI, the shift from systems that generate content to systems that plan, decide, and execute work. We built the partner ecosystems behind Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and Amazon Quick Suite, and launched the AWS Agentic AI Competency to give partners a path to production agents. The mission is unchanged: make partners the force multiplier for enterprise AI I also sit on Qlik's AI Council on responsible enterprise AI deployment, alongside Dr. Rumman Chowdhury, Professor Michael Bronstein, Nina Schick, and Kelly Forbes. What I care about: seeing a foundation model become something that changes how a business actually operates. That's where technology becomes business When I'm not connecting partners in AI, I'm wake surfing on Lake Washington, carving powder on my snowboard, or coaching youth hockey with the Jr. Kraken. Helping young players develop on and off the ice is one of the most rewarding things I do. And yes, I still play too. More enthusiasm than skill. I'm Canadian. It's required.