For companies working out how to use artificial intelligence, the conversation is shifting from improving existing work to rethinking what the business can do. That is the view of John Felton, senior vice president and chief financial officer of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon's cloud computing and AI platform, who discussed the transition in an interview with Fortune.

Felton speaks regularly with AWS customers, including fellow CFOs, and said their AI adoption remains uneven. Many are still early in broader cloud and IT modernization efforts, a prerequisite for deploying AI at scale.

"I think in general, I would say it feels early across the board," Felton said. "It's unbelievable the pace of change, how fast things are moving. I do think every company is in a different stage of it. I think everyone is still early."

His comments place him at an interesting vantage point as AI drives a significant new investment cycle. Felton also noted that customer AI discussions roughly two years ago centered largely on productivity and cutting costs. That focus is changing.

"There really is a lot more focus on: how do I use AI for new revenue products, for new customer experiences?" he said.

The perspective carries particular weight given the scale of the business Felton oversees. AWS is now a $169 billion annualized business. Felton has spent more than 20 years at Amazon and previously led the company's worldwide operations before becoming AWS finance chief in 2024, reporting to Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky. That scale also gives AWS's internal experiments added visibility, since the platform Felton helps run is the same cloud and AI foundation its customers are working to build their own AI efforts on.

According to Felton, the bigger shift is from adding AI to an existing process to rethinking the process itself. What impresses him is seeing companies move toward an "AI first mindset," using AI to reconsider what the business should be in the first place.

"That is where a bunch of customers, including ourselves, really see a lot more value," Felton said.

Inside AWS's finance organization, Felton is encouraging employees to take part in that transformation rather than wait for instructions on how to use AI. His guidance is straightforward: "Use AI every day."

Rather than dictate which tasks employees should tackle or which tools they should use, Felton wants them to identify opportunities themselves, on the grounds that they understand their work better than he does. He tracks whether employees are following through, although he did not detail those metrics.

One example comes from AWS's pricing team. Employees had relied on a complicated Excel model spanning 18 tabs to evaluate customer deals. The team converted it into a chatbot interface that lets users explore scenarios through natural-language questions. They can ask what happens if a price falls 20%, how different payment terms affect a deal, or where the break-even point lies. Employees who prefer the spreadsheet can still export the model back to Excel. The significance is not simply that AI made an existing tool easier to use; it changed how employees interact with the underlying analysis.

Another team built an AI agent to compare payment terms in customer contracts with those recorded in AWS's payment system. Previously, employees checked a sample of contracts. The agent allows the team to check all of them.

"Let's not just do a sample size, let's do all of it," Felton said, describing the team's approach.

The two examples illustrate the broader shift Felton sees in corporate AI strategies: using the technology not only to make existing work faster, but to expand what the organization can do.

Felton also uses the technology himself. He relies on Amazon Quick, an AI assistant for work, including to query supporting materials prepared for board meetings and locate answers in the underlying files. He sees that kind of everyday experimentation as important for CFOs figuring out where AI fits. How AWS measures that internal follow-through, and whether customers' conversations keep shifting from cost cuts toward new revenue, are the developments to watch as the transition he describes unfolds.

Reporting by Sheryl Estrada (Sheryl.Estrada@fortune.com). This story was originally featured on Fortune.