Big cloud computing providers have said customers are clamoring for their artificial intelligence services, which help companies with everything from translating text into speech to automatically recognizing images to fraud detection. Just this week, an investment analyst raised his share price target for Amazon, the dominant player in cloud computing, for that very reason.  

But for Amazon Web Services, the internet retailer’s cloud division, AI isn’t a big business yet, The Information has learned. Last year, one prominent AI service from AWS known as SageMaker generated only around $11 million in sales to customers in the commercial sector, according to two people with knowledge of the business. That represented less than 0.05% of the $25.66 billion in total AWS revenue for 2018. Sales from other, more specialized AI services from AWS were even smaller.