Speaker 1: Andy Jassey's plan to launch Amazon into the AI age.
Speaker 1: Jasse was once Jeff Bezos's deputy and the head of
Speaker 1: Amazon's cloud computing arm. Five years into his tenure as CEO,
Speaker 1: he's killing projects, cutting staff, pleasing Wall Street, and steering
Speaker 1: the Everything Store through its greatest challenge yet by Bradstone
Speaker 1: and Matt Day read aloud by Mark Bleidorf. Thirteen miles
Speaker 1: north of Jackson, Mississippi, passed the self storage facilities, a
Speaker 1: Nissan factory, and a Coca Cola bottling plant. Five enormous
Speaker 1: rectangular buildings rise from the state's mineral rich red clay.
Speaker 1: A few years ago, this was rolling Pine forest, earmarked
Speaker 1: for development by the local planning authority. Now it's part
Speaker 1: of a twenty five billion dollar cluster of state of
Speaker 1: the art data centers. The company behind this mammoth undertaking
Speaker 1: once popularized the act of buying stuff online and later
Speaker 1: the corporate custom of running computer applications in the cloud.
Speaker 1: Amazon on a tour of the site in March. Rich Lebron,
Speaker 1: a former US Navy captain who now runs Amazon's campaign
Speaker 1: to stand up a fleet of data centers in the state,
Speaker 1: gestures passed the wire fence that cordons off of bustling
Speaker 1: construction zone that wasn't there last week, he chuckles, pointing
Speaker 1: at one of a dozen new steel structures planned for
Speaker 1: the site, each of which costs roughly one billion dollars.
Speaker 1: Inside one of them, on the other side of steel
Speaker 1: fire doors that remind employees to leave behind their cell
Speaker 1: phones and smart watches is the reason for that massive expense.
Speaker 1: There are hundreds of black cabinets, each more than seven
Speaker 1: feet high, filled with pizza box sized trays of AI accelerators,
Speaker 1: memory chips, and batteries, all connected by color coded power
Speaker 1: and networking cables and cooled by industrial fans that expel
Speaker 1: the heat generated by quintillions of math calculations each hour.
Speaker 1: The data center was constructed for Anthropic, maker of Claud,
Speaker 1: the popular chatbot. About three thousand construction workers toil here,
Speaker 1: and they're generally in awe of the project. They're a
Speaker 1: bit fuzzier on the exact name of the guy who
Speaker 1: commissioned and financed it, though on the tour a guide
Speaker 1: refers to him as Andy Jazzy. This July will mark
Speaker 1: five years since Andy Jase took over the chief executive
Speaker 1: officer role. From Amazon's founder at the corporate offices in Seattle.
Speaker 1: The workforce has grown accustomed to his brand of rigorous
Speaker 1: oversight and ongoing exhortations to act as if they were
Speaker 1: at Jeff Bezos's startup, not a two point nine trillion
Speaker 1: dollar behemoth. He recently placed a series of staggeringly expensive
Speaker 1: bets on artificial intelligence, audacious even by the standards of
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley's ongoing trillion dollar AI bacchanalia. In February, he
Speaker 1: agreed to invest as much as fifty billion dollars in
Speaker 1: Open AI, in a deal that commits the rising startup
Speaker 1: to relying in part on Amazon's data centers and custom
Speaker 1: designed microchips. Then in April, he expanded a similar partnership
Speaker 1: with its arch rival Anthropic, a thirteen billion dollar investment
Speaker 1: with an option for an additional twenty billion dollars. To
Speaker 1: Jasse's critics that spending was the price of Amazon's late
Speaker 1: jump into the current AI wave, he wasn't bluffing, though.
Speaker 1: Jasse spooked investors by vowing to spend two hundred billion
Speaker 1: dollars this year on big ticket items, including warehouse robots,
Speaker 1: a far out effort to launch satellites into space, and
Speaker 1: in particular more AI data centers, AI chips, and networking equipment.
Speaker 1: I don't think the world has ever seen a technology
Speaker 1: get this much adoption and grow this quickly, at least
Speaker 1: in my lifetime, Jesse tells Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Jase runs the
Speaker 1: fifth largest company in the world by market value. He
Speaker 1: takes pains earnestly and often awkwardly to project an everyman image,
Speaker 1: in part by constantly advertising his lifelong passion for music
Speaker 1: and sports in the ante room to the executive suite.
Speaker 1: In Amazon's Day one headquarters. On a rainy morning in April,
Speaker 1: the Who's Tommy plays on a turntable. On the wall
Speaker 1: is a display of album covers, Ramon's Pink Floyd and
Speaker 1: baseball caps Seattle Kraken New York Giants. He also studiously
Speaker 1: strives to embody one of Amazon's sixteen leadership principles, frugality,
Speaker 1: as if to compensate for Bezos's public evolution into an
Speaker 1: icon of over indulgence. Jasse drives himself to work in
Speaker 1: a ninety eight jeep Cherokee, even though he imagines the
Speaker 1: airbags might pulverize him if they ever deployed. His favorite
Speaker 1: beer is Manny's, a Seattle microbrew and fixture at the
Speaker 1: city's sports bars, and dives to his BusinessWeek photo shoot.
Speaker 1: He wears what he calls his eight minute Blazer, which
Speaker 1: he once bought in a hurry for a customer meeting.
Speaker 1: He's customer obsessed, product obsessed, and frankly Amazon obsessed, says
Speaker 1: his Harvard classmate Gina Raimondo, the former US Secretary of Commerce.
Speaker 1: It's really the only place he's ever worked the The
Speaker 1: company is much different from the online bookseller Jasse joined
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety seven. Amazon today is a corporate urducan
Speaker 1: an advertising, business, and logistics company stuffed inside an e
Speaker 1: commerce marketplace, trust to a cloud computing powerhouse, and garnished
Speaker 1: with Alexa, wholefoods market and Prime video. The behemoth infuriates critics,
Speaker 1: who lambased its rough treatment of drivers and warehouse workers
Speaker 1: and its willingness to bully rivals. On the other hand,
Speaker 1: ordering from Amazon and seeing a cardboard box sitting on
Speaker 1: your doorstep the next day is one of the few
Speaker 1: reliable luxuries of modern life, made possible only because of
Speaker 1: the company's ruthless ability to root out inefficiencies, adopt cutting
Speaker 1: edge robotics, and hide all the messiness from our delicate eyes.
Speaker 1: Jasse took over in mid twenty twenty one and had
Speaker 1: to correct course from some of the excesses of the
Speaker 1: late Bezos era, including a spurt of over hiring to
Speaker 1: meet pandemic demand. He laid off roughly sixty thousand corporate
Speaker 1: personnel employees back to the office and shuttered dozens of projects,
Speaker 1: such as the cashierless go stores, Amazon Fresh supermarkets, and
Speaker 1: a telehealth service. Employees grumbled, but his personal style contrasted
Speaker 1: favorably with his former bosses. He was ever present, probing,
Speaker 1: but never argumentative. Jasse for years has urged colleagues to
Speaker 1: not be afraid to ask dumb questions. He also has
Speaker 1: the agreeable habit of thanking everyone at the beginning and
Speaker 1: end of meetings and sending holiday cards to his senior execs.
Speaker 1: Friends vow that it's all authentic and not at all
Speaker 1: humility theater for a leery public that's become profoundly skeptical
Speaker 1: of technology overlords. Then came the age of generative AI,
Speaker 1: inaugurated by Open AI's chat GPT in late twenty twenty two,
Speaker 1: which posed perhaps the first existential challenge to Jasse's own
Speaker 1: baby and Amazon's profit engine, Amazon Web Services. With AWS,
Speaker 1: Amazon invented cloud computing and went on to build a
Speaker 1: client list that included the biggest names in corporate America.
Speaker 1: It remains the market leader, though Microsoft and Alphabet have
Speaker 1: collectively booked six hundred billion dollars more in future business
Speaker 1: than Amazon. Since chat GPT came on the scene. Would
Speaker 1: companies and governments move their data off Amazon servers to
Speaker 1: access the newest large language models. Would shoppers, for that matter,
Speaker 1: start browsing and buying with knowledgeable chatbots such as chat
Speaker 1: GBT and Google's Gemini instead of endearing the ad riddled
Speaker 1: search results on Amazon dot Com. The answers to those questions,
Speaker 1: and how Jasse navigates the AI era will matter more
Speaker 1: than anything else in determining whether Amazon continues to thrive
Speaker 1: in its fourth decade and how posterity comes to view
Speaker 1: Bezos's successor. Some of Jasse's moves have seemed contrarian. While
Speaker 1: the world swooned over CHATGPT, Amazon executives told anyone who
Speaker 1: would listen that the market would be bigger than any
Speaker 1: one chatbot. Jase cozied up to Anthropic, getting Amazon corporate
Speaker 1: customers access to Claude, and buying time for Amazon to
Speaker 1: develop its own alternative. He decided that Amazon should be
Speaker 1: of all crazy things, the Amazon of AI. Then assured investors, employees,
Speaker 1: and the public that resisting the coming changes wrought by
Speaker 1: AI would be feudile. I can understand how when there's
Speaker 1: the potential for this much change it can make some
Speaker 1: people nervous. I just happen to think it's going to
Speaker 1: make so many things better. He says. You can choose
Speaker 1: to howl at the wind, but AI is not going away.
Speaker 1: Jase never intended to spend his life in the Pacific Northwest.
Speaker 1: He grew up outside New York City in a well
Speaker 1: off household with doting parents. During business school, he agreed
Speaker 1: with his Los Angeles raised girlfriend and now wife, Elana,
Speaker 1: via contract scribbled on a bar napkin, of course, to
Speaker 1: spend a few years out west before returning to New York.
Speaker 1: Jase applied for jobs over the summer and enjoys telling
Speaker 1: the story of how he ended up interviewing at Walt Disney.
Speaker 1: Asked to name an incredibly successful product without picking Nike
Speaker 1: or other obvious choices, Jasse blurted out Beavis and butt Heead,
Speaker 1: touting the cartoons creative merchandising. Jasse didn't get the job.
Speaker 1: Telling the story is perhaps more humility theater, but to
Speaker 1: fulfill the contract with Elana, he worked for a digital
Speaker 1: stock photography company one summer in Seattle and loved the city.
Speaker 1: Approaching graduation, he applied to a few other West Coast
Speaker 1: companies until an online bookseller flying high in the first
Speaker 1: dot com boom, plucked his resume out of a stack.
Speaker 1: Amazon was all hands on deck, with employees spending weeks
Speaker 1: over the holidays in warehouses packaging books for customers. Colleagues
Speaker 1: remember Jasse running Amazon's first eight person marketing team and
Speaker 1: then its fledgling CD selling business, parroting bezos maxims and
Speaker 1: wearing his dress shirts rolled up at the sleeves above
Speaker 1: the elbows, working for Bezos back then with tough, Why
Speaker 1: should I listen to anything else you have to say
Speaker 1: the rest of this time? He once asked Jasse in
Speaker 1: a packed meeting after identifying some incorrect numbers in a
Speaker 1: slide presentation, Jasse persevered and impressed the boss, who selected
Speaker 1: him as his first technical advisor or shadow, a job
Speaker 1: that consisted of trailing the CEO to meetings and then
Speaker 1: huddling with him each week to consider various opportunities. During
Speaker 1: that time, Bezos and Jasse conceived Amazon Web Services partly
Speaker 1: to relieve it bottlenecks at the company by building heavily
Speaker 1: automated self service computing tools, and in two thousand and six,
Speaker 1: Jasse split off to run it. One can see why
Speaker 1: fifteen years later, Bezos came to view Jasse as his
Speaker 1: natural successor. AWS attracted waves of startups like Airbnb, Reddit,
Speaker 1: and Dropbox, then larger enterprises such as Netflix into it,
Speaker 1: and the US government including the CIA. In twenty fifteen,
Speaker 1: Jasse and Jane Hamilton, a top technical exec at the company,
Speaker 1: spearheaded the acquisition of Napurna Labs to kickstart the process
Speaker 1: of supplanting the pricey hardware in its data centers made
Speaker 1: by Intel and other companies. By twenty sixteen, AWS was
Speaker 1: generating twelve billion dollars in sales a year. Jeff was
Speaker 1: pretty hands off, says Peter DeSantis, a Jasse deputy who
Speaker 1: now runs Amazon's AI, chips and Quantum computing group. He
Speaker 1: audited US he poked on us, but that relationship has
Speaker 1: been fairly consistent over time. Several Amazon board members say
Speaker 1: Jasse was the clear choice, even before Bezos decided he
Speaker 1: wanted to spend more time with his boat and other
Speaker 1: endeavors like his space company Blue Origin. It was always
Speaker 1: obvious that Andy was the right person, says Wendell Weeks,
Speaker 1: CEO of Corning and a board member since twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1: You could not have a higher regard than Jeff has
Speaker 1: of Andy's builder skills, and that is the good housekeeping
Speaker 1: seal of approval. Jesse claimed improbably that he had never
Speaker 1: thought about getting promoted, and says that he took a
Speaker 1: few days to consider it. I think there was a
Speaker 1: low chance he was going to say no, says Beth Galletti,
Speaker 1: Amazon's human resources chief. But I also think that he
Speaker 1: was taking the time to make sure that when he
Speaker 1: said yes, he was ready to go do all the
Speaker 1: things that then meant the week. Jasse officially became CEO
Speaker 1: in July twenty twenty one at the Allen and Company
Speaker 1: mogulfest in Sun Valley, Idaho. Bezos worked the room, asking
Speaker 1: attendees to congratulate Jassey and support him. Since then, Bezos
Speaker 1: has been an active chairman of Amazon's board of directors.
Speaker 1: He speaks last in board meetings and pitches enthusiastic ideas
Speaker 1: about emerging technologies like humanoid robots. Amazon is my baby,
Speaker 1: and I will always be a parent, Bezos said in
Speaker 1: a statement, I will never ever stop worrying about having
Speaker 1: love for having heart for Amazon, and I work on
Speaker 1: it every day, and one of my jobs is to
Speaker 1: make sure that Andy and his leadership team are successful.
Speaker 1: Bezos has also helped Amazon navigate Washington, DC, as when
Speaker 1: he took a call from the President when Amazon considered
Speaker 1: disclosing some tariff costs to shoppers. Jasse, a donor to
Speaker 1: mostly Democratic candidates and Causes, says with equanimity that he
Speaker 1: too has relationships with the White House and that I
Speaker 1: find that a lot of times people actually all want
Speaker 1: the same things. Members of the board say the company
Speaker 1: puts Bezos to good use in managing a transactional and
Speaker 1: vituperative White House. He gets access to audiences that some
Speaker 1: people don't always get access to, says Brad Smith, the
Speaker 1: former CEO of into It and an Amazon board member
Speaker 1: since twenty twenty three. No one is confused that Andy's
Speaker 1: the CEO and Jeff is in there as an incredible asset.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back with Andy Jase's plan to launch
Speaker 1: Amazon into the AI age. Welcome back to Andy Jase's
Speaker 1: plan to launch Amazon into the AI age. Jase now
Speaker 1: had an unfathomably large surface area to oversee not only
Speaker 1: cloud services and chips, but also perishable groceries, films and
Speaker 1: TV shows, consumer electronics, and all the other meets in
Speaker 1: the Amazon Turducan. Although he sat on Bezos' leadership s
Speaker 1: team for years, much of the new territory felt unfamiliar,
Speaker 1: so Jasse scheduled what he called learning sessions and what
Speaker 1: colleagues euphimistically dubbed inspections, deep dives into different parts of
Speaker 1: the business, with sometimes combative results. During his first year
Speaker 1: as CEO, Jasse walked through Amazon warehouses and transportation hubs
Speaker 1: around the country. He examined Amazon's massive HR group and
Speaker 1: the highly automated tools it uses to manage one point
Speaker 1: five million employees. He came into the office a few
Speaker 1: days after Christmas one year to record sixteen videos extolling
Speaker 1: seemingly off the cuff and wearing a close cousin to
Speaker 1: the eight minute Blazer each of Amazon's leadership principles. He
Speaker 1: traveled to LA to visit Amazon's Hollywood arm and called
Speaker 1: its leaders back to headquarters to ask broad but discussion
Speaker 1: provoking questions about how commissioning TV shows and films helped
Speaker 1: Amazon's overall business. The deepest dive was reserved for Amazon's
Speaker 1: original business of e commerce, and its decades long pushed
Speaker 1: to speed up delivery by building warehouses ever closer to
Speaker 1: customers and obsessing maniacally over the cost of operating them.
Speaker 1: Not everyone took his prodding well. Over that first year,
Speaker 1: at least a half dozen senior execs left Amazon. Dave Clark,
Speaker 1: who oversaw the rapid expansion of Amazon's logistics network and
Speaker 1: led the retail business, was among the most high profile
Speaker 1: departures after Jasse tunneled into a debate over the cost
Speaker 1: to deliver products from warehouses to customer doorsteps from mid
Speaker 1: twenty two onwards. I think the organization actually took the
Speaker 1: inspections quite well, says Udiit Madan, who sits in the
Speaker 1: logistic czar chair once held by Clark. Madan adds that
Speaker 1: Jasse's probing led his group to reconceive Amazon's US warehouse
Speaker 1: and transportation network as a series of separate regions rather
Speaker 1: than a single hole, which moved products closer to customers
Speaker 1: and accelerated delivery times. The teams had gotten quite comfortable
Speaker 1: with linear progress. Jasse's questions forced us to go back
Speaker 1: and spend a few weeks thinking, he says. Jase concedes
Speaker 1: that the friction surprised him. All the people that I
Speaker 1: was going to manage in my new job were peers
Speaker 1: for a long time, and I had good relationships with them,
Speaker 1: he says. After becoming CEO, every relationship reset. Some of
Speaker 1: them reset really quickly, some of them took a bit
Speaker 1: longer to reset, and some never reset. And the ones
Speaker 1: that don't reset, both parties have to move on. Jasse
Speaker 1: also declared war on the bureaucracy that grew as Amazon's
Speaker 1: corporate staff swelled to more than three hundred thousand. He
Speaker 1: asked teams to increase the ratio of individual contributors to
Speaker 1: managers by fifteen percent, decreed that each manager had to
Speaker 1: oversee six people or more, and introduced a bureaucracy mailbox
Speaker 1: to let workers complain about sclerotic processes. Many employees privately
Speaker 1: confide that this fight hasn't yet been won, and that
Speaker 1: the mailbox just forwards to the whistleblower's most senior boss.
Speaker 1: Members of Amazon's board, though seemed satisfied. Andy inherited a
Speaker 1: frigging mess, and it was a mess that we all
Speaker 1: were part of, including Jeff says Jamie Gorlik, a former
Speaker 1: US Deputy Attorney General and an Amazon board member since
Speaker 1: twenty twelve. At the end of COVID, we had more
Speaker 1: capacity than we needed. We also had a myriad of
Speaker 1: potential and actual investments. Andy was meticulous in addressing both
Speaker 1: of those and got us to the point after about
Speaker 1: two years where we knew he'd righted the ship. But
Speaker 1: for a company on track to become the first to
Speaker 1: hit one trillion dollars in revenue, slashing bureaucracy and shutting
Speaker 1: down moonshots was not going to deliver a new wave
Speaker 1: of reliable growth. So while Jasse canceled some projects, he
Speaker 1: sprinkled investments elsewhere, like the autonomous Zeke's robotaxis that offer
Speaker 1: rides to the public in San Francisco and Las Vegas,
Speaker 1: a set of healthcare initiatives branded Amazon Health Services, and
Speaker 1: Amazon's Leo satellite effort. The brainchild of former Starlink engineers
Speaker 1: who left SpaceX and joined Amazon in twenty eighteen. LEO
Speaker 1: is an attempt to offer satellite internet access anywhere on Earth.
Speaker 1: It has faced delays as rocket bakers, including Bezos' Blue Origin,
Speaker 1: struggled to launch on time and deliver payloads to the
Speaker 1: right orbit. Nevertheless, in April, Jasse bolstered the project with
Speaker 1: his biggest acquisition yet, an eleven point six billion dollars
Speaker 1: deal to buy global Star, a satellite outfit best known
Speaker 1: for providing emergency connectivity to iPhone users. About three hundred
Speaker 1: LEO satellites are in low Earth orbit, providing access to
Speaker 1: beta customers. Amazon's satellite plant in Kirkland, Washington is a
Speaker 1: testament to Jasse's even grander ambitions. In a former video
Speaker 1: game hardware factory tucked behind a car dealership, hundreds of
Speaker 1: engineers wearing electrostatic discharge smocks and safety goggles turn out
Speaker 1: multiple satellites a day. Individual components such as flight computers,
Speaker 1: solar panels, and radio arrays are shaken, baked, and frozen
Speaker 1: in large testing chambers to simulate the conditions of spaceflight.
Speaker 1: Completed satellites are turned on for testing, then put to sleep,
Speaker 1: laid on a custom steel palette with shock absorbers, and
Speaker 1: shipped by truck to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida,
Speaker 1: where they'll wait to be loaded onto a rocket to
Speaker 1: extend the inescapable influence of Amazon and Anti Jassey into
Speaker 1: outer space. But Jasse's biggest bet by dollar value and
Speaker 1: the share of the eight or so meetings he's in
Speaker 1: every day, is AI. Even though Bezos was pushing machine
Speaker 1: learning tools on employees over the last ten years of tenure,
Speaker 1: Amazon was late to the AI frenzy. It never developed
Speaker 1: as large a fundamental research group as rivals like Google
Speaker 1: and missed obvious hints about what was coming. Anthropic, founded
Speaker 1: in early twenty twenty one, originally relied exclusively on AWS
Speaker 1: and turned through so much processing power that some inside
Speaker 1: Amazon wanted their company to invest in the San Francisco startup.
Speaker 1: Executives weren't convinced there was a real business model and
Speaker 1: passed on Anthropics early funding rounds, but Google invested in
Speaker 1: early twenty twenty three and shrewdly wove its homegrown Gemini
Speaker 1: model across its services. Microsoft meanwhile back to open AI
Speaker 1: after chat GPT and Claude took off. Amazon rushed to
Speaker 1: catch up. Its first LLM powered products were rough around
Speaker 1: the edges, and managers across Amazon told employees to dig
Speaker 1: in for a long and difficult engineering effort. Alexa, which
Speaker 1: Jassey and colleagues disconcertingly insist on referring to as she
Speaker 1: d needed a total overhaul to compete with new chatbots
Speaker 1: and an inevitable flood of AI infused devices. Jasse engaged
Speaker 1: personally in the effort, rewriting its PRFAQ, the document framed
Speaker 1: as a press release that's crafted at the start of
Speaker 1: every project inside the company and firing off bug reports
Speaker 1: on early versions of the software. Engineers in Boston and
Speaker 1: Seattle recall working eighty hours a week for two years
Speaker 1: to make Alexa more conversational and to surpass what they
Speaker 1: described as an internal target of ninety seven percent correct answers.
Speaker 1: Alexa Plus, as the company calls it, was unveiled at
Speaker 1: a Manhattan press conference in February twenty twenty five, with
Speaker 1: Jase's parents sitting in the front row. Over the next year,
Speaker 1: the refurbished assistant was automatically downloaded onto tens of millions
Speaker 1: of the Echo speakers out in the world, giving them
Speaker 1: an instant brain boost it uugh. She now banters with users,
Speaker 1: sometimes gradingly, and Kenris spond to complex commands by turning
Speaker 1: on the lights, hailing an uber, and making a restaurant reservation.
Speaker 1: Jasse asserts that users are talking to Alexa plus twice
Speaker 1: as much as they did with the original, and says
Speaker 1: it's still early with respect to how good Alexa is
Speaker 1: going to be over time. Both Alexa and Rufus, a
Speaker 1: conversational chatbot that helps shoppers find and compare products on Amazon,
Speaker 1: are powered in part by a homegrown suite of AI
Speaker 1: models called Nova, but they're not widely regarded as a
Speaker 1: credible competitor to the most capable llms, so Jasse opened
Speaker 1: his checkbook. He invested in Anthropic in September twenty twenty three,
Speaker 1: seven months after Google's own stake became public, and then
Speaker 1: this spring in open Ai, which this year made versions
Speaker 1: of its models available as an option on the dinner
Speaker 1: menu of AI tools on aws's Bedrock service. Both companies
Speaker 1: have promised to use chips from Annapurna, cutting into the
Speaker 1: dollars the companies send to the hugely profitable chip maker.
Speaker 1: In Nvidia. Amazon claims its AI chip Traanium is more
Speaker 1: energy efficient and runs more cheaply than comparable silicon from Nvidia.
Speaker 1: On a recent podcast, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang rejected that
Speaker 1: claim and said nobody can demonstrate to me that any
Speaker 1: single platform in the world today has a better performance.
Speaker 1: Asked whether he trusts Open Ai chief Sam Altman, who's
Speaker 1: often characterized in the press and by critics as a
Speaker 1: master strategist who tailors his message to such a degree
Speaker 1: that it can border on deception, jasse responds by saying
Speaker 1: he spoke with Altman multiple times a week for four
Speaker 1: months straight. We were pretty open with one another about
Speaker 1: what was important to us in building a partnership. He says,
Speaker 1: in my own interactions with Sam, I do trust him.
Speaker 1: The deals have made AWS a safe space for companies
Speaker 1: looking to enjoy the AI ferry dust, as evidenced by
Speaker 1: the unit's fastest sales growth in more than three years.
Speaker 1: In late April, AWS started selling a broader suite of
Speaker 1: software for office tax a bet that AI powered tools
Speaker 1: could grab customers in a market dominated by Salesforce, SAP
Speaker 1: and other companies. They're so good at creating affordable innovation,
Speaker 1: says Adina Friedman, the CEO of Nasdaq, an AWS customer
Speaker 1: since two thousand and eight. Jase's strategy is straight from
Speaker 1: the book of Bezos. Offer vast selection, undercut fat margin rivals,
Speaker 1: and eliminate any reason for customers to even think about leaving.
Speaker 1: That success has put AWS once the insurgent pirate ship
Speaker 1: that tore through the established giants of corporate computing, in
Speaker 1: a strange new position, an incumbent defending its turf in
Speaker 1: an age of disruption. Most companies want to run their
Speaker 1: AI where the rest of their data and applications are,
Speaker 1: Jase says, and a lot more of that lives in
Speaker 1: AWS than anywhere else. Every fall for the past few years,
Speaker 1: forty business leaders head to Seattle for what Jasse calls
Speaker 1: the Amazon CEO Summit, a private, day long conference to
Speaker 1: talk about technology trends and share personal tips on the
Speaker 1: grind of leading through a turbulent business environment. Execs such
Speaker 1: as NBA commissioner Adam Silver and Accentcher CEO Julie Sweet
Speaker 1: say they never miss it thanks to the low pressure
Speaker 1: FaceTime with peers and guests. At night, Jasse hosts the
Speaker 1: group for cocktails and dinner in his own backyard, or
Speaker 1: if it's raining, in helmet Head, the sports bar he's
Speaker 1: installed in his basement. The evening is capped by a
Speaker 1: private concert by one of Jasse's favorite musicians. Dave Matthews
Speaker 1: and Brandy Carlyle have performed for the group, so has
Speaker 1: Dave Grohl, who sang a new song for Attendees. Each
Speaker 1: received a custom pressed album of the performance. This is
Speaker 1: the environment in which Jasse thrives, hobnobbing with other CEOs,
Speaker 1: with his s team, or one on one with an
Speaker 1: Amazon partner at a sporting event. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell,
Speaker 1: another Summit regular, recalls watching a game with Jasse soon
Speaker 1: after Amazon started broadcasting Thursday Night Football and asking how
Speaker 1: the league could use AI to improve officiating. Jesse paused,
Speaker 1: started nodding his head and by the end of the
Speaker 1: quarter was reeling off ideas. I don't think there's a
Speaker 1: detail too small for him, Goodell says, it's what makes
Speaker 1: him such an effective CEO, because you can insulate yourself
Speaker 1: to a point where you're not hearing what's happening on
Speaker 1: the ground. But he's a tremendous listener and asks incredibly
Speaker 1: good questions. That sort of personal diplomacy has also smoothed
Speaker 1: Amazon's incursions into areas where relationships and an ability to
Speaker 1: cut massive checks might matter more than the company's technological prowess.
Speaker 1: Amazon last year raced to refit a vacant production studio
Speaker 1: in Culver City, California, into a gleaming led paneled sports
Speaker 1: set in time for the company's first NBA broadcasts. The
Speaker 1: eleven year deal expanded an already growing portfolio of sports
Speaker 1: rights meant to keep prime members happy and juice Amazon's
Speaker 1: booming advertising business. Inside control room trucks parked in a
Speaker 1: garage around the corner from the studios, NBA games are
Speaker 1: produced for global consumption. It's all a short walk away
Speaker 1: from the headquarters of Amazon MGM Studios, where producers are
Speaker 1: plotting the next iteration of James Bond. After the eight
Speaker 1: point five billion dollar deal to buy the storied Hollywood studio,
Speaker 1: Jasse has bigger challenges mollifying Amazon's three hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: thousand white collar employees at its million plus warehouse workers,
Speaker 1: some of whom privately confide that morale at the company
Speaker 1: is poor. In dozens of conversations, many remain skeptical of
Speaker 1: Jasse's tenure and express consternation with the current environment at Amazon,
Speaker 1: where job cuts and pressure to flatten organizations mean fewer
Speaker 1: opportunities for promotion. Top ai talent is decamping to rivals
Speaker 1: and startups. Employees fear their jobs will be replaced by
Speaker 1: automation and complain about a culture of constant reorganizations, rotating bosses,
Speaker 1: NonStop me and a cumbersome path to getting big decisions
Speaker 1: approved when no one feels empowered to put their name
Speaker 1: on the line. The bottleneck, they assert, is Jasse himself,
Speaker 1: who never let go after the inspections of that first
Speaker 1: year and wants to make every major decision. One way
Speaker 1: he manages the never ending carousel of approvals is by
Speaker 1: taking home a translucent colored folder of documents each evening
Speaker 1: and weekend, reading through them, and firing off emails every
Speaker 1: morning from an elliptical machine. Some employees contend it's a
Speaker 1: dangerous way to run a company, with calls debated and
Speaker 1: second guest on their way to the boss while the
Speaker 1: next transformative idea is at risk of getting overlooked. Amazon
Speaker 1: says most employees report that they're satisfied with their jobs
Speaker 1: and that thousands of decisions are made regularly without Jasse's involvement. Still,
Speaker 1: the CEO is unapologetic about the scrutiny he gives Amazon's operations.
Speaker 1: None of the decisions are made at thirty thousand feet,
Speaker 1: Jesse says, at a place like Amazon, if you don't
Speaker 1: actually under stand some of the details of the business,
Speaker 1: you're not going to be very helpful to those teams.
Speaker 1: Employees complained plenty about Amazon's culture during the Bezos years, too,
Speaker 1: but they seemed proud of the ostentatious technology gambles like Alexa,
Speaker 1: the Kendall and delivery drones, and the way the company
Speaker 1: was always pushing the frontier of what was possible. Bezos
Speaker 1: owned more than twenty percent of the stock at one point,
Speaker 1: so he could take more risks and flout convention. He
Speaker 1: showed up to his last quarterly earnings call with analysts
Speaker 1: in two thousand and nine, for example, and for the
Speaker 1: rest of his tenure left that unsavory responsibility to his
Speaker 1: chief financial officer. Jasse is on the call every quarter.
Speaker 1: David Solomon, the Goldman Sachs CEO who's known Jassy for years,
Speaker 1: says his friend has evolved into more of what I
Speaker 1: call an established public company CEO than I think Jeff
Speaker 1: ever was. Jasse understands the importance of starting experiments that
Speaker 1: are more visible than abstract AI algorithms, chips and datas
Speaker 1: or satellites way up in space. The company is building
Speaker 1: a two hundred and twenty five thousand square foot facility
Speaker 1: outside Chicago, a combination superstore and warehouse where it will
Speaker 1: blend robotics and AI to sell general merchandise, groceries, and
Speaker 1: prepared food. According to permitting documents and people familiar with
Speaker 1: the plans, it's classic Amazon. The company has failed repeatedly
Speaker 1: at developing new store formats and is way behind rivals
Speaker 1: like Walmart in the business of selling fresh food. None
Speaker 1: of that matters, Jase says, the company will simply keep
Speaker 1: trying new things until something sticks. We're doing an ungodly
Speaker 1: amount of invention right now, he says, and I think
Speaker 1: that will be true for as long as I can
Speaker 1: foresee in the future. It's just part of our DNA