What’s On the Mind of Amazon’s Top Exec?
In his annual lengthy letter to shareholders, Amazon President and CEO Andy Jassy recapped the company’s performance and spotlighted areas of innovation.
He started the missive noting that 2024 was a strong year for Amazon, which posted an 11% year-over-year (YoY) revenue gain. Jassy emphasized the expanded selection in its Stores business and ongoing efforts to lower prices and speed shipping times.
In addition, Jassy drove home the point that advances in retail, which include the Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods Market businesses, are ultimately influenced by shoppers.
“At the highest level, we’re aiming to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, making customers’ lives better and easier every day. This is not easy to do in general, let alone year after year. In fact, it’s actually quite hard, especially with the rapid rate of change in technology, customer habits, and new products from large and small companies alike. If we want to have a chance at succeeding in our mission, we have to constantly question everything around us,” he pointed out, adding that Amazon’s strategies are guided by the “Why?” question. “We ask why, and why not, constantly. It helps us deconstruct problems, get to root causes, understand blockers, and unlock doors that might have previously seemed impenetrable."
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The company’s willingness to take risks was another highlight of Jassy’s letter, something that’s reflected in the ongoing tweaking of its grocery business in both the physical and digital space. “You can’t achieve something extraordinary for customers by playing ‘not to lose’,” Jassy noted.
As Amazon moves deeper in its current year and builds for the future, the exec affirmed that AI will essentially touch every customer experience and enable new ones. There are more than 1,000 GenAI applications being built across the company, he reported.
“The early AI workloads being deployed focus on productivity and cost avoidance (e.g. customer service, business process orchestration, workflow, translation, etc.). This is saving companies a lot of money. Increasingly, you’ll see AI change the norms in coding, search, shopping, personal assistants, primary care, cancer and drug research, biology, robotics, space, financial services, neighborhood networks — everything,” Jassy said.
The full shareholder letter is posted on Amazon's website.
Seattle-based Amazon is No. 2 on The PG 100, Progressive Grocer’s 2024 list of the top food and consumables retailers in North America. The company was also named among PG’s Retailers of the Century.
