Amazon CEO outlines AI investment plans

In a letter to its shareholders, Amazon’s CEO and president Andy Jassy has spoken on the marketplace’s past year, with a look into the changes it has made in order to face the turbulent headwinds of the current market.

Jassy outlined areas in which the company has made structural shifts in order to reach long-term potential and drive enough revenue, resulting in the shuttering of certain businesses and reevaluation of its fulfilment networks.

Among his comments, the exec also highlighted areas where Amazon has made significant investments, a notable one being that of artificial intelligence (AI), a form of machine-learning technology that has increasingly been adopted by companies over the past ten years and has now come into the spotlight at Amazon.

Jassy noted that Amazon had been working on its own form of Large Language Models (LLM) under Generative AI, a new form of machine learning that looks to accelerate adoption and transform customer experience. He added that plans revolve around democratising the technology to allow other companies to implement it into their own operations.

Amazon continues to shift its focus

Among other investment areas are that of its grocery segment, ‘Buy with Prime’ offer which allows third-party sellers to offer Amazon services on their own website and healthcare, through which it acquired One Medical in a bid to snap up a substantial market share in the sector.

The letter comes after the company, like other tech giants, was forced to shift its focus to a more efficient model and recentre itself around profitable divisions, causing a significant series of lay-offs in its cloud computing, human resources, advertising and Twitch streaming divisions.

The same could be seen at Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, which announced in March that 10,000 people would lose their jobs amid its ongoing restructuring process.

Despite the increasing hesitancy in the tech sector, Amazon’s Jassy remained optimistic about the company's future, noting that there is still an ongoing shift in customer behaviour towards online retail and cloud-based operations, which he believes Amazon has a foothold in.

Jassy concluded: “I strongly believe that our best days are in front of us, and I look forward to working with my teammates at Amazon to make it so.”