• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, 8 hours ago

Amazon uses generative artificial intelligence in nearly every business it supports, from advertising to shopping and product forecasting. But on Tuesday Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, sent a message to employees — GAI is the future and employees better get comfortable and learn how it works.

Jassy praised Amazon products and the ways the company uses the technology. The company today has more than 1,000 GAI services and applications in progress or built. But he says that based on the scale of the company, this is only “a small fraction of what we will ultimately build.”

Jassy said the goal is to “lean in further in the coming months” and make it easier to build agents -- and then build, or partner, on several new agents across all its business units and general and administrative (G&A) areas.

Finding more ways to implement GAI means Amazon will need fewer people to do some of the jobs done today, Jassy wrote. He warned that GAI will help the company reduce its workforce as it looks to gain efficiencies.

With those words of caution, Jassy encouraged employees to embrace change.

He suggested that employees be “curious about AI, educate yourself, attend workshops and take trainings, use and experiment with AI whenever you can, participate in your team’s brainstorms to figure out how to invent for our customers more quickly and expansively, and how to get more done with scrappier teams.”

Amazon has made progress with GAI, but there is still more to do and many reasons he believes the company must move even faster to innovate.

He predicts that billions of agents across every company and in every imaginable field will support life.

Agents allow people to tell them what they want, often in natural language, and do things like search the web to make purchases, summarize results, engage in deep research, write code, and much more.

At Amazon these agents will change what is possible, as well as the speed at which it can happen.

Jassy believes GAI will allow Amazon to “operate like the world’s largest start-up -- customer-obsessed, inventive, fast-moving, lean, scrappy, and full of missionaries trying to build something better for customers and a business that outlasts us all,” he wrote.

Consumers use Alexa+ and Shopping, and features such as Lens, Buy for Me, and Recommended Size.

In the first quarter of 2025, more than 50,000 advertisers used Amazon’s suite of AI tools for advertising, which is intended to make it easier for brands to plan, onboard, create and optimize campaigns.

Jassy cited how independent sellers can more easily create new product-detail pages or get advice on how to become more effective as sellers in the Amazon marketplace. Nearly half a million selling partners use these services.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) for builders -- from custom silicon to provide better price-performance on AI model-training and inference -- provides services that make it much easier to build Foundation Models, or ways to leverage frontier models and conduct GAI inference.

GAI supports Amazon’s internal operations, fulfillment network, inventory placement, demand forecasting, and improved efficiency of its robots.

Consumers use Alexa+ and Shopping, and features like Lens, Buy for Me, and Recommended Size, and soon will have much more.