Amazon Goes All-In on AI: Jassy's Vision for the "World's Largest Startup"

Amazon.com is all-in with AI to fuel the next phase of growth for the company. In his annual letter to shareholders, CEO Andy Jassy says the company is aggressively adopting AI - including AI agents - with more than 1,000 applications currently being built to transform everything from their operations, to delivering a better customer experience, to making their streaming services more efficient, and more.

In a compelling passage, Jassy makes clear why Amazon should embrace agentic AI:

If your customer experiences aren't planning to leverage these intelligent models, their ability to query giant corpuses of data and quickly find your needle in the haystack, their ability to keep getting smarter with more feedback and data, and their future agentic capabilities, you will not be competitive.

Hear, hear. It's the kind of "go big" mindset that I argue any business model needs to stay competitive in the age of AI, especially when your competitors are AI-first entrants.

Yet what resonates most are the passages without explicit mentions of AI. Jassy envisions Amazon as "the world's largest startup" that builds internal innovators, moves with remarkable speed, and embraces risk-taking. These ambitious goals are challenging for any organization, especially one with close to 1.6M employees that leads in most of its markets.

As I've written before, to build internal innovators requires the support of AI agents. Forward-thinking CEOs clearly understand this. Tobi Lütke at Shopify calls it "opportunity AI," while Rob Fauber at Moody's promotes AI with a "yes, and..." mindset. Jassy isn't explicit but he's on it: to continue the culture that consistently asks "why, and why not" needs agentic AI.

These are distinctions without a difference. The fundamental goal remains: empower all employees to innovate with AI.