Jassy's AI Memo Was a Snoozefest, In a Good Way
If you have been watching Amazon for more than 5 minutes, you could have written Jassy's note for him to be honest. Instead, what we got coming out of it was a lot of hot takes like:
"Amazon doesn't want employees"
"The note was a revolution!"
Neither of which feel right to me. Here's what I heard out of the note:
* Amazon AI Press Puffery
* Documenting what is actually already going on.
* Continuing the trendline in straightforward ways.
First things, first. All CEO notes are PR. All of them. So there was a lot of that in here. If you've heard Andy blather on about AI during earnings calls the last two years, there wasn't a ton new in this note tbh.
To contrast, Jeff never even attended earnings calls and commissioned the "World's Worst Slide Decks" to support them -- just to reinforce how irrelevant they were in his mind to taking care of customers.
His notes about employees I thought were pretty tame. He has been speaking for years now about getting teams smaller, and this is just another excuse in my mind to continue on the same crusade: smaller teams get more done faster than bigger teams. If you've ever been in a large meeting, you understand that each person you add to a meeting decreases its value exponentially.
I think a lot of people missed that he also mentioned there would be more people doing other kinds of jobs. So there's that.
Still, while there is broad worry that AI is going to be net negative to the new generation of college grads, I do think that is based on extremely misguided assumptions:
* existing big corporate execs are safe
* big corporate execs will cut staff
* AI will do a lot of things mid and lower-tier employees are doing today
Instead, the statement I feel is necessary is more like:
The next generation of employees are the only ones who can imagine the workplace of the future. Full stop. And VC and other long-term investors who aren't thinking about next quarter earnings will help enable this transition.
