In his annual letter to Amazon investors, the company’s CEO, Andy Jassy, notes several key innovations for customer experience on the back of $638 billion in revenue, up 11% on the previous year.
“Apart from the financial results, we made our customers’ lives meaningfully better and easier. In our Stores business, we substantially expanded selection, continued lowering prices, and for the second year in a row, we shipped at record speed to our Prime members.” Said Jassy, looking to make life better for the company’s 300-million plus customers.
Oddly, there was no mention of Amazon’s Rufus customer AI in the letter, but plenty of attention on Amazon’s upcoming technology and CX plans.
On the technology side, “AWS launched a slew of new infrastructure and AI services that make it even easier to build remarkable customer experiences, including our latest custom AI silicon (Trainium2), a new set of frontier foundation models in Amazon Nova, and significant expansion of available models and features in our leading Generative AI (“GenAI”) services Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Bedrock.” Jassy noted.
An extreme customer focus
Discussing the need for continued innovation, “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.” said Jassy.
While Amazon can make things better for most customers at scale, the need for individual-level smartness is still missing. Amazon is still full of “you just bought a 4K TV, here are some more 4K TVs you might like” moments.
To solve these problems, Jassy notes Amazon should still act like the world’s largest startup. “Whatever we’re contemplating building has to be focused on solving a real customer problem or meaningfully improving a customer experience. Companies can get off track prioritizing technology because they’re excited about the technology. Great startups are on a mission to change what’s possible for customers.” Jassy concludes, so there’s hope for those plagued by repeat suggestions and a world headed to AI-guided shopping beyond typical search.