Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has emphasized the urgent need for companies to invest heavily in Artificial Intelligence (AI), to unlock substantial financial returns in the years ahead.
Jassy in his letter to shareholders, disclosed that generative AI is going to reinvent every customer experience, which will enable companies to save a lot of money.
Part of his letter reads,
Register for Tekedia Mini-MBA edition 17 (June 9 – Sept 6, 2025) today for early bird discounts. Do annual for access to Blucera.com.
Tekedia AI in Business Masterclass opens registrations.
Join Tekedia Capital Syndicate and co-invest in great global startups.
Register to become a better CEO or Director with Tekedia CEO & Director Program.
“Generative AI is going to reinvent virtually every customer experience we know and enable altogether new ones about which we’ve only fantasized. The early AI workloads being deployed focus on productivity and cost avoidance (e.g. customer service, business process orchestration, workflow, translation, etc.). This is saving companies a lot of money. Increasingly, you’ll see AI change the norms in coding, search, shopping, personal assistants, primary care, cancer and drug research, biology, robotics, space, financial services, neighborhood networks—everything. Some of these areas are already seeing rapid progress; others are still in their infancy.
“But, if your customer experiences aren’t planning to leverage these intelligent models, their ability to query giant corpora 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. How soon? It won’t all happen in a year or two, but, it won’t take ten either. It’s moving faster than almost anything technology has ever seen. Fundamentally, if your mission is to make customers’ lives better and easier every day, and you believe every customer experience will be reinvented by AI, you’re going to invest deeply and broadly in AI. That’s why there are more than 1,000 GenAI applications being built across Amazon, aiming to meaningfully change customer experiences in shopping, coding, personal assistants, streaming video and music, advertising, healthcare, reading, and home devices, to name a few.”
Jassy’s statement follows the company’s announcement of its fourth quarter (Q4) earnings which saw total revenue grow 11% year-over-year (“YoY”) from $575B to $638B. Operating income in 2024 improved 86% YoY, from $36.9B (an operating margin of 6.4%) to $68.6B (an operating margin of 10.8%). Free Cash Flow, adjusted for equipment finance leases improved from $35.5B in 2023 to $36.2B.
Jassy further revealed that Amazon plans to invest over $100 billion in capital expenditures in 2025, with the “vast majority” going toward expanding AI capabilities within Amazon Web Services (AWS).
“We continue to believe AI is a once-in-a-lifetime reinvention of everything we know. The demand is unlike anything we’ve seen before, and our customers, shareholders, and business will be well-served by our investing aggressively now”, he stated.
Notably, Jassy revealed that the most significant AI-related costs currently lie in building data centers and acquiring expensive AI chips. However, he noted that these upfront investments will become more cost-effective over time.
Amazon is already building more than 1,000 generative AI applications and seeing rapid growth in the sector. According to Jassy, Amazon’s AI business is experiencing triple-digit year-over-year growth and has reached a multi-billion-dollar annual revenue run rate.
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 a significant expansion of available models and features in our leading Generative AI (“GenAI”) services Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Bedrock.
Last month, expanded access to its latest generative AI models with the launch of nova.amazon.com, a website aimed at developers and technology enthusiasts interested in building applications using its in-house foundation model family, Amazon Nova. The company also introduced a research preview of Amazon Nova Act, a new AI model designed to perform tasks within a web browser.
Developers can now download the Nova Act SDK to create software agents that navigate websites, fill forms, and execute user-defined instructions such as bypassing pop-ups or refusing optional services. The move marks Amazon’s latest step in the intensifying AI race among Big Tech firms, as it positions Nova as a cost-efficient, high-performance alternative to rival models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.