- Andy Jassy impresses investors with efficiency plans, deviating from Bezos’ growth-at-all-costs approach.
- Jassy’s meticulous leadership style involves ruthless cuts and measured investments.
- As Amazon tackles generative AI, Jassy faces his next big challenge.
Jassy’s ruthless efficiency drive
In November 2022, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy met top investors at the company’s Seattle headquarters, addressing concerns about the company’s $1 trillion market value loss.
Jassy impressed the group his long-term plans for making Amazon’s retail and cloud businesses more efficient, setting the stage for a remarkable comeback.
Jassy put his own stamp on Amazon by making ruthless cuts and more measured investments, a departure from Jeff Bezos’ growth-at-all-costs approach.
He eliminated long-term, expensive moonshot projects and slashed roughly 27,000 jobs, even in historically profitable units like AWS and advertising.
The devil’s in the details
Known for his meticulous attention to detail, Jassy approves almost every major press release, blog post, and company statement.
He openly criticizes the performance of individual employees several levels below him, an unusual level of engagement for a CEO of such a large company.
While some employees appreciate his focus on the bottom line, others worry that Amazon is becoming too short-term in its thinking.
As Amazon responds to the rise of generative AI, Jassy faces his next big challenge. Although AWS has been late to the “genAI party,” every team is working on AI projects, Jassy directly involved in many of them.
In contrast to the chaotic Alexa rollout under Bezos, Jassy is taking a more measured investment approach to generative AI.
