By Matt Day and Amy Thomson | Bloomberg
Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy said the e-commerce company will try to keep prices low but said online sellers could pass some tariff costs on to customers.
“We look at all the things that could impact consumers and customers,” he said Thursday in an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin on CNBC. “It’s hard to know what’s really going to happen. There’s a lot of flux right now.”
Jassy said he hadn’t seen any change in consumer behavior since President Donald Trump announced tariffs on multiple countries last week. Trump paused many of them on Wednesday but boosted tariffs on China, where Amazon sources much of its inventory.
Asked if he’s talking to the Trump administration about tariffs, he said Amazon had shared its concerns and that US officials were aware of them.
Jassy also released his annual letter to shareholders, in which he said Amazon has to operate like the “world’s largest startup” as it works to meet demand for artificial intelligence and cut bureaucracy in its ranks.
Amazon, like most of the largest technology companies, has bet heavily on AI, committing much of its $100 billion in planned capital expenditures this year to AI-related projects. Most of that is geared toward data centers operated by Amazon Web Services, the largest seller of rented computing power. The company also recently revealed a long-delayed update to Alexa set to give the voice assistant more fluent conversational powers.
Jassy also pointed to innovations in health care, and growth in the company’s Amazon Pharmacy and Amazon One Medical products, saying the company will continue to “iterate quickly” to expand those services.
Jassy, who took over from Jeff Bezos in 2021, carried on his predecessor’s tradition of annual missives to shareholders. Previous letters touted the company’s AI business and pledged big bets despite cost cuts. His first letter looked at injuries among Amazon’s warehouse workers.
The executive has also been trying to overhaul Amazon’s corporate culture, calling out examples of bureaucracy and urging workers to move faster and do more with less. He’s overseen cost cuts that meant layoffs for tens of thousands of workers, and asked the rest to report to the office daily, ending pandemic-era flexibility in a move that reflected concerns that new recruits weren’t adopting the famously hard-charging company’s culture.
Jassy said in Thursday’s letter that the company had polled employees to ask for examples of unnecessary bureaucracy and received almost 1,000 responses.
“Builders hate bureaucracy,” Jassy said. “It slows them down, frustrates them, and keeps them from doing what they came here to do. As leaders, we don’t always see the red tape buried deep in our organizations, but we can sure as heck eliminate it when we do.”
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