Amazon is teaming up with another retail competitor to offer customers more places to return products.

The Seattle retailer confirmed that it recently began testing a partnership with pet giant Petco, which will accept returns from customers who purchased items on Amazon.com.

Amazon did something similar in 2017 when it started accepting returns at Kohl’s stores. It also uses Whole Foods locations and Amazon Fresh grocery stores as return drop-off sites, and last year Amazon partnered with office supplies company Staples.

The strategy lets Amazon grow its physical footprint for returns without adding real estate.

For retailers like Petco and Staples, inking these deals with Amazon helps bring customers into their stories — though after they’ve bought products from their retail rival. Some offer in-store coupons to Amazon customers making returns at their store. Kohl’s said it added 2 million new customers in 2020 thanks to its Amazon partnership.

Petco operates more than 1,500 locations across the U.S., Mexico, and Puerto Rico. The company reported net revenue of $1.53 billion in the second quarter, up 3.4% year-over-year.

A survey from Jungle Scout found that nearly a quarter of pet owners shop for pet products most frequently on Amazon. Pet food alone is a $1.4 billion industry on Amazon, according to the report.

Amazon helped set the standard for free online returns but more retailers — including Amazon — are charging for returns with rising shipping and labor costs.

Earlier this year Amazon began charging some customers $1 for returns made at UPS stores in a bid to reduce expenses. It also rolled out a new feature that flagged “frequently returned” products.

Amazon says most customers have at least one label-free, box-free return drop-off point within a 5-mile radius.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy called the attacks against civilians in Israel “shocking and painful to watch” in a post on X on Monday night.

Jassy joined the chorus of those expressing sadness and outrage at the surprise offensive by Hamas militants, which began Saturday near the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip and has escalated into full-scale war.

According to the Amazon jobs page for Israel, Seattle-based Amazon opened its first office in Tel Aviv in 2014, and has continued to grow and invest in its Israeli client base. The Amazon Web Services space in Tel Aviv called Floor28 opened in 2018 as an education hub for events and workshops.

Jassy said he has been in touch with teammates in Israel to make sure the company is doing everything it can to “help support their family’s and their safety, and to assist however we can in this very difficult time.”

Amazon told GeekWire Tuesday that the company is in touch with employees on the ground and is providing individual support.

An internal web page has been set up where any employee can donate to humanitarian missions, and Amazon has started the process for making cash donations to international organizations operating in the area.

Amazon has a robust disaster response and relief apparatus that utilizes the company’s global logistics capabilities, and normally responds to crises such as hurricanes, earthquakes and other natural disasters. According to its website, since 2017, Amazon has donated more than 23 million relief items to support people impacted by over 108 disasters around the world.

AWS CEO Adam Selipsky also weighed in with a post on LinkedIn in which he called the attacks against Israel “sad and distressing.”

“Through the past few days we’ve been talking to our AWS teammates in Israel, offering our support,” Selipsky wrote. “Our priority is to make sure they are safe and have the resources they need during this difficult time. We are also in close contact with international humanitarian relief partners providing support to impacted civilians. We hope deeply for peace.”

The Information reported Monday on how the conflict could affect tech companies in Israel, whether because Israeli tech workers will be headed to the front lines or because U.S. firms have large offices there.

Microsoft has a significant presence in Israel, employing more than 2,000 people at its Tel Aviv campus, most of whom work on cybersecurity research and development, The Information said. The Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant’s careers page for Israel also lists offices in Herzliya, Haifa, and Nazareth. A 2-year-old video on the site, below, provides a tour of an R&D center. Microsoft declined to comment when contacted by GeekWire on Monday.

The Information said Google employs roughly 2,200 people in Tel Aviv and Haifa, and operates data centers in the country for its cloud computing division.

Other notable Seattle ties and comments about the war:

• Dr. Hayim Katsman, a University of Washington Ph.D. student, was one of the Americans killed in the attacks.
• Tech execs with Seattle ties are reportedly heading back to Israel to fight in the war.
• “It’s hard to explain how emotionally shattering the last few days have been,” wrote Shahar Ronen, a longtime Seattle-area engineering leader. “Fortunately my family and friends in Israel are safe, mostly sheltering in place. But in my second circle there are people who were murdered or are being held hostage. Regardless of where you stand on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this attack by Hamas should be unequivocally condemned.”
• Craft PNW, a therapy center led by Seattle health tech entrepreneur Grin Lord, is hosting Israeli support groups this week.

Pamela Hayter just wanted someone at Amazon to answer “the why.”

After more than eight years at the tech giant, Hayter had come to expect that decisions large and small at the company were always rooted in data.

Following three years of pandemic-induced remote work, Hayter figured Amazon’s February mandate calling for corporate and tech employees to return to the office at least three days a week must have been a data-driven decision.

“There was no data,” Hayter said. “I kept trying to find the reason. That’s what we do at Amazon, we find the why. There was no why that I could find. And I think that really got to me.”

Hayter isn’t just another employee frustrated by having to leave the comforts of home to return to the office. A former executive assistant and program manager who has only ever worked for Amazon since moving to Washington state from Virginia, Hayter became a leading critic in the push back against return-to-office mandates.

She launched an internal Slack channel at Amazon called “Remote Advocacy” that quickly attracted 33,000 users. She helped organize a petition against the mandate, helped draft a six-page document (a nod to Amazon’s “six-pager”) advocating for remote work that was sent to company leadership, and she was an organizer of an employee walkout in May.

But when pushed to the brink by, among other things, concerns about being able to afford to commute again from her home in Kirkland, Wash., back to an office in South Lake Union, Hayter left Amazon this summer.

Now she’s contemplating what she learned about the company and herself, what she would do differently, and what she would say to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy about his return-to-office directive. Her story reflects the ongoing push and pull between employers and tech workers navigating when and how — if at all — to return to the office.

Learning to love remote work

When Hayter started at Amazon in 2015, she was completely bought in. She said she enjoyed working with smart and capable people. She appreciated learning, growing, and being allowed to try things and fail. She loved the culture.

“I loved it. Absolutely loved it,” she said. “I very, very much drank the Kool Aid, like everybody else does. I think a part of you has to, in order to just make it there, because it’s a very harsh environment. They don’t do a lot of hand-holding.”

In March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in Seattle and elsewhere, word came down at Amazon, like many places where it was feasible, that employees were being sent home to work remotely.

Hayter learned of the directive while in the middle of a session training fellow employees as part of her work with the Learning & Development team. Before Zoom calls became commonplace, some people would even fly in to attend such week-long classes.

“How do we do this? How do we pivot?” Hayter said she wondered at the time.

Hayter admitted that she never really understood why anyone would want to work from home. There was too much distraction from family, chores and daily life.

“Then I had to work from home and I realized I didn’t know what I was talking about,” she said. “Everyone’s life is so different, and I can see how this is very beneficial to people.”

A mother of two daughters in their 20s, Hayter became especially sympathetic to working parents of little children, those who had to take care of an ill family member, those with disabilities, and women and minorities who discovered they were treated more equally on video calls than they were in in-person meetings.

In a new study by the women’s advocacy group LeanIn.org, the overwhelming majority of women and men surveyed said that working remotely or on a hybrid schedule made it easier to balance work and life. And that the arrangement made them more efficient and productive, according to Axios.

For her commute from Kirkland to downtown Seattle, Hayter used to take I-405, SR 520 and I-5. She said she was spending roughly $600 a month on tolls, plus gas, parking and wear and tear on her car. And she was losing more than an hour every morning and evening sitting in traffic.

“By the time I come home, I’m dead. I’m mentally, emotionally exhausted,” Hayter said.

Working from home, Hayter also went to work on herself. After three years away from the office, Hayter said she completely changed as a person. She got to spend more time with her daughters, she was healthier than she’d ever been because she ate better, and she wasn’t drained from driving back and forth.

She also got divorced, and lost half the income she relied on to pay for her commute and other expenses.

Turning anger into action

On Feb. 17, Jassy sent a memo to Amazon employees stating that it was time to return to the office for the majority of the work week. The company was hardly alone in bringing workers back or issuing mandates. Redfin, Disney, Starbucks, DocuSign, and Apple also set in-person requirements.

CNBC reported last month that 90% of companies in one survey plan to implement return-to-office polices by the end of 2024, though some companies such as Zillow Group are committed to remote policies.

“It’s easier to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture when we’re in the office together most of the time and surrounded by our colleagues,” Jassy told employees. “Collaborating and inventing is easier and more effective when we’re in person.”

Hayter read the announcement and felt what she described as a mixture of anger and incredulousness.

“‘Oh, hell no,'” she remembered thinking. “‘Wait a minute, this is not gonna happen.'”

She started thinking about her future, all that had changed while working from home, and all that she would lose again by returning to an office.

She started the Slack channel.

The online meeting place for those who were angry and confused, or those who just wanted to witness a venting of the anger and confusion, quickly blew up as thousands of employees joined. Someone added Jassy to the channel, but Hayter said the CEO never chimed in.

“It would have been lovely if he had. I wanted desperately for him to,” she said. “I wanted him, and any other leader in that company, to see that we were very serious, and we weren’t joking around. We weren’t just doing this to pass memes back and forth. It was human beings talking about how [return to office] is going to affect our lives, sometimes positive, majority negative.”

In Amazon’s view, the plan to bring employees back at least three days a week would yield the best long-term results for customers, business, and culture.

“While we understand some people didn’t agree with the direction, they were in the minority,” Amazon spokesperson Rob Munoz said. “Now that we have several months under our belts of people in the office more frequently, there’s more energy, connection, and collaboration, and we’re hearing that from employees and the businesses that surround our offices.”

Speaking to the crowd at the employee walkout in May, Hayter called the Slack channel “the largest concrete expression of employee dissatisfaction in our entire company history.”

She was joined that day at the podium by Emily Cunningham, co-founder of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice. Cunningham was fired by Amazon in 2020 and ultimately settled with the company in 2021 over allegations of illegal retaliation for her activism.

Hayter said she started to notice her work environment was changing. She was “below bar” on her annual review for the first time in eight years, and in June she said she was investigated by an employee relations team.

“They basically were saying that I was instigating, leading people into being angry at leadership, if you will,” Hayter said. In July she was told she was going to be placed in a program called Pivot, which is intended for employees who are not performing to standards.

She spoke with her manager about potentially shifting to a virtual role, perhaps with a different team, but Hayter said she didn’t find anything that interested her in internal job postings. In August she decided it was time to leave Amazon, voluntarily, and at least get some severance.

She has since filed an unfair labor practice complaint with the National Labor Relations Board against the company.

“We respect the right of every employee to share their experience, but these claims are without merit, and we will demonstrate that through the legal process,” Amazon’s Munoz said.

‘Listen to your people’

In a Washington Post story last month about workers quitting rather than returning to the office, Hayter was among those profiled. She said, “I assumed Amazon was going to be my forever company.”

Her goal isn’t to get her job back. She doesn’t even know if she’d work in tech again, much less for a massive company. She just wants people to understand how the return-to-office decisions at Amazon and other companies are negatively affecting many workers.

Asked if she would do it all again, she said, “1000%” yes, and that she would go at the company even harder.

“I don’t think I did enough. I would have just gone all in from day one. I didn’t because I was nervous. I was afraid of losing my job,” Hayter said. “Not to downplay anything that we did, because we did a ton of stuff, but I think that I maybe would have set a different tone and a different pace.”

Amazon has changed its own tone and pace in recent months when it comes to letting corporate and tech workers know how serious it is about getting them back in the office.

In July, the company started asking some workers to relocate to ensure they’re close enough to work in person with others on their teams. The company has said that requests for exceptions will be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Last month, the Puget Sound Business Journal reported that Amazon told employees it’s monitoring their individual badge swipes into office buildings. Other companies such as TikTok are implementing similar tracking tools.

Amazon’s Munoz said in a statement that the “information will help guide conversations as needed between employees and managers about coming into the office with their colleagues.”

Hayter said it’s fascinating to see that step by Amazon actually playing out.

“When we first started the [Slack] channel, that was one of the things that we were talking about: how long until they start tracking?” she said. “It was almost kind of a joke. Now, fast forward. They know who you are, where you are.”

Longtime human resources professional Mikaela Kiner, founder and CEO of Seattle-based HR consulting company Reverb, said there’s speculation that large employers in particular are using return-to-office mandates to force attrition, especially given the economic downturn and layoffs of the past year.

Amazon in January announced an 18,000-person layoff, the largest in its history. An additional 9,000 layoffs were announced in March.

“As always, people react negatively to any kind of monitoring of their whereabouts,” Kiner said.

She added that workers are choosing companies and roles that are location agnostic. It shows “how much of a driver that is in terms of attraction and retention,” she said.

“The policies I’ve seen that make the most sense lead with flexibility, are thoughtful about when and why people should come together, and use incentives (carrots not sticks) to encourage people to use the office,” Kiner said.

A recent survey of CEOs by professional services giant KPMG found 90% of CEOs saying they will “reward employees who make an effort to come into the office with favorable assignments, raises or promotions.”

Even though she never connected with him over Slack, Hayter still has a message for her former CEO. She said Jassy should be upfront about the real reasons and data — “the why” — behind making people return to the office.

“If it’s because of taxes, just say it. If it’s because of your real estate investments, just say it,” Hayter said. “We’re not children. The whole time you’re at Amazon, you’re told you’re an owner and a leader. Treat us like those things that you say that we are.”

And she said Jassy, and other corporate leaders making the same policies, should trust employees to know what is best for their own lives and livelihoods.

“Listen to your people,” Hayter said. “They are telling you what they need, and you’re turning a blind eye to it. You know how that makes people feel? It certainly isn’t conducive to culture that you keep carrying on and on about. And it really isn’t conducive to productivity. It’s not going to make people be loyal to you. It certainly isn’t going to make anyone want to go work there.”

Amazon’s first satellites were launched today on a mission aimed at testing out the hardware and software for the Seattle company’s worldwide Project Kuiper broadband internet constellation.

Two prototype satellites — known as KuiperSat 1 and 2 — rode a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida into space at 2:06 p.m. ET (11:06 a.m. PT).

United Launch Alliance provided updates on what it called the Protoflight mission via its X / Twitter account. In a post-launch statement, ULA declared the mission to be successful and said that the Atlas V “precisely” delivered the satellites to orbit.

The satellites were sent into 311-mile-high (500-kilometer-high) orbits with a 30-degree inclination. In a status update, Amazon said Project Kuiper’s mission operations center in Redmond, Wash., confirmed first contact with both satellites within an hour after launch.

“Five plus years in the making. So much care, persistence, boldness and beauty,” Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said in a posting to Instagram and Threads. “What an amazing endeavor. … Big milestone and much more to come!”

Project Kuiper, an ambitious program that was publicly unveiled in 2019, aims to provide broadband internet access — and satellite-based access to Amazon Web Services — to millions of people who are currently underserved.

Amazon plans to use the prototypes — which were built at Project Kuiper’s HQ in Redmond — to test the hardware on the spacecraft, as well as ground operations and customer terminals.

“We’ve done extensive testing here in our lab and have a high degree of confidence in our satellite design, but there’s no substitute for on-orbit testing,” Rajeev Badyal, vice president of technology for Project Kuiper, said in a launch preview. “This is Amazon’s first time putting satellites into space, and we’re going to learn an incredible amount regardless of how the mission unfolds.”

The results of the tests will factor into further preparations for building production-grade satellites at a factory that’s being set up in Kirkland, Wash. If all goes according to plan, mass production of thousands of satellites will begin early next year, and Amazon will make Project Kuiper service available on a beta testing basis to commercial partners by the end of 2024.

Launch of the prototypes had been delayed for a year due to logistical and technical schedule slips. Most recently, ULA switched the launch from its next-generation Vulcan rocket to the Atlas V, a workhorse rocket that’s nearing retirement.

Amazon is facing schedule pressure from at least two directions: First of all, the terms of Project Kuiper’s license from the Federal Communications Commission require Amazon to have at least half of the 3,236 satellites in its proposed constellation launched by mid-2026.

To meet that requirement, Amazon reserved scores of rocket launches — on Atlas V’s, Vulcans, Ariane 6’s and on the New Glenn rockets currently being developed by Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture.

Just as importantly, Amazon is trying to catch up with SpaceX and its Starlink satellite internet service, which already has more than 2 million customers.

Dave Limp — who is leaving his longtime post as Amazon’s chief of devices and services to become Blue Origin’s CEO in December — insisted last year during a live-streamed chat session that there’d be room enough in the marketplace for multiple broadband satellite constellations in low Earth orbit.

“I think more constellations is generally good,” he said. “I do think we have some benefits, though, in ours.”

He pointed to the synergies between Project Kuiper and Amazon’s other lines of business, including AWS. He also hinted that Project Kuiper will compete with Starlink on a price basis.

Amazon says it’s committed $10 billion to getting Project Kuiper off the ground. More than 1,000 employees are said to be working on the project, and Amazon’s careers website lists an additional 200-plus open positions — with most of those positions based in Washington state.

Back in 2019, Bezos was asked to identify one of Amazon’s recent “big bets,” and he didn’t hesitate to name Project Kuiper. Will that multibillion-dollar bet pay off? Today’s launch marked a significant step toward finding out.

Amazon has moved about half of a planned 2,000 employees from Seattle to Bellevue, Wash., where the company ultimately plans to employ 25,000 people.

Despite an ongoing pause in the construction of numerous new Bellevue office buildings, announced last year, Amazon now has more than 1,000 employees working in 555 Tower in the city east of Seattle, the company confirmed. Commercial real estate website CoStar News first reported on the development.

Amazon said it has completed full construction up to the 19th floor at the 42-story 555 Tower, and is still waiting to proceed with the interior buildout of the remaining floors for now.

The company cited uncertainty about the impact of hybrid work on its office designs when it paused construction on five towers in downtown Bellevue in July 2022. It also said it would hold off on a sixth tower, for the time being.

Amazon said it will move additional employees into the West Main Tower One later this year, and that Amazon Web Services employees are being assigned to these locations over the next few months. West Main is a three-building, half-block project at 117 106th Avenue NE, developed by Vulcan.

Amazon employs more than 55,000 corporate and tech employees in Seattle and more than 10,000 in Bellevue and on the Eastside.

Located at 555 108th Ave. N.E., 555 Tower is taller than any existing building in Bellevue, according to developer Vulcan Real Estate. The building rises to 600 feet and features a standalone retail pavilion at ground level, encircled by a public plaza.

The other buildings include The Artise, at 788 106th Ave NE, a planned 600,000-square-foot, 25 story building leased from Schnitzer West; and Bellevue 600, a two-tower project slated to be the central hub of Amazon’s Bellevue operations.

The 3.5-acre Bellevue 600 site runs from 110th Avenue NE to 108th Avenue NE, near the Bellevue Transit Center and a future Link Light Rail stop. Amazon is holding off, for now, on construction of the 31-story Tower 2 at Bellevue 600.

Amazon did not have any updated timelines on the construction pause or ultimately restarting work on the Bellevue towers. Amazon has previously signaled plans to focus much of its future growth in the city.

A third-quarter report from real estate firm Broderick Group noted that Amazon’s return-to-office mandate this year helped drive other companies to bring workers back to their Bellevue offices.

“The Eastside office market is still in a downward cycle, with increasing vacancies and economics such as rental rates in the early phases of a major adjustment,” the report said. “Amazon injected a much-needed shot of optimism with its May 1st return to office mandate, while also pressing forward to build out its Bellevue CBD office portfolio.”

Microsoft, meanwhile, is pulling back on office space in Bellevue as it continues construction on a refresh of its Redmond headquarters campus. The company announced in September that it won’t renew its biggest lease in Bellevue. The Puget Sound Business Journal reported this summer that Amazon surpassed Microsoft as Bellevue’s largest employer.

Amazon is pulling the plug on Amp, the audio app it launched last year to let users DJ their own live radio shows complete with a catalog of millions of licensed songs and the ability to engage with callers.

“We’ve made the difficult decision to close Amp,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement emailed to GeekWire on Wednesday. “In creating Amp, we tried something that had never been done before and built a product that gave creators a place where they could build genuine connections with each other, and share a common love for music. We learned a lot about how live music communities interact in the process, which we are bringing to bear as we build new fan experiences at scale in Amazon Music.”

Bloomberg reported that it had viewed a memo about the decision from Steve Boom, head of the digital music unit at Amazon.

“This decision was not made quickly or easily,” Boom said. “It only became clear after months of careful consideration determining the investments Amazon wants to make for the future.”

Amazon had big plans to “reimagine radio” with Amp in March 2022. It signed on music personalities such as Nicki Minaj, Pusha T, and Travis Barker to promote the app.

But by October, Amp was already in trouble as Amazon conducted layoffs within the service. A company spokesperson said at the time that Amazon continually evaluates the progress and potential of its products and services makes adjustments based on those assessments.

“Following a recent review, we’ve made the decision to consolidate a few teams so we can focus on the growth and scaling of Amp,” the spokesperson said.

Two weeks ago, Insider reported that there was more trouble at the experimental service. After a leadership change, questions submitted for an internal town hall meeting “ranged from concerns about Amp’s business outlook to a lack of trust in the leadership team and allegations that internal work culture has grown ‘toxic,'” according to Insider.

Amazon is no stranger to audio content. Amazon Music and the Amazon-owned Audible audiobook company expanded into podcasts in 2020. The company also acquired the Wondery podcast production studio.

Amp launched during a pandemic-era time when companies such as Spotify and Clubhouse were offering similar services and content.

The Federal Trade Commission alleges that Amazon’s “Project Nessie” was designed to gauge the impact of its product price increases on the broader retail market, monitoring whether its rivals followed its lead, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The report sheds new light on a heavily redacted portion of the FTC’s antitrust suit, filed against Amazon last week in U.S. District Court in Seattle. If other retailers didn’t raise their prices in turn, the Project Nessie algorithm dropped Amazon’s prices back to normal, the FTC alleges, according to the WSJ report.

It’s part of the FTC’s effort to show Amazon’s broader influence in online retail, and the consequences of what the agency describes as monopoly power.

Amazon contends that the Project Nessie allegations, like much of the antitrust suit, misrepresent its actions and offer a distorted view of e-commerce pricing dynamics.

“The FTC’s allegations grossly mischaracterize this tool,” an Amazon spokesman said in a statement. “Project Nessie was a project with a simple purpose—to try to stop our price matching from resulting in unusual outcomes where prices became so low that they were unsustainable. The project ran for a few years on a subset of products, but didn’t work as intended, so we scrapped it several years ago.”

This is consistent with reporting on Project Nessie in the book “Winner Sells All” by journalist Jason Del Rey. According to the book, “Amazon’s pricing tool would repeatedly lower the price on an item to match its competitor, leading to what insiders dubbed a death spiral.”

The new WSJ report references this aspect of Project Nessie, as well:

“The company also used Nessie on what employees saw as a promotional spiral, where Amazon would match a discounted price from a competitor, such as Target.com, and other competitors would follow, lowering their prices. When Target ended its sale, Amazon and the other competitors would remain locked at the low price because they were still matching each other, according to former employees who worked on the algorithm and pricing team.”

A 2018 Amazon blog post described Nessie as “a system used to monitor spikes or trends on Amazon.com” (as well as the name of an Amazon office building).

The FTC is focusing heavily on Project Nessie. It’s referenced by name 16 times in the public version of the 172-page FTC lawsuit. A dedicated subsection on Project Nessie spans nearly four pages. The complaint reads, in part, “Amazon’s Project Nessie has already extracted over [redacted] from American households.”

The Wall Street Journal, citing an unnamed person familiar with the matter, says Amazon made more than $1 billion in revenue as a result of the algorithm.

By default, non-public information is redacted from such complaints to give a corporate defendant the opportunity to make its case to the court to keep trade secrets and other potentially sensitive competitive information under wraps.

“Amazon has 14 days from the entry of a temporary sealing order to provide legitimate justification for preventing this information from being revealed,” FTC spokesman Douglas Farrar said last week. “We do not believe that there are compelling reasons to keep much of this information secret from the public.”

Amazon issued an extensive response to the FTC’s complaint last week, saying it’s based on a “fundamental misunderstanding of retail,” a twisted definition of the relevant markets needed to find monopoly power, and a misleading narrative of Amazon’s actions, intentions, and impact on sellers and consumers.

In a small corner of Lumen Field, Amazon is putting a new spin on its cashierless “Just Walk Out” shopping system.

At the home of the Seattle Seahawks, just down the street from Amazon’s headquarters, the new Seahawks Pro Shop Outlet store gives football fans a way to grab some gear without needing to wait in line.

We gave it a test run last week before the Seattle Seahawks hosted the Carolina Panthers.

The store uses RFID tags to track individual products, instead of overhead cameras typically found at other stores with Amazon’s cashierless technology.

This makes it possible to sell clothing, apparel, and other “soft goods” merchandise, going beyond food and beverage.

At a typical “Just Walk Out” store, customers scan their credit card or palm at the entrance, and they’re tracked by the cameras. This is how the store knows what you pick up, in addition to sensor tech on shelves or tables.

The new Seahawks shop does not have any scanners at the entrance. Instead, they are placed at the exit. That’s where the system detects any RFID tags, and charges the customers as they leave with their jerseys, shirts, jackets, and more.

It worked pretty much as advertised during our test run. It felt like normal shopping — browse through items, try stuff on, put stuff back, etc. — until the end, when you either plug a credit card in for a few seconds or scan your palm to pay.

The best part was not wasting time in line. There can be a small queue when multiple customers try to exit but I didn’t notice many logjams.

This advantage was made more apparent as I walked down the concourse and saw a hoard of people waiting to check out at the main pro shop store.

I used the extra time to grab pizza and a drink at Tutta Bella, one of four new concession stands at Lumen Field that uses Amazon’s cashierless tech. There are now nine such stores at Lumen Field, the most of any venue globally.

My only complaint at the outlet was the limited product selection. Clearly this is a test run of sorts as Amazon and the Seahawks figure out if it can work.

So far, it seems so. Amazon said it plans to roll out the RFID-enabled system to more locations this year. And the Seahawks are seeing improved transaction time and reduced friction at checkout compared to a traditional shopping experience, according to Doug Orwiler, managing director of consumer experience (retail) for the team.

Amazon first tested the RFID tech at Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle, toward the end of the Seattle Kraken season. It’s using RFID technology from an Ohio company called Avery Dennison.

“RFID technology has been around for decades and is typically used by stores to track and manage inventory,” Amazon wrote in a blog post. “Given its prevalence in retail supply chains, we decided to figure out a way RFID could benefit customers in a checkout-free environment.”

More than 70 Amazon-owned stores and more than 85 third-party retailers currently use “Just Walk Out” tech across the U.S., U.K., and Australia. The lineup includes grocery stores, airport travel retailers, music and sports venues, theme parks, and shops and cafes on college campuses. Amazon opened its first Go convenience store, featuring “Just Walk Out,” in 2018 in Seattle.

Stadiums across the country are quickly adopting various versions of cashierless tech from Amazon and others such as Standard AI, AiFi, and Zippin.

The Seahawks opened their first “Just Walk Out” shop last season and said transactions increased 85% while sales per game increased 112% compared to the traditional concession stand that previously was in the same location.

What lurks beneath all that blacked-out text?

That’s the immediate question for anyone reading the Federal Trade Commission’s landmark antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, filed Tuesday in federal court in Seattle.

The FTC complaint refers extensively to internal Amazon documents and communications in an apparent effort to contradict Amazon’s public statements and support the agency’s allegations that the company achieved and exploited monopoly power to give itself an unfair advantage in e-commerce, to the detriment of sellers and consumers.

For example, the complaint says at one point, “Amazon recognizes the importance of maintaining the perception that it has lower prices than competitors. Behind closed doors, however, Amazon executives actively …”

The rest of that sentence is blacked out in the public version of the complaint, followed by three paragraphs of mostly redacted material apparently intended to support the FTC’s allegation that “Amazon’s first-party anti-discounting algorithm is designed to discipline rivals from lowering their prices.”

Also among the redactions are nearly four pages describing “Project Nessie,” which the FTC alleges is a secret pricing algorithm that Amazon used to compete unfairly in the e-commerce market.

Amazon insiders described Project Nessie differently to journalist Jason Del Rey in his recent book, “Winner Sells All,” about the Walmart-Amazon rivalry.

By default, non-public information is redacted from such complaints to give a corporate defendant the opportunity to make its case to the court to keep trade secrets and other potentially sensitive competitive information under wraps.

When and if they’re revealed, the details behind the many redactions will be key not only to understanding the merits of the FTC’s case, but also to assessing the prospects for Amazon’s defense.

“We share the frustration that much of the data and quotes by Amazon executives in the complaint that describe what we allege is monopolistic and illegal behavior is redacted,” said Douglas Farrar, an FTC spokesman, via email.

Farrar added, “Amazon has 14 days from the entry of a temporary sealing order to provide legitimate justification for preventing this information from being revealed. We do not believe that there are compelling reasons to keep much of this information secret from the public.”

David Zapolsky, Amazon senior vice president and general counsel, issued an extensive response to the FTC’s complaint on Tuesday, saying it’s based on a “fundamental misunderstanding of retail,” a twisted definition of the relevant market, and a misleading narrative of Amazon’s actions, intentions, and impact on sellers and consumers.

“We respect the role the FTC has historically played in protecting consumers and promoting competition,” Zapolsky wrote, “Unfortunately, it appears the current FTC is radically departing from that approach, filing a misguided lawsuit against Amazon that would, if successful, force Amazon to engage in practices that actually harm consumers and the many businesses that sell in our store—such as having to feature higher prices, offer slower or less reliable Prime shipping, and make Prime more expensive and less convenient.”

The Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust lawsuit against Amazon alleges, for the first time publicly, that the company used a secret pricing algorithm known internally as “Project Nessie” to compete unfairly in the e-commerce market.

Descriptions of the algorithm are blacked out extensively in the public version of the complaint, filed Tuesday morning in U.S. District Court in Seattle. An FTC spokesperson told GeekWire that the agency could not provide further details but raised the possibility of portions of the complaint being unredacted in the future.

“There is no valid and cognizable justification for Amazon’s use of Project Nessie,” the complaint says.

Visible portions of the complaint describe Nessie as a “pricing system,” “algorithm,” and a “scheme” that “belies its public claim that it ‘seek[s] to be Earth’s most customer-centric company.’ “

Amazon references its pricing practices and tools in an extended response to the FTC complaint, saying, in part:

“The FTC’s case alleges that our practice of only highlighting competitively priced offers and our practice of matching low prices offered by other retailers somehow lead to higher prices. But that’s not how competition works. The FTC has it backwards and if they were successful in this lawsuit, the result would be anticompetitive and anti-consumer because we’d have to stop many of the things we do to offer and highlight low prices—a perverse result that would be directly opposed to the goals of antitrust law.”

In the FTC complaint, unredacted sentences around the blacked-out Nessie descriptions include allegations of Amazon overcharging customers.

For example, the complaint reads, “Amazon’s Project Nessie has already extracted over [redacted] from American households,” and then adds in the subsequent paragraph, “In addition to overcharging its customers, Amazon is degrading the services it provides them.”

Project Nessie is referenced by name 16 times in the public version of the 172-page FTC filing. A dedicated subsection on Project Nessie spans nearly four pages.

We’ve contacted Amazon for comment on Project Nessie and the FTC allegations.

An Amazon blog post from 2018 described Nessie as “a system used to monitor spikes or trends on Amazon.com,” in addition to the name of a building at the company’s Seattle headquarters.

Addressing the complaint in general, Amazon said in an earlier statement that the “practices the FTC is challenging have helped to spur competition and innovation across the retail industry, and have produced greater selection, lower prices, and faster delivery speeds for Amazon customers and greater opportunity for the many businesses that sell in Amazon’s store.”

Update: Journalist and author Jason Del Rey has more details on Project Nessie from his recent book, “Winner Sells All,” about the Walmart-Amazon rivalry.

According to the book, “Amazon’s pricing tool would repeatedly lower the price on an item to match its competitor, leading to what insiders dubbed a death spiral.”

The Federal Trade Commission and 17 state attorneys general filed suit against Amazon on Tuesday, alleging that the Seattle-based tech giant is a monopoly that abuses its power.

The complaint alleges that Amazon uses “anticompetitive and unfair strategies” that “stop rivals and sellers from lowering prices, degrade quality for shoppers, overcharge sellers, stifle innovation, and prevent rivals from fairly competing” against the e-commerce giant.

The long-awaited lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, is a test for FTC Chair Lina Khan and those who have targeted Amazon for years over its business practices.

“Our complaint lays out how Amazon has used a set of punitive and coercive tactics to unlawfully maintain its monopolies,” Khan said in a statement. “The complaint sets forth detailed allegations noting how Amazon is now exploiting its monopoly power to enrich itself while raising prices and degrading service for the tens of millions of American families who shop on its platform and the hundreds of thousands of businesses that rely on Amazon to reach them. Today’s lawsuit seeks to hold Amazon to account for these monopolistic practices and restore the lost promise of free and fair competition.”

Amazon issued the following statement in response to the suit, from David Zapolsky, senior vice president, Amazon Global Public Policy & General Counsel:

“Today’s suit makes clear the FTC’s focus has radically departed from its mission of protecting consumers and competition. The practices the FTC is challenging have helped to spur competition and innovation across the retail industry, and have produced greater selection, lower prices, and faster delivery speeds for Amazon customers and greater opportunity for the many businesses that sell in Amazon’s store. If the FTC gets its way, the result would be fewer products to choose from, higher prices, slower deliveries for consumers, and reduced options for small businesses—the opposite of what antitrust law is designed to do. The lawsuit filed by the FTC today is wrong on the facts and the law, and we look forward to making that case in court.”

Zapolsky penned a longer response in a separate post later Tuesday morning, in which he called the lawsuit “misguided” and said the commission has a “fundamental misunderstanding of retail.”

“The FTC pretends that this everyday retail competition doesn’t exist,” Zapolsky wrote. “But its attempt to gerrymander alleged markets into narrow subsets of retailers (who in reality compete with other retailers on the same products) can’t make Amazon into something it is not. Amazon may not be the small business it once was, but we’re still just a piece of a massive and robust retail market with numerous options for consumers and sellers.”

The FTC is joined by state partners seeking a permanent injunction in federal court that the agency says “would prohibit Amazon from engaging in its unlawful conduct and pry loose Amazon’s monopolistic control to restore competition.”

The states include: Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Nevada, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin.

A 2020 report from a U.S. House antitrust subcommittee previously found that Amazon “has monopoly power over most third-party sellers and many of its suppliers.”

That 450-page report concluded a 16-month investigation into Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple as the operators of major online markets, and proposed sweeping reforms for U.S. tech giants including “structural separations to prohibit platforms from operating in lines of business that depend on or interoperate with the platform.”

Khan’s selection by President Biden as FTC chair was a big deal in 2021 because of her stance on antitrust. She gained national attention while still in law school when Yale Law Review published her article, “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox.” In it, Khan argued that the so-called “consumer welfare standard” — in which regulators look narrowly at prices to determine whether a company has behaved monopolistically — is insufficient for the digital economy.

Khan believes that a company like Amazon can abuse its market power, even if it uses that power to lower prices for consumers, rather than raising them. Under her leadership, the FTC has taken a more aggressive stance in pursuing action against tech companies.

In June, the FTC sued Amazon for allegedly duping customers into signing up for subscriptions to its Prime service and making it unnecessarily difficult for them to cancel.

Blue Origin has confirmed that Dave Limp, who is leaving his post as Amazon’s senior vice president of devices and services, will take over as the CEO of Jeff Bezos’ privately held space venture.

The current CEO, longtime aerospace executive Bob Smith, is retiring from the post but will stay on with Blue Origin until January to help with the transition, a company spokesperson told GeekWire in an email.

Limp presided over Amazon’s Echo hardware line and its Alexa voice assistant business, among other initiatives. The most relevant initiative for Blue Origin would be his oversight of Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellite project, which is due to have its first prototype satellites launched as soon as next month.

Those satellites will be sent into low Earth orbit on United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket, but Blue Origin is a major contractor for the Kuiper launches to come.

Reports about the transition began percolating out on social media today, after Blue Origin distributed internal memos to the company’s staff. In today’s emailed statement, Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin praised Limp’s record at Amazon.

“Dave is a proven innovator with a customer-first mindset. He has extensive experience in the high-tech industry and growing highly complex organizations, including leading Amazon’s Kuiper, Kindle, Alexa, Zoox, Fire TV and many other businesses,” Blue Origin’s statement noted.

The statement also paid tribute to Smith’s leadership: “In his six years, Bob led Blue Origin’s transformation from an R&D-focused company into a multifaceted space business nearing $10 billion in customer orders and over 10,000 employees. Dave will join in December, and Bob will be here through January 2 to ensure a smooth transition.”

Under Smith’s watch, Blue Origin began sending spacefliers — including Bezos — on suborbital trips using its New Shepard rocket ship. The company also ramped up efforts to build its orbital-class New Glenn rocket and unveiled the Orbital Reef space station project. This year, Blue Origin and its partners won a $3.4 billion contract to work on a lunar lander for NASA’s use, after losing out to SpaceX for an earlier contract.

For what it’s worth, Smith’s tenure has also been marked by controversy, including internal acrimony over Blue Origin’s COVID policies and concerns relating to safety and sexual harassment.

If Limp’s tenure lasts as long as Smith’s, he could oversee the resumption of crewed suborbital space trips after a yearlong hiatus, as well as the start of Blue Origin’s orbital space program and its participation in crewed missions to the moon.

Meanwhile, Amazon is expected to name longtime Microsoft executive Panos Panay to take Limp’s place as its devices and services chief. Microsoft announced Panay’s departure just last week.

Amazon will invest up to $4 billion and take a minority stake in Anthropic, the San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company founded two years ago by former OpenAI executives and considered one of the world’s top AI labs.

Anthropic makes large-scale AI models and a chatbot called Claude. The company’s founders split from OpenAI after becoming concerned that the ChatGPT maker was becoming too commercial. Its founders include siblings Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei, who led OpenAI’s engineering and policy/safety teams, respectively.

The investment and expanded partnership includes a commitment by Anthropic to make Amazon Web Services its main cloud provider. Specific terms of the investment and the size of Amazon’s stake were not disclosed.

Were it an outright acquisition, the Anthropic deal at maximum value would rank among the top four in Amazon’s history, behind its $13.7 billion purchase of Whole Foods in 2017 and its $8.5 billion purchase of Hollywood studio MGM in 2022, and comparable to its $3.9 billion acquisition of One Medical this year.

News of the investment comes less than eight months after Anthropic declared its allegiance to Google Cloud, the AWS rival that reportedly invested $300 million in Anthropic for a 10% stake as part of a prior funding round.

• Amazon “will become Anthropic’s primary cloud provider for mission critical workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development,” the Seattle company said in a post announcing the deal.
• The companies said Anthropic will build, train, and deploy its AI models on AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips.
• The startup will also expand its support for Amazon Bedrock, the AWS service that provides access to AI foundation models for cloud customers to use in building their own apps and services.

Amazon has been scrambling to demonstrate momentum in generative artificial intelligence in AWS and across its business in recent months, seeking to counter the perception that it has fallen behind in the AI technology race.

The investment in Anthropic “signals a newfound urgency in Amazon’s strategy to further integrate generative AI into its AWS suite of services,” Wedbush analyst Scott Devitt wrote in a note Monday.

Amazon’s investment in Anthropic echoes Microsoft’s multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI. That partnership has given the Redmond company new momentum in deploying AI in its own products and for its cloud customers.

“Amazon developers and engineers will be able to build with Anthropic models via Amazon Bedrock so they can incorporate generative AI capabilities into their work, enhance existing applications, and create net-new customer experiences across Amazon’s businesses,” Amazon said in its post.

In its own post, Anthropic cited its own need for scarce computing horsepower.

“Training state-of-the-art models requires extensive resources including compute power and research programs,” the company said in the post. “Amazon’s investment and supply of AWS Trainium and Inferentia technology will ensure we’re equipped to continue advancing the frontier of AI safety and research.”

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, the United Kingdom’s chief financial minister, visited Seattle on Friday as part of a West Coast tour to promote the expansion of the UK’s tech sector, and lay the groundwork for an upcoming global artificial intelligence safety summit organized by the British government.

He spoke with GeekWire following meetings in Seattle with tech and business leaders including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan, and Alphabet/Google CFO Ruth Porat.

Continue reading for an edited transcript of the interview.

GeekWire: How would you describe the substance of your meetings with Microsoft, Google, and Amazon today, and what was accomplished?

Chancellor Hunt: Well, they were very productive meetings, on a number of levels. The reason I’m here is because, in the last decade, the UK has become Europe’s Silicon Valley. We’ve become only the third economy in the world to have a trillion-dollar tech sector. And so there’s lots we want to talk about.

But the main areas of discussion are really around where we go next with AI, and whether it’s possible to get a global consensus as to the guardrails we put in place to really allow AI to take off, as we all want it to do.

There was a lot of common ground. The UK has got a reputation for having very nimble regulators who are good at nurturing innovation, and not stifling it. And it’s easier for us to change the regulatory environment than it is either in the EU or the US. It was really a discussion on all those levels as to what we need to do next.

Can you go into more detail about what, for example, Satya Nadella and Andy Jassy wanted to talk about?

At least half the time was spent talking about AI. We’ve got an AI safety summit coming up later this year (Nov. 1). We’re setting up an AI Safety Institute. We’re very hopeful that they will be members of that institute to help shape the regulatory structures that are going to work best for the development of global AI. And we want that to be the start of a global consensus as to the best way we harness this new technology to be a force for good.

Did you receive any indication from Microsoft, Amazon, or Google about their preferences for the involvement of China in the upcoming summit on AI?

There was broad agreement that, on something that is going to change humanity as dramatically as AI, you need to engage with China. That doesn’t mean you’re going to agree with them. It doesn’t mean that we’re going to necessarily have the same values and necessarily talk as openly as you would with fellow democracies.

But it is plainly sensible to see if there are areas of agreement, because China has a huge tech sector and, love it or loathe it, is going to have a huge impact on the development of the Internet going forward. My own view is, any engagement with China needs to be done with your eyes open. You need to understand that the system in China is not one whose values we share. And so that needs to be part of your thinking, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t talk to them.

When you consider the potential negative implications of AI for jobs, but also the potential positive impact on productivity and efficiency, do you see it as a net positive or a negative for the economy in the UK and globally?

I see it as off-the-scale positive. I really do. If you look at the lack of self-confidence and the social unrest, and sometimes the despair that you’ve seen in Western democracies in the last couple of decades, really since the financial crisis, a lot of it is because many have fallen into a low-growth trap. The average growth in the G7 at the moment is 1%. Whereas 15 years ago was 2% to 3%. And in the end, if the political classes are going to deliver what ordinary families want, we’ve got to find a way to get growth up, and MIT says that AI could triple our productivity.

One of the things that Satya Nadella said to me was that AI could bring back the joy into critical jobs, like being a police officer, or a teacher, or a doctor, by removing a lot of the drudgery and the difficult, annoying admin tasks that make those roles extremely frustrating. So I think from that point of view, I’m very optimistic.

But we have to harness this change with our eyes open. We welcomed social media as a fantastic way of making it easier for people to make connections, keep in touch with their friends and family. We now understand that the picture is more mixed than that. And there are mental health implications when these new tools are used in the wrong way.

So I think with AI, we need to be full of positivity and optimism about the potential but also be sensible about the risks and make sure they’re carefully managed.

It struck me that the UK Competition and Markets Authority’s announcement this morning giving preliminary approval to the Microsoft and Activision deal was great timing for you. Did that come up at all in your conversations with Activision Blizzard and Microsoft today?

Only to say that, we’ve always been very clear with Microsoft and Activision that the system we have in the UK — which is, by the way, what they want — is that regulators are wholly independent. And that decision by the CMA today had nothing to do with me, nor did the timing have anything to do with me, either. So that’s the system we have.

And that’s important, because what international investors love about the UK is that there’s a level playing field with domestic companies, and that regulators aren’t being [influenced] by politicians. They operate at arm’s length from us. But that doesn’t mean to say that politicians don’t have very important influence on what those rules are. And really that was why I had very useful discussions with Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft about how we create regulations that are nimble, and don’t stifle this new emerging technology, but foster its growth.

What would be your elevator pitch, to use a startup phrase, to tech companies about expanding in the UK?

I’d say this: we’ve just become the third trillion-dollar tech economy in the world because we have two very unique things:

• Outside the United States, we have the biggest financial services sector, so startups can get the funding they need to start up and scale up.
• And outside the United States, we have the most respected higher education sector with four of the world’s top 20 universities.

And what that means is that in the UK, you have an unrivaled amount of talent. So if you’re looking to hire people for your AI startup, your life sciences startup, your fintech startup, you can find them in the UK. We have a visa that means that anyone from the global top 50 universities can come to the UK without a job. And that’s deliberate because we’re trying to attract people from all over the world, the brightest and best, to the UK. …

Demis Hassabis is in Seattle today, where I am. When he sold DeepMind to Google, it was on the condition that he could keep DeepMind in London. And his argument was, I can get engineers of the same quality in the UK as I can get in the US, but they’re a lot cheaper, and it’s easier to find them.

We’ve got double the AI startups in the UK of any other European country. We’re currently attracting double the investment into technology of any other European countries. So it’s a great thing. And we’re very proud.

Are you using AI in your own work and life? And if so, how?

Well, it’s really interesting question, and well-done for putting me on the spot on that. The truth is we’re not using it nearly as much as I would like to be. I set up a project in which I’ve asked every UK government department to tell me, how much unnecessary admin is been done by public servants in your department, because this is the opportunity when it comes to productivity. So by Christmas, I’ll know how much unnecessary admin is been done by police officers in the UK, by teachers, by doctors, by nurses. We are then going to use that as the foundation for AI-driven projects that dramatically transform the delivery of public services. And that’s something we’re very excited about.

Any impressions of Seattle that you’d want to share? Or the tech companies here? What are your overall thoughts on what you’ve seen, heard and observed in your visit?

I’d just simply say this: Seattle is very similar to Britain. Everyone says it’s always raining, but when I’m coming in, it’s bright sunshine.

Amazon’s Astro home robot was introduced at the company’s fall Devices & Services event two years ago. Last year, Astro’s name was mentioned no less than 25 times during the annual event. This year: zero mentions.

Combined with the earlier departure of Amazon’s VP of consumer robotics, Ken Washington, the absence of the 17-inch tall Alexa-enabled robot earlier this week left us wondering if Astro (or at least the project) was still alive.

“As we mentioned when we announced Astro, this will be a long journey,” an Amazon spokesperson said in response to GeekWire’s inquiry earlier this week.

The statement continued, “We’re committed to bringing more features to Astro that make it even more helpful in the home. As you heard [Wednesday], generative AI and LLM technologies together present an exciting opportunity for us across Amazon, and this includes Astro. We think Astro’s future is bright.”

Much of Amazon’s focus was, in fact, on AI during the event at its HQ2 in Virginia earlier this week. New features previewed by the company included a new Alexa capability called Let’s Chat, which opens a dedicated chat session that — based on the demo, at least — feels like a voice-enabled conversation with ChatGPT.

One of Amazon’s points was that it’s much more challenging to make this type of AI chat work in the context of voice in the home, given the need for faster response times, and zero tolerance for AI hallucinations when turning off a light bulb, setting a timer, or adding an item to a shopping list for example.

Add a rolling robot to the mix, and it might get tougher, and maybe cooler.

For the record, Astro is still listed on the Amazon website, under the Day 1 editions preview program, for a price of $1,599. According to the listing, the it’s still available in limited quantities on an invite-only basis.

Washington, whom we got to know last year at Amazon re:MARS and the GeekWire Summit, has started a new job as senior vice president and senior technology and product officer at medical device company Medtronic.

Of course, this journalistic game of “what’s missing” is ultimately an imperfect exercise, but sometimes what a company doesn’t say or do can be as just as telling as what it actually says and does.

Speaking of which, where was the Kindle Scribe? OK, we’re done now.

Amazon is ready to interrupt Prime Video programming to bring commercial breaks to its streaming shows and movies, the company announced Friday.

Amazon joins a growing list of streamers giving in to the need for revenue beyond subscriptions in order to compete for content.

“We aim to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers,” the company said in a blog post about its plans, which will start early next year. Ads will be introduced in the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Canada at first, followed by France, Italy, Spain, Mexico, and Australia later in 2024.

The move follows other streaming platforms such as Disney+, Netflix and Max, which offer ad-supported tiers. Netflix resisted advertising for years before finally caving as subscriber numbers dropped, adding a $7 ad-supported tier last last fall.

Amazon says it will offer an ad-free option for U.S. Prime members for an additional $2.99 per month. Live event content such as sports — Prime Video is home to “Thursday Night Football” — will continue to include advertising.

Along with paying millions for the rights to the NFL’s “TNF,” Amazon’s recent investments in content include the $8.5 billion acquisition of Hollywood studio MGM and the hefty price tag it paid to create the fantasy series “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.”

Prime Video is also home to such award-winning shows as “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” the most Emmy-nominated streaming comedy ever with 80 nominations over its five-season run.

It was tough, as usual, to keep up with the announcements coming out of Amazon’s fall Devices & Services event Wednesday morning. But in a change from the past, there was lot more stage time for software enhancements, AI features, and paid subscription services, and not as much focus on new Echo devices.

Put another way, there was no Alexa-enabled microwave anywhere to be found.

The shift suggests a sharper focus in the Alexa and Echo division after a difficult year that included cutbacks as part of a broader shakeout in Amazon’s corporate and technology workforce. Dave Limp, the longtime leader of the division, led its signature annual event for the final time after previously announcing plans to retire.

There was no cameo by Panos Panay, the former Microsoft Surface leader who was reported by Bloomberg News this week to be in line to succeed Limp as the new head of the Amazon Devices & Services division.

There was still plenty of new hardware, including a wall-mountable Echo Hub designed to serve as a smart-home control panel; an upgraded Echo Show 8; a Fire TV Soundbar; and new releases from Amazon’s Ring, Blink and eero.

But from the start, the tech giant was clearly out to make a statement about artificial intelligence, attempting to counter the impression that it has fallen behind OpenAI and others in the field.

It began with a preview of its new “Let’s Chat” feature that turns Alexa into something more closely resembling a voice-enabled ChatGPT.

Limp made it clear that Amazon doesn’t consider the comparison to ChatGPT fair, citing the unique requirements of voice interactions in the home, including a need for much faster responses than available in text interactions, and zero tolerance among users for AI hallucinations when trying to turn off a lightbulb, for example.

“We’ve been on that journey to create that superhuman assistant for more than a decade now,” Limp said in his introductory remarks from Amazon’s HQ2 in Arlington, Va. “But with generative AI, it’s now within reach.”

As demonstrated on stage, the feature opens a dedicated session that allows users to converse with Alexa and even interrupt the voice assistant without repeatedly invoking a wake word. Alexa maintains the context of the conversation over time, until the user ends the session, and takes into account preferences such as a favorite sports team.

Amazon also showed this video to give a sense for the capabilities.

An optional capability works in conjunction with Amazon’s visual ID service, allowing enrolled users to start and maintain a conversation with Alexa by looking at the screen without saying “Alexa,” said Rohit Prasad, Amazon’s senior vice president and head scientist of Artificial General Intelligence.

“This is the most natural conversational experience we have built,” Prasad said. “And it feels just like talking to a human being because it has the same latency as you expect when talking to a human.”

Prasad also previewed a new version of Alexa that will adjust its tone and emotion based on the context of a conversation, such as informing you that your favorite sports team has lost a game.

Other new capabilities announced and previewed by Amazon at the event:

• The future ability to speak conversationally to control smart-home devices, giving Alexa instructions for multiple steps at once, rather than one-by-one.
• A new smartphone feature called Map View, giving customers an overview of their Alexa devices on a diagram of their home.
• Alexa Emergency Assist, a voice-enabled personal and family safety service, will be $5.99 a month or $59 a year.
• A feature called Eye Gaze for the Fire Max 11 tablet, for people with mobility or speech disabilities to use Alexa with their eyes.

Amazon this morning showed a new feature, dubbed “Let’s Chat” driven by generative artificial intelligence, designed to make its Alexa voice assistant more conversational on its Echo devices.

Demonstrated on stage during an event at Amazon’s HQ2 in Arlington, Va., the feature opens a dedicated session that allows users to converse with Alexa without repeatedly invoking a wake word.

Alexa maintains the context of the conversation over time, until the user ends the session, and takes into account preferences such as favorite sports team.

Dave Limp, the outgoing leader of the company’s Devices and Services division, said the feature, based on the company’s latest generative AI model, will be available as preview to customers on existing devices.

The rise of text-based generative artificial intelligence tools, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, have illustrated the need for Alexa to significantly improve its conversational abilities, but in the context of voice conversations in the home.

Amazon also previewed a more natural-sounding Alexa voice, with inflections more tuned to the specific messages it delivers, in a demo by Rohit Prasad, senior vice president and head scientist of Amazon Artificial General Intelligence.

Other announcements included:

• A new wall-mounted Alexa smart home control device called Echo Hub with an 8-inch touchscreen, providing a dashboard for device control, selling for $179.99 later this year.
• A new smartphone feature called Map View, giving customers an overview of their Alexa devices on a diagram of their home.
• Fire TV Soundbar, a new product from the company, for $119.99, shipping next week.
• Alexa Emergency Assist, a voice-enabled personal and family safety service, will be $5.99 a month or $59 a year.
• A new Echo Show 8 with an upgraded design, camera and audio enhancements, available next month for $149.99.
• There’s also a “Photos Edition” of the Echo Show 8 for $159.99, which works in conjunction with a $1.99 per month PhotosPlus subscription (after six-month free trial with device) for new photo features.
• A feature called Eye Gaze for the Fire Max 11 tablet for people with mobility or speech disabilities to use Alexa with their eyes.

See updates from Amazon in its live blog from the event.

Developing story, more to come.

Microsoft developed its first Surface tablet more than a decade ago under strict secrecy to give then-CEO Steve Ballmer the option to pull the plug shortly before it launched if the company’s PC partners objected.

Yet the company needed top hardware engineers to devote themselves to the project. Mike Angiulo, the former Microsoft executive who was secretly in charge of the project under then-Windows chief Steven Sinofsky at the time, solved this dilemma with a strategic recruit from another part of the company.

“How do you convince people to pour their hearts and souls into something that could ultimately be thankless?” Angiulo said this week. “You hire Panos Panay.”

Panay, who left his role as Microsoft’s chief product officer on Monday, is known for obsessing publicly over the details of the company’s Surface devices and other hardware products during launch events, which he has a habit of starting by declaring how “pumped” he is to be showing the team’s latest creations.

That attention to detail has also defined Panay’s management style off-stage, in his day-to-day role at Microsoft, according to several people who worked with him at the company over the years.

Such an approach, especially when combined with a certain intensity, can raise the risk of making people feel micromanaged, and it may not be for everyone.

But former colleagues said Panay has a knack for making people working on even the smallest parts of a project feel valued. He sees and appreciates the nuances of what they’re doing, and how it contributes to the larger whole.

“If I could meet with every single person in my organization, just to check on how they’re doing, I would absolutely do it,” Panay said during a virtual appearance at the 2020 Geekwire Summit, in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, explaining his strategy for helping members of his team adjust to the realities of remote work at the time.

In the office, former colleagues said, Panay was often the first to arrive and the last to leave.

In a LinkedIn post this week, a current Microsoft product management and marketing director, Ryan Day, recounted with appreciation a time when Panay spent 90 minutes giving him a one-on-one career counseling session: “Just me and him, during his workday,” he wrote, describing it as “a lot of time” to give someone at his level of the company.

Panay’s potential new role

But how would his style translate to Amazon?

That’s a key question after Bloomberg News reported that the e-commerce giant is poised to hire Panay to lead the division that makes its Alexa voice assistant and Echo devices. Panay would replace Dave Limp, Amazon’s devices and services chief, who said in August that he would step down this year after more than 13 years at the company.

The company has not yet commented on the Bloomberg report. Panay has yet to comment publicly beyond confirming on Twitter that he would be leaving Microsoft.

The timing is notable, with Amazon set to hold its annual Echo and Alexa product unveiling Wednesday morning in Arlington, Va. It’s not clear if Panay will make a cameo.

Microsoft, which named veteran executive Yusuf Mehdi to lead the Windows and Surface business, has confirmed that Panay won’t be appearing at its separate Windows and devices event, scheduled for Thursday in New York.

Apart from possible non-compete and trade secrets issues with Microsoft, one potential complication for Panay in accepting a new Amazon role could be his role as a board member of Sonos, which he has held since August 2020. The smart speaker maker offers Alexa functionality as part of its devices but also lists Amazon among its competitors in its annual 10K filing with the SEC.

Panay, who was 50 years old as of the filing of Sonos’ proxy statement in January, has a bachelor of science degree from California State University, Northridge, and an MBA from Pepperdine University.

He joined Microsoft in 2004, working on hardware projects in the company’s Entertainment & Devices Division before he was recruited to the nascent Surface team. After working as general manager of the Surface business, his role ultimately expanded to chief product officer overseeing the Windows and Devices division, including the integration of AI into the operating system through a feature called Windows Copilot.

Microsoft has long described its Surface hardware business, including tablets, laptops and desktop PCs, as a way of creating reference designs and setting examples for other Windows PC makers to follow. At the same time, under the leadership of Panay and his team, it has became a multi-billion dollar business in its own right.

The company’s Windows and Devices businesses surged during the pandemic but declined in the company’s most recent fiscal year, which ended in June. Windows revenue fell 13% to $24.7 billion, and Devices revenue, including the Microsoft Surface hardware lineup, was down 24% to $5.5 billion.

A shot in the arm for Alexa?

From the start, Panay won high marks for his passionate and conversational approach to Microsoft Surface launch events — which in recent years sometimes included him meandering through the audience as he told the tale of the company’s newest devices.

At first glance, that would seem to contrast with Amazon’s tightly scripted events.

But Amazon’s Devices & Services team might benefit from a shot in the arm in the form of Panay’s signature enthusiasm. Along with the rest of the company, the Echo and Alexa group went through difficult layoffs last year, amid reports that the division was losing as much as $10 billion a year.

At the same time, the rise of generative artificial intelligence tools, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, have illustrated the need for Alexa to significantly improve its conversational abilities.

Although Microsoft has discontinued its Cortana voice assistant, removing one area of direct competition between Microsoft and Amazon, a common interest in the future of AI could be a point of friction in the context of Panay’s potential new role.

Executives at both companies traditionally sign non-competition and confidentiality agreements that can limit their ability to work elsewhere for specified periods after their employment ends. Microsoft would naturally want to ensure that Panay doesn’t leverage any trade secrets in a new role.

Microsoft and Amazon went through a process of negotiation over confidentiality and trade secrets after senior Amazon Web Services exec Charlie Bell left Amazon and joined Microsoft in 2021 to lead its security division. The companies ultimately reached a truce in that situation, allowing Bell to continue in his new role.

There’s a long tradition of cross-pollination of executives, managers, and employees, between the Seattle-area tech giants, due in part to the fact that those who jump from one to another often don’t need to relocate.

Key executives who have moved from Microsoft to similar roles at Amazon in recent years include Ian Wilson, vice president of human resources for AWS; and David Treadwell, now senior vice president of Amazon’s Commerce Platform. Earlier examples included Brian Valentine, the longtime Windows executive who went on to lead engineering for Amazon starting in 2006, before retiring from that role in 2014.

We’ll have to wait to see if Panos Panay joins the list. But he’ll no doubt be pumped if it happens.

Amazon says it will seek to hire 250,000 people for the holiday season, a significant increase from past years, citing projections for a strong holiday shopping season.

As part of the announcement Tuesday morning, the company also said it’s putting $1.3 billion into pay increases for fulfillment and transportation employees, boosting the average pay for those positions to more than $20.50 per hour, representing an increase of more than 50% over the past five years.

Amazon says the 250,000-person hiring goal for the holidays includes seasonal, full-time, and part-time workers. The number is up from a target of 150,000 last year.

Responding to an inquiry from GeekWire, an Amazon spokesperson said the company bases its seasonal hiring goals each year on numerous factors, chief among them projected customer demand. The company is staffing up for what it projects to be a strong holiday season.

The new plan suggests a return to growth mode for Amazon’s warehouses after a post-pandemic period of decline.

In advance of the holidays last year, for the second quarter of 2022, Amazon posted the largest sequential employment decline in its history, largely through attrition, after overstaffing its warehouses to handle pandemic-driven demand. The impact of that decline was felt across the company’s U.S. fulfillment and distribution network.

The company separately made a record 27,000 layoffs in its tech and corporate workforce earlier this year.

As of the end of June, Amazon’s global employment, including corporate and warehouse employees, was 1.46 million people, down 4% year-over-year.

Amazon is adding a new wrinkle to “Just Walk Out,” combining its cashierless retail technology with RFID capability so that the quicker checkout experience can be offered on expanded selection of clothing and related merchandise.

Amazon’s Just Walk Out tech has traditionally been used in stores offering products such as food, beverages, groceries and home goods. The tech, which debuted in Amazon Go convenience stores in 2018, relies on cameras, shelf sensors, sensor fusion and computer vision to track what customers pick up.

With RFID (radio-frequency identification), unpackaged products such as clothing on hangers, hats and other soft goods can be purchased in stores using Just Walk Out. Each item for sale in such a store would have a unique RFID tag, which looks similar to a standard apparel tag.

Customers enter the store, shop for, handle and try on what they like, and then leave through an exit gate by using their credit or debit card, or hovering their hand over an Amazon One palm-scanning device. When they pass through the gate, the RFID tags are read by readers, and the credit card or Amazon One information will be charged.

“RFID technology has been around for decades and is typically used by stores to track and manage inventory. Given its prevalence in retail supply chains, we decided to figure out a way RFID could benefit customers in a checkout-free environment,” Jon Jenkins, vice president of Just Walk Out technology, AWS Applications, said in a blog post Tuesday.

The new combination of technology is already being used by the Seattle Seahawks in a Pro Shop Outlet location at Lumen Field. It was first piloted at Seattle’s Climate Pledge Arena near the end of the Seattle Kraken’s most recent NHL season.

To enable the new capability for Just Walk Out, Amazon worked with Avery Dennison, a provider of RFID sensor and digital identification solutions for the retail industry.

More than 70 Amazon-owned stores and more than 85 third-party retailers currently use Just Walk Out tech across the U.S., U.K., and Australia. These experiences include grocery stores, airport travel retailers, music and sports venues, theme parks, and shops and cafes on college campuses.

Amazon is expected to name Panos Panay, the longtime Microsoft Windows and Devices leader, as the new executive in charge of the division that includes its Alexa voice assistant and Echo smart devices, Bloomberg News reports, citing unnamed people familiar with the situation.

Microsoft announced Panay’s surprise departure earlier Monday morning.

Panay would replace Dave Limp, Amazon’s devices and services chief, who said in August that he would step down this year after more than 13 years at the company.

The news comes during a pivotal week for both companies. Amazon is scheduled to hold its annual Echo and Alexa product unveiling Wednesday morning at its second headquarters in Arlington, Va. Microsoft hosts its own event in New York City on Thursday where Surface and Windows-related announcements are expected. 

We’ve contacted Amazon for comment on the report. Microsoft isn’t commenting beyond its earlier statement on Panay’s exit.

Non-compete agreements have been a recurring issue when executives have moved between the companies. Issues of confidentiality and trade secrets came up when senior Amazon Web Services exec Charlie Bell left Amazon and joined Microsoft in 2021 to lead its security division. The companies ultimately reached a truce.

Microsoft has discontinued its Cortana voice assistant, which was previously a counterpart to Alexa, but the rise of generative AI could create new areas of competition between the companies.

Amazon’s Alexa group is under pressure to catch up to the conversational abilities of new forms of AI, most notably ChatGPT, made by Microsoft’s strategic partner OpenAI. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told analysts in April that Amazon was working on a new large language model for Alexa “that’s much larger, and much more generalized, and capable.”

Amazon conducted layoffs in its Devices & Services team in 2022 as part of company-wide cuts, amid reports that the division was losing as much as $10 billion a year.

Microsoft’s Windows and Devices businesses surged during the pandemic but declined in the company’s most recent fiscal year, which ended in June. Windows revenue fell 13% to $24.7 billion, and Devices revenue, including the Microsoft Surface hardware lineup, was down 24% to $5.5 billion.

Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft corporate vice president and consumer chief marketing officer, will lead the Windows and Surface business, according to an internal email this morning from Rajesh Jha, Microsoft executive vice president.

Brad Smith, the former Intuit CEO and current president of Marshall University, has joined the Amazon board of directors.

The Seattle-based company revealed the news in an SEC filing Wednesday. Smith will also join the board’s Audit Committee.

The West Virginia native served as CEO of business software giant Intuit, maker of TurboTax and Mint, from January 2019 until January 2022. He left to become president of Marshall University, his alma mater.

Smith is a board member at Humana, and sat on the Nordstrom board from 2018 to 2022. He’s the first new Amazon board member since 2021, when the company added former Goldman Sachs exec Edith Cooper.

Smith — not to be confused with Microsoft President Brad Smith — is Amazon’s 12th board director.

Former board member Rosalind Brewer departed in 2021 after taking the CEO job at Walgreens. Thomas Ryder retired that same year.

The board currently has seven men and five women. Amazon’s other board members are founder Jeff Bezos; CEO Andy Jassy; Jamie Gorelick; Daniel Huttenlocher; Judith McGrath; Indra Nooyi; Jonathan Rubinstein; Thomas Ryder; Patricia Stonesifer; and Wendell Weeks.

Amazon recently assigned new responsibilities to board members. Gorelick is the new lead director; Rubinstein chairs the Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee, and Cooper chairs the Leadership Development and Compensation Committee.

• Amazon announced Wednesday that it is partnering with National Housing Trust (NHT) on the initiative, in which Amazon’s capital will be used to acquire and build affordable homes for sale, in partnership with a network of local organizations.
• The effort is part of Amazon’s ongoing $2 billion Amazon Housing Equity Fund, a program that started in 2021 to create or preserve thousands of housing units with guaranteed affordable rents across the Puget Sound region; the Arlington, Va., region; and Nashville, Tenn.
• In the Seattle area, Amazon and NHT will initially partner with three organizations: Habitat for Humanity Seattle-King & Kittitas Counties, to support the construction of over 240 homes, as well as a down-payment assistance program, enabling 50 families to become homeowners in 2023; African Community Housing & Development (ACHD), to fund operating support as well as technical assistance to strengthen ACHD’s housing development capacity; and Homestead Community Land Trust, to help fund Homestead’s work to develop land and housing with local community partners.
• The Equity Fund has historically focused on rental properties, and the new pilot is the fund’s first step into home ownership.

Amazon is further expanding its delivery business with the official rollout of Amazon Shipping, a service for sellers that picks up items directly from their warehouses and delivers them to customers.

The service, which the company has offered in various forms in the past, is now available in 15 U.S. metro areas, with plans to expand the footprint in the future, the company said Wednesday morning.

Amazon Shipping is notable in part because it operates independently from the company’s fulfillment network, targeting businesses that would normally use UPS, FedEx or other traditional shipping services.

The company says Amazon Shipping is designed for sellers who manage and fulfill their own orders, including items purchased on Amazon.com or direct-to-consumer websites or other sales channels.

The service offers delivery in two to five days, with no extra cost for residential or weekend delivery. It also provides package tracking and the ability to receive a photo of a delivery when completed.

It’s part of a broader push by Amazon to expand its own business by offering a broader set of services for Amazon sellers. The company said Tuesday that it will offer sellers the ability to distribute products in bulk from Amazon’s warehouses to fulfillment channels and physical stores not affiliated with the e-commerce giant.

Amazon is holding its annual conference for sellers, Accelerate, in Seattle this week. The conference coincides with reports that the Federal Trade Commission is poised to sue Amazon on allegations including unfair business practices in its logistics services for sellers and pricing for third-party products.

Separately, Amazon this week announced an additional $840 million investment in its Delivery Service Partner program, designed in part to help the independent companies that deliver packages for Amazon to boost wages for drivers.

An expansion of Amazon’s supply chain services will give sellers the ability to distribute products in bulk from Amazon’s warehouses to fulfillment channels and physical retail stores not affiliated with the e-commerce giant.

The move, announced Tuesday morning, further broadens Amazon’s services for sellers beyond the virtual walls of Amazon.com. The company is pitching this larger set of services as a way for sellers to simplify their operations and reduce costs in moving products from warehouse to customer.

But it raises the question of whether sellers will become even more dependent on a company that already gets more than half their revenue, in some cases.

The news comes in advance of Amazon’s annual seller conference in Seattle this week, and amid reports that the Federal Trade Commission is poised to sue Amazon on allegations including unfair business practices in its logistics services for sellers and pricing for third-party products.

Combined with the company’s existing seller services, including Amazon Warehousing and Distribution, the new Multi-Channel Distribution service completes the basic infrastructure of what the company is now calling “Supply Chain by Amazon,” which it describes as an end-to-end set of services to move products from manufacturer to customer regardless of sales or distribution channel.

“The reality is, sellers are going to sell through multiple channels,” said Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon vice president of Worldwide Selling Partner Services, in an interview this week. “It’s a rational thing for brand owners to do, and so we want to support them across all the sales channels.”

With the expanded offering, Amazon is stepping up its competition against companies such as Shopify, Walmart, WareIQ, and others than offer various forms of e-commerce fulfillment and distribution for sellers.

San Francisco-based Flexport has likewise been expanding its own supply chain services into an end-to-end solution, including its acquisition of Shopify Logistics and Deliverr, before the abrupt departure last week of CEO Dave Clark, a former Amazon executive.

Flexport announced its own new end-to-end fulfillment service for small businesses a few hours before Amazon on Tuesday morning, and Flexport is planning its own event for customers in Seattle on Tuesday night, on the eve of the Amazon Accelerate seller conference.

Amazon’s expanded supply chain initiative builds on the core Fulfillment by Amazon service that traditionally stores sellers’ products in Amazon fulfillment centers and delivers them to Amazon customers. The company also offers an existing service called Multi-Channel Fulfillment, which supports Amazon’s Buy With Prime program to fulfill orders made on competing e-commerce websites.

Whereas the existing Multi-Channel Fulfillment service ships individual packages, the new Multi-Channel Distribution service will move pallets of product in bulk.

“Slowly but surely, Amazon is replicating the AWS playbook by broadening the availability of its fulfillment network,” wrote Wedbush analyst Scott Devitt in a note to clients, referring to the Amazon Web Services cloud platform. “Today’s announcement is another example of Amazon’s ongoing platform democratization, enabling monetization of incremental eCommerce and retail transactions by leveraging existing infrastructure.”

Amazon’s Mehta gave the hypothetical example of a seller currently working with multiple supply chain partners, requiring them to split up the goods from a shipping container for different sales and distribution channels. If they make a mistake in the allotment for one channel, it’s difficult to move products around.

“Having a single pool of inventory in bulk storage is helpful, to be able to optimize from there,” Mehta said. “All of those things drive more efficiency and lower costs for the seller. And so there’s a bunch of reasons it makes sense, not only for us to do, but in terms of the benefits it provides [to the seller].”

A February report by Marketplace Pulse, based on its review of financial documents from a sample of anonymous Amazon sellers, said more than 50% of their revenue is now going to Amazon, primarily in the form of fulfillment fees, advertising costs, and referral fees.

“Sellers are paying more because Amazon has increased fulfillment fees and made spending on advertising unavoidable,” the Marketplace Pulse report said.

Amazon’s revenue from third-party seller services topped $32 billion in the second quarter, up 18% year-over-year. Seller services were responsible for more than 24% of the company’s overall revenue for the period, second only to online store sales among Amazon’s major categories of revenue.

Other new seller services announced by Amazon on Tuesday include:

• Automatic discounts on cross-border transportation for Amazon Global Logistics customers;
• The expansion of Amazon Warehousing and Distribution to all customers, with reduced prices;
• Automated inventory replenishment through Fulfillment by Amazon.

Updated with analyst comment and details of Flexport’s new service.

Amazon added a new artificial intelligence policy to its content guidelines for authors who distribute their work through its Kindle Direct Publishing platform, reacting to a wave of new books written using generative AI tools.

The policy doesn’t prohibit the use of AI but requires disclosure by authors in certain situations. Amazon is making a distinction between using AI to generate content, which the company will require authors to disclose; and using AI to assist in the process of editing and refining copy, which will not need to be disclosed.

Here’s how the new policy defines the two categories.

• AI-generated: We define AI-generated content as text, images, or translations created by an AI-based tool. If you used an AI-based tool to create the actual content (whether text, images, or translations), it is considered “AI-generated,” even if you applied substantial edits afterwards.
• AI-assisted: If you created the content yourself, and used AI-based tools to edit, refine, error-check, or otherwise improve that content (whether text or images), then it is considered “AI-assisted” and not “AI-generated.” Similarly, if you used an AI-based tool to brainstorm and generate ideas, but ultimately created the text or images yourself, this is also considered “AI-assisted” and not “AI-generated.” It is not necessary to inform us of the use of such tools or processes.

The Associated Press reports that the initial impact of the new policy “may be limited because Amazon will not be publicly identifying books with AI,” but says Amazon is leaving the door open to revisiting the practice in the future.

The policy is notable as an early attempt by a major publishing platform to address one of the major issues created by the rapid rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other generative AI technologies this year.

The Authors Guild calls it “a welcome first step,” saying it follows “months of discussions between the Authors Guild and KDP leadership on the need for safeguards against AI-generated books flooding the platform and displacing human authors and to protect consumers from unwittingly purchasing AI-generated texts.”

With a footprint bigger than the Texas Longhorns football stadium, this 2-year-old, 11th-generation robotic fulfillment center employs 3,000 people and holds 35 million units in inventory, buzzing with activity for much of the day.

But as Amazon’s employees take a break, another group is still hard at work: Amazon’s Robin automated arms and Pegasus mobile drive units.

Robots don’t stop for lunch.

The yellow Robin arms identify packages using an array of cameras and sensors. They use high-tech retractable suction rods, in varying combinations, to pluck and place boxes and bags onto the blue Pegasus platforms.

The knee-high robots zip around in a computerized choreography, navigating via QR codes in the slate floor and using their little built-in conveyor belts to send packages down the designated chutes.

In the past, this work did not happen at Amazon fulfillment centers, where the primary tasks are putting products in packages, and labels on them. Traditionally, these packages are then routed via separate Amazon sortation centers, which then send them to the delivery stations responsible for getting them to customers.

The duo of Robin and Pegasus replace that intermediary stop.

There are nearly 40 Robin arms in this facility, part of a fleet of 1,000 of them deployed in the company’s warehouses across the country. Collectively, Robin robots handled about a billion packages last year, Amazon says, or more than 12% of the company’s total package volume over that timeframe.

These types of robots raise all sorts of questions about the future of work. A few years ago, before the pandemic and the rise of labor shortages, they might have created more concern about job loss.

But increasingly, Amazon is counting on robots to help make its warehouses safer.

“We really index on reliability, on quality, on scale, and most importantly, on safety,” said Tye Brady, the chief technologist for Amazon Robotics, describing the company’s approach in a recent interview.

The idea, he said, is to “eliminate the mundane, the repetitive, the tedious,” freeing up humans for higher-level work with less risk of physical wear and tear. “The more that we can pick up objects, sort objects, and put them into boxes automatically, the better it is for everybody involved.”

Amazon’s safety controversies

Safety is top of mind for others, as well. Federal and state regulators, labor unions, and Amazon shareholders have repeatedly raised red flags about Amazon’s warehouse injury rates. A few examples:

• In Amazon’s home state, the Washington Department of Labor & Industries recently cited a fourth Amazon facility for requiring workers “to execute repetitive motions, lifting, and other physical work at such a fast pace that it puts workers at risk for developing Work-Related Musculoskeletal Disorders.”
• A widely cited 2019 report by the Center for Investigative Journalism showed a higher injury rate at Amazon’s robotic fulfillment centers than at its older facilities at the time, indicating that human workers were struggling to keep up.
• A report by the union coalition Strategic Organizing Center, released in April of this year, asserted that Amazon’s “serious injury rate” was more than double the industry average.

Amazon disputes and denies these claims. The company, famously willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time, would see this as yet another example.

In a case that resumes later this month, Amazon is appealing the first three citations by Washington L&I, at facilities in Sumner, Kent, and DuPont, Wash., and dismissing as “categorically false” the agency’s allegation that the fourth citation, in Spokane, amounted to a willful violation.

In almost every other situation, Amazon takes issue with the numbers.

“Having spent some time with the safety data myself, there are a lot of ways you can spin that data and there are special interest groups that regularly skew them for their own agenda,” said Amazon CEO Andy Jassy at the company’s 2022 annual meeting, when a shareholder asked what he was doing about safety.

Releasing its annual safety report in July, the company said claims that its injury rates were significantly higher than the industry were based on misleading calculations from “outside groups with ulterior motives,” wrongly overlooking data from its peers and counterparts such as Walmart, Target, Costco, UPS, and FedEx.

“[S]ometimes we’re higher, and sometimes we’re lower than other companies, but to paint us as significantly worse than the rest of the industry simply isn’t true,” the company said in its July post. “At the same time, our goal isn’t to be average—we want to be best in class compared to our peers, and we are optimistic about our continued progress so far this year.”

Amazon maintains that robots will help. The company cites its 2022 safety data as an early indicator. Numbers provided by the company show that recordable incident rates and lost-time incident rates were 15% and 18% lower, respectively, at Amazon Robotics sites than they were at its non-robotics sites in 2022.

Amazon didn’t provide the number of robotic and non-robotic fulfillment sites used in the calculations, which would make the sample sizes clear. The company also hasn’t publicly broken out the difference in injury rates at its robotic and non-robotic sites for prior years, which would provide a sense for the trend over time.

Amazon’s robotic boom

But there’s no question that robots are doing more and more of the heavy lifting at Amazon fulfillment centers, as GeekWire saw first-hand during tours with site leaders at facilities in Austin and San Marcos, Texas, this summer.

It starts with the “Hercules” robotic platforms that deliver shelving units to workers at fixed workstations, eliminating the need to walk the floor to pick products. Amazon says there are now more than 750,000 of these units across its operations, an evolution of its acquisition of Kiva Systems more than a decade ago.

That change alone has been dramatic, said Robert Morua, a senior operations manager at AUS2, who recalled what it was like when he started 13 years ago as a front-line worker in a traditional Amazon warehouse.

“As a picker, I’d walk 20 miles a night picking products,” Morua recalled. “Here, the picker is standing in one spot, and all the product comes to the picker. So we’ve severely reduced all that walking, and all that wear and tear on the body.”

Even so, Amazon workers remain at high risk of ergonomic hazards and musculoskeletal disorders due to the fast pace of work, long hours, the heavy weight of items, awkward twisting, bending, and extending of their body, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration has found in a series of investigations at Amazon facilities.

Amazon says it’s making ongoing efforts to reduce injuries through process improvements and changes in the designs of its workstations, with the goal of improving efficiency and safety.

Examples from our Austin tour included basic upgrades such as the introduction of ergonomic ladders, and high-tech solutions such as software that stops associates during scheduled windows to lead them through stretching routines specific to the work they’re doing.

Workstations are equipped with lights that shine on individual bins in the fabric shelving units carried by the Hercules drives, showing workers where to place specific items. The system is programmed to prompt the associates to put smaller, lightweight items in the higher shelves, leaving heavier objects for shelves in their power zones.

“One of the biggest things we’ve worked on is reducing MSD [musculoskeletal disorder] injuries,” said Dom Gutierrez, the AUS2 workplace health and safety manager, pointing out some of the changes during our tour.

Beyond ergonomics, some safety regulators are also focusing on the risk created by noise levels in Amazon facilities. Washington L&I’s latest Amazon citation, for example, included allegations of “three serious and one general violation for noise levels that were too high when workers are not wearing appropriate hearing protection.”

Before stepping onto the floor at AUS2 as a visitor, I was given a high-visibility safety vest and required to put on special shoe covers with reinforced toes. However, there was no requirement to use any ear protection.

The noise from the high-speed conveyor belts was so loud at times on the tour that it was difficult to hear the Amazon site leaders, even from a close distance. They provided short-range wireless radios with earpieces to communicate.

Latest robotic advances

The introduction of robots has also created safety risks that the company has taken steps to address. Many of its existing robots operate behind fences to reduce the risk of unsafe interactions with workers.

The technicians who go behind the fences to work on Hercules drives, for example, wear special safety vests that send out radio signals causing the drives in their vicinity to stop moving when they’re in close proximity.

Elsewhere in the Austin facility, a large robotic arm puts containers of items onto pallets, surrounded by an invisible light curtain that automatically stops the arm from moving when someone moves into its work zone.

Amazon last year unveiled a new mobile drive unit, dubbed Proteus, that the company describes as its first fully autonomous robot designed to operate safely alongside humans on the warehouse floor.

Other new robots in the works promise to further reduce the risk of injury from repetitive motion.

• University of Washington researchers, working in an Amazon-funded lab, are testing a prototype robotic arm to remove items from the fabric pods. This was visible in a short video clip posted by U.S. Sen. Patty Murray’s office after visiting the UW’s Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering in August.
• Amazon is expanding its testing of Sparrow robotic arms, its first automated robots in the field that can grasp individual products of varying shapes and sizes, not just packages and boxes. Amazon says Sparrow can handle about 65% of the more than 100 million items in its inventory. 
• Amazon says it will begin field testing a new robotic system for containerized storage this fall at a facility in Houston. Unveiled last year, it’s designed to reduce the need to stoop, reach up, or climb ladders to retrieve or stow products, bringing the containers to workers in their “goldilocks zone” around the midpoint of their bodies.

Brady, the Amazon Robotics chief technologist, said he believes the company’s applied robotics — developing and deploying automated technologies, at scale, to solve real-world problems — will ultimately have implications beyond Amazon, influencing other industries.

He said this is what motivated him to join the company eight years ago.

“It’s not humans against machines,” he said. “It’s humans and machines working together to do that task, and we’re pioneering that movement.”

Coming Up: Tye Brady, Amazon Robotics chief technologist, will be the guest on this week’s GeekWire Podcast, available Saturday morning. Subscribe in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or any podcast app.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy made it clear in a recent internal meeting that he wants employees to “disagree and commit” to the company’s policy of working three days in the office, and find somewhere else to work if it doesn’t work for them.

We discuss the news in the first segment of the GeekWire Podcast this week, and ponder why Amazon seems to be getting a bigger backlash than other big companies implementing similar policies.

In the second segment, we consider new changes in the MLB automated ball/strike system for Triple-A games, as an update to Seattle Mariners CEO John Stanton’s comments in a recent interview with our GeekWire colleague Taylor Soper.

And finally, we give a sneak preview of the upcoming GeekWire Summit, scheduled for Oct. 19 at the iconic Seattle movie theater formerly known as the Cinerama. 

Listen above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

With GeekWire co-founders John Cook and Todd Bishop. Edited and produced by Curt Milton. Theme music by Daniel L.K. Caldwell.

Amazon named three additional executives to its senior leadership team Friday:

• Swami Sivasubramanian, a longtime AI leader for Amazon Web Services;
• Aicha Evans, CEO of Amazon-owned self-driving car company Zoox;
• David Brown, who oversees the key AWS Elastic Cloud Compute service, EC2.

Andy Jassy, the Amazon CEO, announced the additions in a message to employees that was also published on the company’s corporate site. The “s-team,” or “steam” as it’s known internally, now numbers 32 executives.

“Their customer obsession, inventiveness, propensity to be right a lot, curiosity and ability to learn, humility, very high standards, and missionary approach (always focusing on what’s best for customers — and the company as a whole vs. just their own area) are distinguishing characteristics that will make them effective steam members,” Jassy wrote of the three execs, referencing Amazon leadership principles.

Jassy added, “Additionally, the fact that we’re living in such an unusual time of invention and change makes me extra excited to have this trio join our crew.”

Here is Amazon’s updated roster of senior leaders, with new additions underlined, and prior text crossed out, to show how the group and executive roles/titles have changed since late 2022.

• Amit Agarwal, SVP and country manager, Amazon, India and Emerging Markets
• Colleen Aubrey, SVP, Performance Advertising Product and Tech
• Christine Beauchamp, SVP, North America Stores
• Jeff Blackburn, SVP, Global Media & Entertainment
• Peter DeSantis, VP of global infrastructure and customer support, AWS Utility Computing
• John Felton, SVP, Worldwide Operations
• Beth Galetti, SVP, People eXperience and Technology
• Matt Garman, SVP, AWS Sales and Marketing
• Russell Grandinetti, SVP, International ConsumerStores
• James Hamilton, SVP and Distinguished Engineer, AWS
• Drew Herdener, SVP, Worldwide Communications
• Doug Herrington, CEO, Worldwide Amazon Stores
• Tony Hoggett, SVP, WW Grocery Stores
• Mike Hopkins, SVP of Prime, Amazon Video and Amazon Studios
• Andy Jassy, CEO
• Paul Kotas, SVP, Advertising, Music & IMDb, and Grand Challenge
• Peter Krawiec, VP, Worldwide Corporate Development
• Dave Limp, SVP, Devices & Services
• Neil Lindsay, SVP, Prime and MarketingHealth
• Brian Olsavsky, SVP and Chief Financial Officer
• Rohit Prasad, SVP and head scientist, AlexaHead Scientist, Artificial General Intelligence at Amazon
• Adam Selipsky, CEO, Amazon Web Services
• Steve Schmidt, Chief Security Officer
• Dave Treadwell, SVP, e-commerce servicesCommerce Foundation
• David Zapolsky, SVP, Global Public Policy and general counselGeneral Counsel
• Steve Boom, VP of Amazon Music, Audio, Twitch, and Games
• Candi Castleberry, VP of Global Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Inclusive eXperiences and Technology
• Udit Madan, VP of Worldwide Last Mile, Amazon Transportation
• Rob Williams, VP of, Device Software and Services
• Aicha Evans, CEO, Zoox
• Swami Sivasubramanian, VP, AWS Data & AI
• David Brown, VP, Compute Services

Online merchants who use Shopify’s e-commerce platform will be able to natively integrate Amazon’s “Buy with Prime” program into their Shopify sites under an initiative unveiled by the companies Wednesday afternoon.

For Prime members, the news brings the promise of a more consistent checkout and delivery experience across a greater number of sites beyond Amazon.com.

Inside the industry, the surprise announcement amounts to a truce between two of the biggest players in e-commerce. It comes a year after Shopify warned merchants on its platform who tried to integrate Buy with Prime on their own that they were violating its terms of service and creating a security risk.

The nuances of the integration offer clues about compromises made by both companies: Amazon Prime members who sign into their Amazon accounts on a “Buy with Prime”-enabled Shopify site will use a payment method from their Amazon wallets — but Shopify will process the payments through its checkout system.

In addition, Amazon Pay will now be a payment option inside Shopify Payments.

“Most importantly, we’re giving customers access to Prime members, while also ensuring that they keep 100% control of their brand and their customer data, all within the Shopify admin,” said Shopify President Harley Finkelstein in a video released by the Ottawa, Canada-based company on Wednesday afternoon.

The integration will work through a Buy with Prime app for Shopify merchants. It’s initially available to merchants on an invite-only basis, but Amazon says it will be available to all U.S.-based Shopify merchants using the Seattle-based e-commerce giant’s fulfillment network by the end of September.

In a press release, Peter Larsen, the Amazon VP in charge of Buy with Prime, described the development of the app as a collaboration between Amazon and Shopify.

“Great to work with Shopify to help make this happen,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy posted Thursday on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Amazon has more details for merchants on this page.

Buy with Prime, announced by Amazon in April 2022, expands the company’s membership program beyond Amazon.com to third-party e-commerce sites. It lets Prime members buy items on non-Amazon e-commerce sites just as they would on Amazon.com, including streamlined checkout, and free delivery and returns.

Corrected on Aug. 31 to clarify that Amazon Pay will be a payment option inside Shopify Payments.

Amazon and Google are putting their rival voice assistants on the same devices for the first time, allowing users to alternate between Alexa and Google Assistant depending on their preference and the situation.

The combination will debut with the release of Harman’s new JBL Authentics 200, 300, and 500 smart speakers in September. After initial setup, users will be able to invoke either assistant by saying “Alexa” or “Hey Google.”

Examples cited by Amazon include the ability to ask Google Assistant about a product, and then ask Alexa to buy it from Amazon; or receive a delivery notification from Alexa, and ask Google Assistant to set a reminder about it.

The integration extends to basic operation of the smart speakers. It will be possible, for example, to start a timer with Alexa and end it with Google Assistant, if users forget which voice assistant they used at the outset. This capability is known as universal device commands.

Amazon says the companies have also taken steps to ensure that the assistants don’t talk over one another.

It’s part of Amazon’s longstanding push for interoperability among different voice assistants. The company founded the Voice Interoperability Initiative in 2019. Google is not listed among the more than 90 members of the initiative.

Harman says the JBL Authentics 200, 300, and 500 smart speakers are scheduled be released in September for $329.99, $429.99, and $699.99, respectively.

• The price increase does not affect Prime members, who pay $139 a year for a subscription that includes free shipping and other perks, such as access to streaming content.
• “We continually evaluate our offerings and make adjustments based on those assessments,” Amazon spokesperson Kristina Pressentin told GeekWire. “Prime members continue to enjoy free delivery on over 300 million items, with tens of millions of items available for free same or one-day delivery.”
• The testing will apply to some customers in randomly generated markets, and raising the price could drive more customers to sign up for Prime.
• Amazon previously raised the minimum order amount for non-subscribers from $35 to $49 annually in 2016 and then back down to $35 in 2017, and later $25, as it faced new shipping pricing competition from Walmart.
• Amazon has been making a number of changes as it looks for ways to cut costs. The company slashed 27,000 corporate and tech jobs; added new fees to its Amazon Fresh grocery delivery service; ended the charity program AmazonSmile; ended its healthcare business; closed a handful of Amazon Go stores; and paused construction on its HQ2 project.

Amazon is headed back to college for the new school year.

The company’s cashierless “Just Walk Out” technology is being deployed for the first time by Grubhub as part of the food ordering platform’s Grubhub Campus experience.

Just Walk Out will be used at Loyola University Maryland in Baltimore at a store called Bowman Express, which offers freshly prepared foods, beverages, frozen foods, snacks, and convenience store items.

Grubhub partners with 300 higher education institutions and says it is the only food ordering and delivery marketplace that works with campus dining programs. The company — now part of Just Eat Takeaway — competes against DoorDash, Uber Eats and others in restaurant food delivery. It previously partnered with Amazon on a Prime Day promotion offering free, one-year Grubhub+ memberships.

To use Just Walk Out at Loyola, students scan a QR code in the Grubhub app to enter the store. The technology, which relies on an array of overhead cameras and computer vision, detects what shoppers take from or return to the shelves. When customers complete the shopping experience, they leave the store without having to wait in line and the payment will automatically be deducted from their meal plan or other stored payment methods linked to their Grubhub account.

Amazon first debuted Just Walk Out at its Amazon Go convenience stores, and it’s now in use in a variety of locations, including grocery stores, airports, music and sports venues. It debuted in a liquor store for the first time earlier this month in Seattle.

In addition to Loyola, Amazon’s Just Walk Out is in use on several other college campuses in retail settings, including: Marymount University in Arlington, Va.; University of Dayton in Dayton, Ohio; Marywood University in Scranton, Pa.; Lafayette College in Easton, Pa.; CSU – Long Beach in Long Beach, Calif.; and the University of Pittsburgh.

Grubhub plans to add Just Walk Out to more food locations at Loyola and on additional campuses across the country during the 2024 school year.

• Fig has several products, including “Autocomplete,” and “Dotfiles” for managing shell configuration.
• In a blog post announcing the news, Fig co-founders Brendan Falk and Matt Schrage said they’ll continue supporting existing Fig users.
• “AWS believes that generative AI represents a major technological shift to transform the way its customers build, and we are beyond excited to be a part of that larger vision,” they wrote in the post.
• Founded in 2020, Fig graduated from Y Combinator that same year. It raised a $2.2 million seed round in 2021 from investors including General Catalyst, which led the round, and other tech execs. Falk and Schrage both attended Harvard University.