To deliver for customers, it’s essential to anticipate what will make their lives easier and better every day, and wherever possible, to invent the next inflections.In the following excerpt from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s latest annual letter to shareholders, he shares three ways the company is innovating to achieve that:We try to anticipate what will make customers’ lives easier and better every day, and invent the next inflection. Historically, we’ve successfully done so in areas like Retail, Logistics, AWS, Ads, Kindle, Alexa, and Pharmacy. There are too many new efforts in flight to mention them all, but will mention a few.First, despite many improvements over the years, customers always want lower costs and faster delivery speed. While we continue to work on productivity and inventory levels, robotics provides a step-level change for how we can deliver faster, reduce the cost of carrying more selection, and automate movements that cause strains and injuries to our teammates. Accelerated by acquiring Kiva in 2012, and investing in numerous robotics initiatives the last 14 years, we now have over one million robots operating in fulfillment centers helping with stowing, picking, sorting, and intra-facility transport. And, we've done this while continuing to be one of the largest job creators in the country. While the above progress is substantial, we’re still in the early stages of how we’ll leverage robotics. Expect us to keep innovating on form factors, use case diversity, agility, grasping, and intelligence. And, wherever we can leverage our scale and real-time feedback loop from so many robots in our fulfillment network to build robotics solutions for other industrial and consumer customers, we’ll explore doing so.Second, we understand that rural customers are often de-prioritized by logistics and telecom providers because remote communities are more expensive to serve. While other companies have been backing away from these customers, we’ve been running to them. We’ve committed over $4 billion to expand our rural delivery network. Customer response has been overwhelmingly positive, with the average number of monthly Same-Day customers in rural areas nearly doubling in 2025 compared to the prior year. Once this expansion is complete, our network will be able to deliver over a billion more packages each year to customers living in over 13,000 zip codes spanning 1,200,000 square miles.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy talks 6 truths surrounding the rise of AI