Name: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the company
Uploaded: 2022-01-21
Duration: 4 min 21 s
Description: Jassy spoke at a Davos panel hosted by Fortune.

Jassy spoke at a Davos panel hosted by Fortune.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the company

Leadership

Andy Jassy spoke at a Davos leadership panel hosted by Fortune.

Amazon CEO on how the company was impacted by COVID-19

Jassy spoke at Davos panel hosted by Fortune.

Watch: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the company

you know, I think that the pandemic has impacted virtually every business. It's hard to find ones that hasn't impacted. And um it's been very difficult and challenging for everybody and uh you know, if I just um if I look at uh at the impact it's had on amazon, if I if I start in our retail business, we just almost overnight, you know, whatever role we thought we were playing in the world, in our retail business before the pandemic, we realized pretty quickly, once it started that that was gonna be magnified with with everything being closed and so we just had unprecedented demand. Um you know, we grew 2-3 times faster in the 1st 18 months than we had anticipated. And that demand didn't just kind of steadily happen. It really arrived overnight. And so, you know, and then all sorts of things, we had to kind of handle a lot larger demand than we had ever had a reason to plan for. Um very quickly we had to do it while we had um way to keep people safe and keep people socially distanced. Um and a lot of people not showing up for work and understandably, um either because they were sick or they were they were afraid we had um find very large amounts of um, you know, masks and hand sanitizer and thermometers. We set up testing centers and all our sites, we've now set up vaccine vaccine clinics effectively, um, you know, and and we had to change a lot of our processes. If you look at our fulfillment centers, I mean we have processes that we've honed and built over a long period of time that require people to be relatively close to one another. We could change about 100 and 50 of those processes to be able to do it safely for for employees. You know, when all this happened, if you grow that fast and that short of time, Uh you know, we had a footprint that we have built a fulfillment centers in the 1st 25 years of Amazon, which is a pretty big footprint that we've had to double in the last 24 months. Um which you know, trying to do that very quickly, very difficult. And then hire, you know, all the while hire hundreds of thousands of people to be able to get products out there. So it's it's just been, you know, it's it's challenging and it's been hard and um we've had to adjust every step of the way to try and help make it happen. Yeah. And and Andy I assume web services is also, well, I know web service has also been growing at a crazy rate. If you cast that forward, if you look at the year ahead, what what do you, What does that tell you about the year ahead? Surely growth isn't gonna continue at that kind of rape. But what are you seeing for the next 12 months? Well, I think just, you know, on the technology side. And you mentioned our cloud computing business aws. I mean I think we had so many conversations that um you know, for for years large enterprises thinking about, you know what their move might be to the cloud and when you have to do something really discontinuous overnight, like move from your offices and where you normally do your work to to home, you have to change the way you operate. And I think people saw during the pandemic that those that were in the cloud had an easier time doing. It was more cost effective and they had the elasticity to scale up when they needed to and then to stop paying for it when there were issues, demand issues in their business. So there were so many of these conversations that went from talking about making a big shift to the cloud to happening um and planning during that time. So I just think if anything it probably accelerated people moving to the cloud by a few years. Um You know, and I think also just look at what's happening for for all of us in our corporate facilities. I mean not all of us, but many of us we don't have people in the office is the same way right now. And you know, I think many of us we're hoping once we got to the top of this year that we were gonna have more people back and different people were handling it differently but with the army crawl and it's kind of um you know it's ball button and so I don't think, personally I think people will come back in bigger numbers than before, but I think it's not going to look like what it was before. I think they're going to be certain functions and certain teams that predominantly work remotely and others that you know, that need to be together and work in the office.