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hi i m carl azuz for cnn 10. we've got
something special lined up for you today
this show is centered on a single big
topic because in the business world
there are few bigger topics than amazon
in 1995 the company had launched as a
retail website that sold books and not
much else from there well it's grown a
bit amazon sells most of the stuff you
can buy at a mall at a grocery store and
a lot of other types of stores too it
offers online content cloud computing
movies music and it not only still sells
books it helps people publish them today
amazon is one of the top five most
valuable companies on the planet it's
worth more than one and a half trillion
dollars and it grew that big in a
relatively short amount of time its
founder jeff bezos with a net worth of
more than 180 billion dollars according
to the forbes business magazine however
the company he founded has seen its
share of bumps in the road amazon has
been criticized in the past for what it
paid its employees three years ago the
average salary for an amazon employee
was twenty eight thousand dollars per
year that was twenty thousand less than
the average yearly salary in america
amazon has raised its minimum wage to
fifteen 15 an hour for all employees
since then as people spent more time
shopping online and less in retail
stores the infamous amazon effect
occurred in america with thousands of
physical stores shutting down and tens
of thousands of retail jobs lost and
while alexa amazon's virtual artificial
intelligence assistant has found a place
in many homes in recent years privacy
advocates have raised concerns about
smart speakers because they're always
listening as a company amazon is massive
even as other businesses laid off
employees because of the effects of the
coronavirus pandemic amazon grew
tremendously hiring half a million
people in 2020 increasing its workforce
to more than one million two hundred
thousand it's a complicated company like
some of the challenges it's faced it's
also changed the way the world buys
goods
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welcome so i've been here amazon goes
the ultimate grab-and-go shopping
experience literally grab it off the
shelves and go you use the app to enter
the store once you're in you can put the
phone away and you shop the rest of the
store just like you would any other
store with one key difference when
you're done
you could just walk out nothing is
simple about the technology behind this
cashier-less store
the amazon go market uses artificial
intelligence to monitor what you've
reached for on the shelf and to make
sure you're charged for what you walked
out with and nothing else what we had to
do unique in this use case was build the
sensors
the cameras all these cameras
the cameras the cameras in the ceiling
we had to build a specific machine
learning algorithms the problem that we
have to solve in amazon go is who took
what when i take this item off
the shelf it's in my virtual cart when i
put it back the item goes back it's an
easy problem to solve when you have a
single person in the store but when
there's multiple people a lot of
products if you look around look very
similar to each other right so that's
where the challenge comes in
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the amazon go store is by no means the
only place where amazon uses ai we've
got hundreds of teams working on
artificial intelligence programs across
amazon artificial intelligence like
machine learning powers the simplicity
that we always want to offer to our
customers whether it's fulfilling orders
or delivering packages those teams are
working constantly to improve the
customers experience
inside amazon's warehouses ai is hard at
work
these are amazon robotics drive units
once a customer actually purchases an
item either on their mobile app or on
their computer or laptop the system
identifies the pod where the item is
actually located in a field and the bot
maps out the most efficient way through
using machine learning to get that pod
which has that item that that customer
purchased to the associate so there's
some people out there that will hear
robots machine learning ai and think
jobs they're going to be gone what we've
actually determined when we've actually
deployed our solutions in our
fulfillment networks is that we actually
are relying a lot more on our associates
we've increased their efficiency and it
really gives them the ability to work on
different tasks and we've actually grown
our associate employments across the
globe to date
alexa order dog biscuits and of course
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the ai tool you're most familiar with
here's what i found is always learning
new tricks achieving what alexa is right
now is a super hard challenge going from
that to the future um i would like alexa
to respond to the
your mood your sentiment your feelings
as expressed in your speech
the one key advantage we have is we now
have so much more data so is it a big
challenge yes are we up to that
challenge heck yes
an evolution of alexa is it still in its
infancy is it a toddler now or is she a
teller now an adolescent teenager
certainly hasn't graduated from college
no
a.i hasn't graduated from college
overall right and i think ai as a field
is in its infancy think of it as a older
toddler
you know who's going to grow up to be an
adult that just stuns us with her
brilliance right is where we are
is amazon a monopoly well it's not
really an easy question to answer first
you have to understand what the core
tenant of jeff bezos's business
philosophy is
patience
go back to the original letter that jeff
bezos wrote investors in 1997. he wrote
that investors to amazon shouldn't
expect amazon to operate like most
companies because amazon wouldn't judge
itself by short-term profits you know
anything that almost every other company
cares about only the long-term and bezos
and amazon stayed true to that its first
few years amazon barely made a profit it
invested billions of dollars back into
the business and it just kept growing
and growing and growing and growing and
now that patience has paid off with
incredible profits over the last few
years we all know on some level what a
monopoly is we've played the game
but in the context of antitrust law it's
a specific thing it's meant to stop a
company from forming they can dominate
the market in such a way that
competition is impossible
those who do not think amazon is a
monopoly say that because amazon is
offering its customers lower prices it
can't possibly be an anti-trust case
those low prices are a benefit to
consumer welfare and it would be
impossible to regulate exactly how low
is too low for prices the load star of
antitrust enforcement is how are
consumers affected do consumers pay more
do they have less choice then it's time
for the antitrust cops to get on the
beat this is david balto he worked on
antitrust cases for the justice
department and the fdc for years and is
skeptical about amazon being a monopoly
when consumers are paying less and have
a greater amount of choice which seems
to be the simple message from amazon's
business model there's not a reason for
intense anti-trust scrutiny but some say
that business model is a direct threat
to customers this is lena khan she's a
lawyer who has really helped shape the
debate around amazon and anti-trust law
people like her amazon's willingness to
sustain massive losses isn't just a
savvy business move it's an example of
predatory pricing so predatory pricing
is when a company prices a good below
cost and is doing so basically in order
to drive out its competitors so that it
is able to kind of enjoy a dominant
place in the market all of those things
are a really high bar for the government
to prove and because of that a
successful case on predatory pricing
hasn't been litigated in decades that's
not for a lack of will we certainly at
the ftc and the clinton administration
had predatory pricing investigations but
at the end of the day you have to
convince yourself that consumers would
be better off if you stop these
practices and that's like looking for a
unicorn but to those who do think amazon
right now is acting as a monopoly the
government's view of predatory pricing
is outdated the reality is with tech
companies um you have a marketplace
where that is winner take all so if
you're a facebook or an amazon or google
your main goal is to try and acquire as
many users as possible at the very
earliest stages because once you have a
lot of users it's going to be much more
difficult for rivals to divert users
away from you and so in that scenario
predatory pricing actually becomes very
rational it's important to note that the
question of predatory pricing is really
only one of the questions surrounding
amazon there are also concerns about
just how large amazon has become as a
business so in addition to be an online
retailer it also is a huge content
producer is a book publisher it has a
huge cloud computing service the fact
that amazon is involved in all these
different lines of business positions it
to use its dominance in the online space
in order to benefit its other lines of
businesses and i think that's something
that's really problematic what we want
from a consumer's perspective is for
those people who provide services for us
to use the bargaining leverage of having
all those customers to lower costs as
much as possible and that's
fundamentally what amazon has done so
whether amazon has an unfair advantage
over its competitors whether it's a
monopoly all those things are an open
debate but what is not a debate is right
now amazon
is winning
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