Amazon CEO Andy Jassy visited the company's Vancouver office with a message for the more than 46,000 Amazon employees across the country: Canada is an important business to Amazon, with a team that remains scrappy, innovative, and customer obsessed.
"Our Canada business is a very substantial business," Jassy said during a fireside chat with Jesse Dougherty, VP of AWS Customer Experience, in front of a live audience of 200 Amazonians. "It matters a lot to the company. It matters a lot to the leadership team and me."
Jassy has a personal connection to the country's Amazon story. He was present at the launch of Amazon.ca in 2002, when he traveled with founder Jeff Bezos to Toronto for the occasion. More than two decades later, the company operates nearly all of its business lines in Canada — retail, logistics, advertising, AWS, Prime Video, and devices — from offices stretching from Vancouver to Halifax.
The numbers back that commitment. Amazon has invested approximately $65 billion in Canada since 2010, with an additional $25 billion committed to AWS infrastructure over the next decade.
A trillion-dollar ambition
Jassy laid out a sweeping vision for Amazon in the years ahead. He noted that 80% to 85% of worldwide retail spending still takes place in physical stores — a share he expects to shift significantly during the next decade, with the aid of speed and selection improvements like same-day delivery, drone delivery, and expanding grocery operations.
On the cloud computing side, the company has big ambitions: "I believe that AWS has a chance to be a $1 trillion revenue run-rate business in time. There is no trillion-dollar business today. And we have a chance at Amazon to have two of them between retail and AWS."
AI that solves real problems
When the conversation turned to AI, Jassy drew a clear line on the company's approach.
"We don't build experiences just because we think it's cool,” he said. “We're trying to solve real customer problems."
He described two main areas of focus. The first is building tools for developers and companies, including Amazon SageMaker AI for training custom models, Amazon Bedrock for cost-effective inference, and Amazon AgentCore for building AI agents at scale.
"The major way that companies are going to realize value in AI is going to be through agents," Jassy said.
The second area is using AI to reimagine Amazon's consumer experiences — from shopping to entertainment to Alexa.
"Whatever are the leading customer experiences today, they're not going to be the winning experiences three to five years from now," he said. "We have to disrupt ourselves, reinvent ourselves, and do it proactively."
That philosophy is already playing out with Alexa. Jassy said the decision to rebuild the voice assistant from the ground up was "incredibly easy" once generative AI changed what was technologically possible. The harder part was getting teams to let go of what they had spent more than a decade building. He said he’s excited about what’s coming to Alexa Plus soon.
Appointment TV and NHL on Prime Video
Jassy also reflected on being a lifelong hockey fan. He attended New York Rangers games with his dad starting at the age of three, and he couldn't resist a playful nod to history — his Rangers defeated the Canucks in the 1994 Stanley Cup Finals.
He explained the business case behind Amazon's recent NHL deal, which brings 27 regular-season Wednesday night games and exclusive playoff games to Prime Video.
"There's a reason that 95 of the top 100 rated shows every year are sports — it's really the last of appointment TV," he said. "We find that when customers start using Prime Video, they tend to be more engaged with us shopping-wise downstream."
Reaching every corner of Canada
Canada is home to some of the most remote communities in the world, and Jassy was emphatic that location should not determine the quality of a customer's experience.
"It shouldn't be the case that only people in urban or metropolitan areas are able to enjoy that experience," he said.
He noted that Amazon has already reduced delivery times from weeks to days in several remote northern locations and described ongoing investment to reach customers that traditional delivery networks were never built for.
Jassy also discussed Amazon's low Earth orbit satellite service, Amazon Leo, noting that 500 million households worldwide lack broadband connectivity. Amazon currently has approximately 400 satellites in orbit and is heading toward 3,000.
'The straight line was a lie'
When asked about navigating uncertainty, Jassy cited a musical source of inspiration: a New Zealand band called The Beths, whose most recent album is titled Straight Line Was a Lie.
"Anything big and expansive and hard in a dynamic area — it just isn't a straight line," he said. "It's very useful to remember because it's easy to get frustrated if it just doesn't work out right away." He shared two stories from Amazon's early years. The first was the Marketplace, which failed twice — first as an auctions platform, then as a feature called Z Shops — before succeeding when the company placed third-party products directly on its own product pages.
The second was AWS. Jassy recalled walking past a whiteboard that tracked daily revenue for the S3 storage service shortly after it launched: "$11.73. I'm sure glad we committed all this resource to doing this."
Today, AWS is one of the world's largest cloud businesses, with a $169 billion revenue run rate.
Never stop learning
When asked for a single parting piece of advice, Jassy said Amazonians should be relentless about learning. He broke it down into specific steps — be self-aware about gaps, challenge your most closely held beliefs, listen to others, stay curious about the world outside your own work, and put in the effort to actually change.
"The things I'm most proud of," he said, "have not been simple.
