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.

We’re also trying to close the digital divide for rural communities. There are billions of people on the planet who lack high-speed internet access, and millions of businesses, governments, and other organizations operating in places without reliable connectivity. If you don’t have broadband connectivity, you can’t engage in many of the digital activities (e.g. education, business, information retrieval, shopping, entertainment, etc.) that people take for granted in metropolitan locations. Over the last seven years, we’ve built a low Earth orbit satellite network (Amazon Leo) and put more than 200 satellites into space (which is the third-largest low Earth orbit network operating today). With a few thousand more satellites launching in the coming years, the constellation is expanding rapidly. Apart from enabling this connectivity, Leo will offer three unique benefits. First, the performance will be stronger (about six to eight times better on uplink, and two times better on downlink) than what customers have access to now. Second, this performance will come at a lower cost than alternatives. And third, Leo will seamlessly integrate with AWS to enable enterprises and governments to move data back and forth for storage, analytics, and AI.

While Amazon Leo is officially scheduled to launch in mid-2026, we already have meaningful revenue commitments from enterprises and governments. Most recently, Delta Airlines, the highest grossing airline in the world, has announced it’s chosen Amazon Leo for its future Wi-Fi, and will begin with 500 planes in 2028. They join other Leo customers like JetBlue, AT&T, Vodafone, DIRECTV Latin America, Australia’s National Broadband Network, NASA, and others.

Amazon could be successful for a long time without investing this way in robotics, faster rural delivery, and broadband connectivity for underserved customers and geographies. But, we believe we can invent ways to change what’s possible for customers, are hungry to do so, and are confident these investments will yield meaningful growth and return on invested capital (“ROIC”) for the company.