Amazon’s new CEO can either help workers and salespeople or automate them



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Andy Jassy takes over a very unusual “tech” company.

Amazon has several times as many employees as any of its competitors, such as Microsoft, Google and Apple, and many of them are low-skilled manual workers rather than software engineers. Amazon is also a partner with around 2.4 million active sellers in the market, which generate the majority of sales on its retail platform. But the new CEO, Mr. Jassy – a loyal MP and dedicated student of founder Jeff Bezos – has at his disposal a powerful tool for managing such a vast ocean of workers and partners: a cloud-based software infrastructure just as vast as he has supervised since its inception.

Amazon uses software to manage in a way that is unlike almost any other business, with the possible exception of gig economy giants Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and Instacart. Whether they’re driving a delivery van, picking up items from the shelves, or trying to maintain their product inventory to avoid being written off, Amazon employees, contractors, and vendor-partners are monitored, evaluated, rewarded, and even reported for reprimand or coaching by software.

While Mr. Jassy is often described by those who worked for him as being a lot like Jeff Bezos, but perhaps warmer and more fuzzy, there is arguably currently a stark contrast between the way he treats his immediate relationships. and the way Amazon’s algorithms and artificial intelligence treat its millions of frontline workers and market sellers. If Mr. Jassy can figure out how to use algorithms to manage workers and partners as humanely as he seemingly manages the people he works with personally, that may prove to be his defining legacy as CEO.

After building Amazon Web Services from a small start-up he ran within Amazon, started in the early 2000s, in the cloud market giant (and generating half of Amazon’s profits ), Mr. Jassy not only understands internet plumbing for countless tech companies. AWS supports, from Netflix to Slack, but also how it connects to the myriad of businesses owned by Amazon itself. Now 53, Mr. Jassy joined Amazon in 1997, immediately after graduating from Harvard Business School.

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