CNBC Exclusive: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy Speaks with CNBC's Jim Cramer on "Mad Money"

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Category: Business/Financial News

Published on Wednesday, 02 July 2025 12:41

Written by CNBC Mad Money

CNBC's Jim Cramer interviewed Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on "Mad Money," covering a range of topics from the big why's in the "Why Culture," investments in Starlink, Alexa plus, robotics and the evolution of Amazon's delivery options.

An excerpt of the interview which aired Monday, June 30, is below.

JIM CRAMER: Andy, you often talk about a why culture. Why we do things? Why do we found out -- offer books? Why do we do professional reviewers, when you have individual reviewers? What are the big why's that you're looking at right now?

ANDY JASSY: Oh, my gosh. I mean, we're constantly looking at everything, every customer experience we have and asking, why can't it be better? So, despite the fact that we have made so much progress in getting items to customers so much more quickly in our retail business, we keep asking ourselves, why can't it be faster? You know, a couple years ago, most people got items two to three days. Today, most of the items get there in a day or less. We're working on drones which we think can get it to customers inside of an hour. So, we ask, why can't it be so much easier for customers to do A.I. in the U.S. business? Every single business has a big number of why questions—

CRAMER: Don't be hard on yourself. I ordered a smart fast charger yesterday at 2:00, and it came at 4:00. So, you must be doing something right.

JASSY: Pretty good, two hours, yes.

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CRAMER: Two hours. How is that possible?

JASSY: Well, I mean, we have these facilities. They're kind of innovations on our fulfillment network called same-day facilities. And they have a different style fulfillment network with fewer floors. And we stock a couple hundred thousand of the top moving SKUs in that facility. And then we hook up delivery direct from that facility. And so, we're able to get most items to people in that same-day facility within three to five hours. Two hours is pretty good.

CRAMER: Now, will I see one day a robot at my door giving it to me so you can cut it down to an hour and 45 minutes?

JASSY: Well, you know, first of all, I don't think that you need a robot to be able to cut it down. I think with what we're doing with Prime Air, which is our drones project, which we have made so much progress on the last couple years, I actually believe we will be able to get items to people inside of an hour and maybe even as quickly as 30 minutes. I do believe over time, as we continue to expand the use of robotics in our fulfillment network, that we will have robots who will help do delivery and transportation for us.

CRAMER: So, rural is going to use drone, perhaps robot too? Talk about rural, because that's something you just announced. Those are people who don't have maybe even a brick-and-mortar within 10 miles.

JASSY: Yes. I mean, if you think about the basic Prime experience for most customers in any kind of metropolitan area, they're getting most of their items now in a day or so. And then you look at the rural experience. And because we don't have delivery stations and fulfillment centers the same way out in these rural areas, they're getting items in several days. So, they don't get the full Prime experience that people in metropolitan areas do. And at a time when most logistics providers are walking away from rural customers because it's more expensive to serve them out in those areas, we are increasing our investment. We just announced a $4 billion investment to build delivery stations and fulfillment centers out there, so we can get items to people in a day or two and they can have the Prime experience everybody else has.

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CRAMER: Now, when you do that, though, do you think, well, you know what, we're going to lose money on this, but it's the right thing to do? Because, sometimes, I feel like Project Kuiper is a -- you lose money, right thing to do, or are you going to make money in rural [areas]?

JASSY: Well, I would say two things. Both what we do with rural and what we do with Project Kuiper, I believe, are significant up-front investments.

CRAMER: Right.

JASSY: But they're both going to be great for customers and they will be good for the business down the road. So, on the rural side, what we find is, the faster we're able to get items to customers, the better customer experience they have, the more they will sign up for Prime. And when customers sign up for Prime, it turns out they end up doing a lot of their shopping with Amazon. So, you make that big up-front investment to serve rural customers better, and it comes back over a longer period of time. Kuiper, which is our low-Earth orbit satellite that we're building, remember there's 400 to 500 million households around the world who don't have broadband connectivity, so they don't get to do business online or entertainment or shopping or education. And so, we're building this network, so they actually have that connectivity. And it's going to completely change what's possible for them. Again, it's a really significant up-front capital investment, but it has a lot of the same types of financial characteristics as AWS has, which is it's high capital intensity, but it has really good return on invested capital. We believe that's going to be great for customers and great for Amazon.

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CRAMER: Why do we keep reading that you're behind it?

JASSY: On Kuiper?

CRAMER: Yes.

JASSY: Well, the -- if you look at the technology, there's really only two companies that really are going to have this modern technology that we have with low-Earth orbit satellite. One is Starlink, who's been in the market for several years. The other is going to be Kuiper. We just got our first -- we're in the process now of launching all of our satellites into space. We just launched our second set of them. We have got 54 satellites up there, on our way to actually having enough hopefully by the end of the year to have a commercial service and a lot more in '26 and '27. So, a lot of people say, "Why do you want to do this business?" And apart from the attractive financial characteristics I mentioned, I think the thing to think about with our technology in this space is in part because we're coming later and the innovation that we have gone through it's going to be better performance on the up and down link. It's going to be meaningfully more flexible on the antenna side for people. It's going to have lower prices. And then, if you think about the three customer segments that Kuiper serves, it's consumers, it's enterprises, and it's governments. And if you think about it, Amazon has very strong and broad relationships with all three of those customer sets. And we actually think they're going to be pretty exciting. But if you take government and enterprise, a lot of them are going to take the data from the satellite and move it directly into the cloud. And the tight connection between Kuiper and AWS is going to make that very compelling as well.

CRAMER: It just makes me think that Amazon is a bit of a nation-state. You are, well, let's think about this. You're dealing with governments. You're dealing with people. You're in their states. You're trying to help them. I mean, in many ways you're either an ambassador or a company that is basically saying, you know what, look, we can make a country better.

JASSY: I think that the way that we think about our mission at Amazon is that we exist to make customers' lives easier and better every day. And then a lot of people say, what does retail have to do with AWS with advertising, with Prime video, with Kuiper, with Zeus?

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CRAMER: Right.

JASSY: The unifying theme and fabric through all those businesses and customer experiences is to make customers' lives easier and better every day. And that's true for customers in all those segments. It's true in all those businesses. It's true in every geography. I was just in Europe last week and a little bit of the week before, and in the U.K., we employ 75,000 people full time. I mean, that's one of the -- we are one of the biggest employers in the country. And so, in each of these countries, we view ourselves as trying to make customers' lives easier and better for all those customers and part of being a fabric of each of those countries.

CRAMER: Now, how is A.I. helping that? I know you have a lot of A.I. momentum. I know that A.I. is integral to -- you wrote an incredible letter just a few -- just a week ago, basically -- no, two weeks ago, just talking about how people's jobs are going to change, that this is a great thing for customers. You always say that.

JASSY: Yes.

CRAMER: You never say for Amazon. You say great for customers. How is it great?

JASSY: I think that A.I. and generative A.I. specifically is the most transformative technology of our lifetime, which is saying a lot, given that we have had the Internet—

CRAMER: Yes.

JASSY: We have had mobile, we have had the cloud, but I think it's going to end up being the most transformative technology of our lifetime. And if your mission is to make customers' lives easier and better every day, and if you believe that it's going to be the most transformative technology of our lifetime, you're going to invest very expansively, which is what we're doing. And you can see it everywhere, in our consumer businesses, you can look at our shopping assistant in Rufus. You can look at the next generation of our personal assistant, Alexa+. You can look at how it's changing and how we forecast our fulfillment network, very significant gains for us. You can look at how it impacts how you can create advertising, even on Thursday Night Football. And you can see what we're doing in the AWS side, where -- whether it's custom silicon to provide better price performance or services and make it easy to build models or create generative A.I. applications or coding applications. Every single one of our businesses, we're using A.I. to improve the customer experience.

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CRAMER: Let's talk about Alexa+.

JASSY: Yes.

CRAMER: Because when I was on Alexa+, look, I have complained vocally about Alexa, and I feel badly about that, because I have a conversation, a couple conversations a day. Like, I try to get her to play Beethoven's 1st and -- piano concerto, and she will play the 4th, because she doesn't understand the album, whatever. But now Alexa+ is something I would say, you know what, what am I doing at 12:00? oh, my God, I have two different appointments at 12:00. Cancel one. Would you please book me a plane? I mean, are these what I think will happen with Alexa+?

JASSY: Yes, I think Alexa+, which is the next generation of Alexa and our personal assistant, is much more intelligent than the prior generation of Alexa.

CRAMER: Can Alexa+ reason with me, instead of arguing with me?

JASSY: Yes, it can. I mean, I mean, I -- actually, Alexa+ helped me pick some horses for the Kentucky Derby.

CRAMER: Really?

JASSY: Yes. And I asked a lot of questions about wanting somebody that was not a complete long shot, who had a chance. And she suggested somebody, and I asked her why, and we had a debate about that. And based on what I said, she changed her opinion. And so, with Alexa+, much more intelligent, much more capable, and as opposed to most of these chatbots that just answer questions, she takes action. So, she can manage your schedule, as you just mentioned. She can play music. She can move music from one device to another device. I can say to her, I have a couple coming over for dinner. Please turn the porch light on, the driveway light on, raise the curtains, increase the temperature five degrees and play music that we're going to want to hear at dinner. That is all done through natural language. And she's just going to keep being able to do more and more for you.

CRAMER: Alright, let's stay there for a second. More with Andy Jassy after the break.

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PART II

CRAMER:  I'm loving Alexa+. And I think that Alexa+ could end up being in a humanoid form. When can I buy a robot from Amazon?

JASSY: Well, we have had a consumer robot that we have been offering for a bit, which we started a couple years ago, but it's still so primitive compared to where it's going to be. I do believe that -- I think that many, perhaps most consumers will have robots in the home sometime in the next 10 years or so.

CRAMER: You do?

JASSY: I do. And I do believe that -- and I think they're all—

CRAMER: Ten years? After three years?

JASSY: There will be more.

CRAMER: OK.

JASSY: I don't know if it'll be most in three years, but there will be more.

CRAMER: Are they going to be yours or am I going to have to get one from Tesla?

JASSY: I think we're going to keep working on consumer robots. I think you will see that really great personal assistants like Alexa will be inside these robots, and she will be able to help you quite a bit inside your home.

CRAMER: All right, now July 8, I intend to engage with Rufus a lot. For three days, I will engage with Rufus. Sometimes, Rufus is helpful, and sometimes Rufus should link me to what I want to buy. But Rufus is kind of a dead end at times. When can we have Rufus really know us, know what we like?

JASSY: Yes. Well, I think July 8, you're referencing Prime Day—

CRAMER: Yes.

JASSY: Which actually is four days, 96 hours, double the amount we had last year, and with millions of deals across every category. It's going to -- I think people are going to be pretty excited, especially at this time, where people are still a little worried about what's going to happen with trade and continuing to have lower prices.

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CRAMER: Right. Well, I saw a Reuters piece today that said that already you have had to raise prices from China.

JASSY: And we have -- fortunately, we haven't. We did a lot of forward buying several months ago. And then a lot of our sellers, our third-party selling partners, forward-deployed a lot of inventory to avoid some of the issues with the uncertainty around where tariffs are going to settle. And we have so far not seen prices appreciably go up. And I think some of that may be the forward buying and deployment I mentioned, but some of it is, we have about two million sellers in our marketplace. And so even those that decide they're going to pass on whatever the tariff increase is in the form of price, there's probably going to be a number of sellers who decide they're going to take share and not increase prices. So that diversity helps customers in our marketplace.

CRAMER: Well, also, I mean, look, you guys are known. I would think you and an outfit across the street from you, Costco, are the two greatest inflation fighters, other than, say, Walmart. But I don't think the government, nor do I think even the American people understand, you have, your prices in many cases on that -- on Prime Days are going to be like 2018 prices when I look at them.

JASSY: They're very significant discounts, and not -- our stores team, our retail team work very closely with our third-party selling partners because we know people are very sensitive about price right now, but we also want to make sure we gave them great deals on items they actually cared about. So I think our customers are going to be very excited July 8 through 11. And it's to be a good Prime Day.

CRAMER: No, you have a note in your April letter. A.I. does not have to be as expensive as it is today and won't be in the future. Chips are the biggest culprit. OK, when I read that, I know you're talking about Nvidia. I know you're developing your own chips. But, at the same time, can't I make the case that Nvidia actually saves money, that it actually does good things for you?

JASSY: Well, my comment in that letter isn't about any one company. It's just about, if you actually want A.I. to be as expansive as we all believe it can be and should be, we have to decrease the cost, particularly of inference. And the biggest culprit in the cost today happens to be how expensive the chips have been. And so, we have a very deep partnership with Nvidia. We're their lead partner in every new family of chips they launch. I expect we will be partners for a long time, but -- and we learned this lesson in the CPU space with our partnership with Intel -- our customers always want better price performance.

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CRAMER: Sure.

JASSY: And so, we have learned that we are usually going to have to be the ones that provide that better price performance. So, we have this amazing chip design team in Israel called Annapurna. They helped us build a CPU chip that we call Graviton that we're on the fourth version of that's 40 percent more price performant than the leading x86 processors. And four or five years ago, we saw the same trend happening with silicon and A.I., where we set that team, a separate team in that organization, to go build their own custom silicon A.I. called Trainium, which we just launched the second version—

CRAMER: Right. Right.

JASSY: Which is also 30 percent to 40 percent more price performant than GPUs. And so, we consider it not just an opportunity, but really our responsibility to help customers have lower costs and better price performance, not just on training, but particularly in inference, because the dirty little secret is that, while a lot of this expense right now is in training, because everyone's trading these models, at scale, most of the expense is in inference because you only train periodically, and an application at scale is spitting out inferences all the time.

CRAMER: OK. Now, June 17 note, fewer employers that necessarily need it. "As we roll out generative A.I. and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs." Can you be more specific? And also, keep in mind, would it be better to go to a community college or better to go to a four-year college right now in this world?

JASSY:  Wow, that last question, I will have to think about it a little bit. But I think that, as we're talking about this technology, this A.I. technology is going to be the most transformative technology in our lifetime, and I was talking about all the ways that we're using the technology for different customer experiences externally, but it's also going to change the way we work. And if you think about what these agents are going to be able to do, they do coding, they do research, they do analytics, they will do spreadsheets over time, they're going to do anomaly detection, they're going to do localization, as you have information and content you want in a lot of languages. And so that means it's going to change a lot of these particular job functions. And so, when you have really unusual transformative technology like that, you have two choices, two macro choices. You can either lean into it, embrace it, and figure out how to make your customer experience better and shape it, or you can wish it away and then have it happen to you and chase it. And I think that, in the history of technology changes, you're better off with the former. And that's what we're going to do. And I think for our teammates, it's going to allow them to invent better customer experiences much more quickly, much more expansively. They won't have to do as much work. And every single person gets to start every task at a more advanced starting spot. And so that's going to make all of our jobs more interesting. And so, yes, like, with every technical transformation, there will be fewer people doing some of the jobs that the technology actually starts to automate. But there are going to be other jobs, and we're going to hire more people in A.I. and more people in robotics, and there are going to be other jobs that the technology wants you to go hire that we will hire over time too.

CRAMER: OK. So, you need more power—

JASSY: Yes.

CRAMER: For the data centers, $20 billion in Pennsylvania. Is that -- is that right next to Carnegie Mellon? Where are you putting that up? Is that the Susquehanna?

JASSY: Well, that's, it's billions. But it's -- we -- the biggest -- we have more demand in our A.I. business today than we have supply, even though we are taking down a lot of power and spending a lot of capital expenditure on our A.I. And so, the biggest constraint or a few constraints really is power. And so, wherever we can find high-quality, affordable power that ideally, wherever we can, it's low-carbon, that's where we're going to look to build additional data center clusters, which Pennsylvania is a recent one. We're really excited about that.

CRAMER: Indiana, you have done

JASSY: Yes, Indiana, we have done. Mississippi, we have done. And in all those cases, it's a combination of where the power is, the quality of power, and then do we have a partner in -- particularly in those states, who really want the jobs and really want the data centers there?

CRAMER: Do you have -- are there enough people in this country to meet the demand of Amazon in 2030?

JASSY: I do think yes. I mean, yes, I do.  And we have -- we're very fortunate, in that people are interested in working at the company, because we, you know, we're a very customer-focused company. We have a pretty significant impact on the world. We operate at a very large scale. We like to invent, and we have an amazing group of people. And that's true in a lot of our -- what you call corporate jobs, but it's also true in our fulfillment network, where our average starting wage today is over $21 an hour, with full health benefits on day one. We have this program called Career Choice, which allows anybody in our fulfillment network to be able to get an advanced education or college education if they haven't. So, it's an unusual set of capabilities. So, we have a lot of people who are interested. And then I think, over time, what you will also see is, wherever we can, we use robotics in our fulfillment network to make things even more safe for our teammates. And what we have found which has been so interesting in our fulfillment network is that our teammates, they actually like working with the robots. They work in tandem together. And so, they get to work on things that human beings are better suited to do, and the robots get to work on things that maybe are repetitive and can save people from injury.

CRAMER: One last question. Black Friday last year was a pretty boring game. It's sad.

JASSY: Actually, it was a good game, right? It was Oakland -- it was Las Vegas and Kansas City?

CRAMER: Not -- in the end, I'd—

JASSY: You're thinking about two years ago, that Jets-Dolphins game.

CRAMER: That was the worst ever.

JASSY: Yes, that was not good.

CRAMER: How about this year? Do you know who is playing?

JASSY: Well, your Eagles are playing the Bears. Actually—

CRAMER: And the Bears, I think, are a 12-5 team this year. I think it's a good matchup.

JASSY: I think the Bears are going to be better.

CRAMER: They're going to be good.

JASSY: I think it's going to be a very good game.

CRAMER: You care about that. You care who is playing that day.

JASSY: You know I'm a Giants fan. So—

CRAMER: I know. Are you going to -- do you think you will flex those 14 and 16 games?

JASSY: I don't know. We will have to see what the matchups are.

CRAMER: Thursday on that Washington game?

JASSY: It's so hard to know at the beginning of the NFL season, because of the parity, who are going to be the good teams and who aren't. So, we will have to wait and see what happens in the season.

CRAMER: Anyway—

CRAMER: You got 21 days ahead you got to do it, though. That's it. I love talking to you, man.

JASSY: I love talking with you, Jim. Thanks for having me on.

CRAMER: That's Andy Jassy, president and CEO of Amazon.

JASSY: Yes.

CRAMER: Thanks, buddy. Appreciate it.

JASSY: Thank you.