Welcome to the Amazon.com Annual Meeting of Shareholders. I'm David Zapolsky, Senior Vice President, Global Public Policy and General Counsel. I now call the formal portion of this meeting to order. Today's agenda covers our items of business and rules of procedure. Please note that in the event an unanticipated issue prevents us from being able to continue this annual meeting, we will post updated meeting information on our investor relations website. After the proposals have been presented, we will have a presentation by Brian Olsavsky, our CFO. Angie Quinnell, Director of Financial Communications, will then moderate the Q&A session with Andy Jassy, our CEO. Angie, can you provide details on how to submit a question?
Thanks, David. If you wish to submit a question and have not already done so prior to the meeting, please type your question into the Ask a Question field on the website you used to access this meeting, and then click Submit. Out of respect for your fellow shareholders, we ask that each person be concise and limit themselves to one question.
Thank you. It's now my pleasure to introduce our directors who are attending this meeting, including those joining us remotely: Jeff Bezos, Andy Jassy, Keith Alexander, Edith Cooper, Jamie Gorelick, Daniel Huttenlocher, Judy McGrath, Andrew Ng, Indra Nooyi, John Rubinstein, Brad Smith, Patty Stonesifer, and Wendell Weeks. Also joining us remotely today are representatives of our auditors, Ernst & Young. The polls opened for voting on all matters at the beginning of the meeting, and we will close the polls after presentation of today's proposals. The proposals to be voted on today are set forth in our proxy statement. If you wish to vote during the meeting, please follow the instructions on the meeting website before the polls close. If you have already voted in advance of the meeting, you do not need to vote again unless you requested a legal proxy or wish to change your vote.
A representative of Broadridge was appointed our Inspector of Elections, has taken the required oath, and has certified that notice of this meeting was mailed beginning on April 11, 2024, to all shareholders of record as of the record date, and that a majority of our common stock is present or represented by proxies. Therefore, a quorum exists for the meeting. I'll now introduce the company's proposals, which are the election of directors, the ratification of the appointment of Ernst & Young as independent auditors for fiscal 2024, and an advisory vote to approve executive compensation. We have 14 shareholder proposals to be voted on if properly presented. To ensure that we have adequate time for our Q&A session later in the meeting, each proponent will have 2 minutes to present their proposal.
If a proponent goes beyond two minutes, we will need to place the line on mute so that we can continue the meeting. Thank you in advance for your understanding. Jing Zhao will now introduce proposal number four, requesting an additional board committee to oversee public policy. Mr. Zhao has pre-recorded the following statement.
Good morning, fellow shareholders. My proposal is to recommend that the board have a separate board committee responsible for public policy. Considering Amazon's giant size and the complex operations of the business worldwide, even if there are only 0.7% of the companies in the S&P 500 having a public policy committee, Amazon must be one of them. Please vote for proposal number 4 to establish a public policy committee. Thank you.
Thank you. Stefan Padfield will now introduce proposal number 5, requesting an additional board committee to oversee the financial impact of policy positions. Mr. Padfield has pre-recorded the following statement.
My name is Stefan Padfield, and I am the Deputy Director of the Free Enterprise Project, which is part of the National Center for Public Policy Research, which requires spending shareholder assets to embrace highly partisan positions on hot-button issues. As the recent cases of Bud Light, Target, and Disney demonstrate, embracing such radical leftist positions is no longer costless. In fact, it can destroy billions of dollars of shareholder value. Amazon asserts it already has these issues covered, but if that were the case, we wouldn't need to submit this proposal. For all these reasons, we ask you to vote for item five.
Thank you. Laith Abad will now introduce proposal number 6, requesting a report on customer due diligence. Operator, please open the line for Mr. Abad.
Ring continues to expand its thousands of police partnerships. At the same time, Amazon's government-affiliated customers with a history of rights-violating behavior pose risks to the company. The U.N. has clearly indicated war crimes may have been committed by Amazon's major customer, the Israeli Defense Forces, since October seventh, 2023. Amazon's existing policies appear insufficient in preventing customer misuse and establishing effective oversight, yet Amazon continues releasing surveillance products. Moreover, the company's disclosures make no mention of customer due diligence, nor is there any relevant information about the process on its website. Thank you.
Thank you. Robert Wotipka will now introduce proposal number seven, requesting additional reporting on lobbying. Mr. Wotipka has pre-recorded the following statement.
... This is Brother Robert Wotipka. On behalf of the Province of St. Joseph of the Capuchin Order, I hereby move--has been a central actor against climate legislation for over two decades. Amazon supports controversial nonprofits like the Independent Women's Forum, which is attacking so-called woke capitalism, and it has long opposed the Equal Rights Amendment and paid family and medical leave. Amazon supports dark money social welfare groups like the National Taxpayers Union and Taxpayers Protection Alliance to fight antitrust laws. Lobbying disclosure is a safety mechanism for our company, its reputation, and its shareholders. What is disclosed is managed. Full disclosure of Amazon's lobbying will ensure proper oversight of our company's actions. We urge shareholders to vote for this proposal. Thank you.
Thank you. Joan Morris will now introduce proposal number eight, requesting additional reporting on gender and racial pay. Ms. Morris has pre-recorded the following statement.
Hello, my name is Joan Morris, and I work at Amazon as a warehouse associate. There will actually be a place for me, a woman of color, in an HR role at Amazon in the future. This proposal is straightforward. Median pay gap data shows whether minorities and women have the same pay opportunities as their colleagues across the company. Simply put, it depends on whether they hold and have access to the same higher positions. This differs from the statistically adjusted data the company publishes, which only measures whether they are similarly paid to direct peers. I think it's time the company acts, not only for its workers' benefit, but to reduce turnover and improve our company's performance. Thank you for your support of transparent, honest, pay equity reporting. Please vote yes on proposal eight. Thank you.
Thank you. Walker Wildman will now introduce proposal number 9, requesting a report on viewpoint restriction. Mr. Wildman has pre-recorded the following statement.
My name is Walker Wildman, and I am Vice President of American Family Association, and Amazon giving itself permission to ban anything it doesn't like. Given Amazon's long history of taking sides on the most divisive social issues of our time, from voter ID to sexual identity teaching in Florida's kindergarten classrooms, and the board bias report's finding a 36-to-1 ratio of giving to Democrats over Republicans among the Amazon board of directors, we have a pretty clear idea of which ideas Amazon does and doesn't like. I know that we will almost certainly lose today's vote, but that doesn't stop you from doing the right thing. The world's largest bookseller should not be banning books, films, or causes just because they appear on some activist group's hate speech list.
You sell the books and documentaries, and we'll sort out the good and the bad for ourselves.
Thank you. Jesse Moreno will now introduce proposal number 10, requesting additional reporting on stakeholder impacts. Mr. Moreno has pre-recorded the following statement.
Good morning. My name is Jesse Moreno, and I am an Amazon driver in California. It's not their responsibility. We wear their uniforms, we drive in their vans, but Amazon has created a system of subcontractors to dodge accountability. Amazon should stop polluting the environment, but Amazon also needs to say how it is going to keep workers safe in its vans and its warehouses as summer temperatures keep increasing. A just transition begins with respecting and listening to workers. As Amazon addresses its climate pollution, workers need a seat at the table. That's why I urge shareholders to support item ten.
Thank you. Conrad MacKerron will now introduce proposal number 11, requesting a report on packaging materials. Mr. MacKerron has pre-recorded the following statement.
I'm Conrad MacKerron, Senior Vice President of As You Sow, the filer of item eleven on your proxy, Sustainable Recyclable by a specific date. At least 17 other consumer goods companies, including competitors Walmart and Target, have virgin plastic reduction goals. Reducing Amazon's plastic packaging and making all its packaging recyclable are necessary steps to combat the plastic pollution crisis. Our company is overdue on taking action on this important issue. Shareholders will benefit from this proposal by being able to clearly assess company policies and practices versus peers, if Amazon agrees to report on its plastic footprint across company sectors and commits to goals to reduce the amount of plastic used for packaging globally. Please vote yes on this shareholder proposal number 11. Thank you.
Thank you. Sarah Couturier-Tanoh will now introduce proposal number 12, requesting additional reporting on freedom of association. Operator, please open the line for Ms. Couturier-Tanoh.
In 2022, Amazon published a report on its human rights commitments, which outlines Amazon's approach to fundamental labor rights, references ILO conventions, but fails to explain whether Amazon and how Amazon's human rights policies and practices align with these international standards or its own commitments. The apparent misalignment between Amazon's commitment and its reported conduct represents reputational and operational risks that may negatively impact Amazon's long-term performance. A respect for human rights can create a motivated workforce that provides management with critical and timely information to reduce workplace accidents.
... improve relevant trainings, and boost employee morale, thus enhancing productivity, profitability, and ultimately, shareholder value. An independent assessment would help investors assess Amazon's adherence to its human rights commitments. Thank you.
Thank you. Andrew Shalit will now introduce proposal number 13, requesting alternative emissions reporting. Mr. Shalit has pre-recorded the following statement.
Thank you. I'm speaking on behalf of Green Century and Amalgamated Bank. Lead filer's foremost peer follows established best practices by reporting product-related Scope 3 emissions from all products sold on its platform. Walmart is especially relevant as a peer because it functions as both a marketplace and a retailer of its own private label and third-party branded products. Walmart has correctly determined that it should report product-related Scope 3 emissions from all items sold on its virtual and physical shelves. To mitigate material risk, reduce its contributions to climate change, and align with the well-established best practices used by peers, Amazon should report all product-related Scope 3 emissions. For these reasons, we urge you to vote for our proposal.
Thank you. Tejal Sumbhu will now introduce proposal number 14, requesting a report on customer use of certain technologies. Operator, please open the line for Ms. Sannon.
Responding to the growing movement against police brutality and criminal justice bias, Amazon issued an indefinite moratorium on its Rekognition used by police departments. While this acknowledges risks, it is unclear whether it includes other government agencies. In 2021, the Government Accountability Office found 19 of 24 U.S. government agencies surveyed were using facial recognition. Microsoft banned face recognition sales to police, awaiting federal regulation, then announced the removal of its feature from its AI service to ensure facial recognition technology meets ethical guidelines, while IBM stopped offering the software. Following a $550 million settlement from a lawsuit alleging non-consensual use of facial recognition, Facebook ceased using facial recognition. Thank you.
Thank you. Paul Chesser will now introduce proposal number 15, requesting a policy to disclose directors' political and charitable donations. Mr. Chesser has pre-recorded the following statement.
There are many reasons why the request in our proposal, item 15, asks for directors and director nominees to provide the committee and its Leadership Development Committee . That means there is zero ideological diversity that informs the addition of new board members and the addition of new executive leadership for Amazon. That's why the company's censorship is almost entirely against conservatives and why it gives to corrupt organizations like Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, as just two examples of biased management. According to Pew Research, 44% of U.S. adults believe Big Tech favors liberals, while only 15% believe the opposite. Like it has with Bud Light and Disney, insular management and governance will catch up with you one day. Please vote for item 15.
Thank you. Isaiah Thomas will now introduce proposal number 16, requesting an additional board committee to oversee artificial intelligence. Mr. Thomas has pre-recorded the following statement.
Good morning. My name is Isaiah Thomas, and I hereby introduce proposal number 16, submitted by the AFL-CIO. The adoption of artificial intelligence can also impact workers' rights in other ways. For example, in 2015, Amazon scrapped an artificial intelligence human resources tool that reportedly had taught itself to discriminate against women job applicants. Our proposal requests that the board of directors form a new committee of independent directors to address the human rights risk associated with artificial intelligence. Such a committee should be empowered to meet with employees and other stakeholders. As Amazon maintains a leading role in developing and deploying artificial intelligence technology, we believe that appointing an independent board committee is warranted and appropriate as a matter of good corporate governance. For these reasons, we urge you to vote in favor of this proposal. Thank you.
Thank you. Constance Ricketts will now introduce proposal number 17, requesting a report on warehouse working conditions. Ms. Ricketts has pre-recorded the following statement.
Good morning. I'm Constance Ricketts, speaking on behalf of Tulip share in support of Proposal Seventeen, currently investigating whether Amazon misreported its true number of injuries and probing Amazon's safety practices, including relentless work pace and the grueling conditions workers face, underscoring the need for transparency and reform. Several state laws and the new federal Warehouse Worker Protection Act seek to regulate Amazon's treatment of warehouse workers, banning harmful algorithm-determined quotas which push workers beyond their physical limits and fire those who fail to meet undisclosed targets. Our workers are the backbone of Amazon's success, so their safety is paramount. Supporting Proposal Seventeen will protect our workforce, ensure regulatory compliance, and enhance our reputation.
Thank you. The proxy statement for this meeting explains the reasons for the company's recommendation against each of the shareholder proposals appearing in the proxy statement. We have received some questions regarding the proposals. Thank you for these questions. In response, I invite you to review the board's statement and recommendation as applicable on each of the proposals as set forth in the company's proxy statement. That concludes the presentation of the proposals. The polls are now closed on all proposals, and the formal portion of this meeting is now adjourned. Based on preliminary voting results, each nominee for director received a majority of the votes cast for such nominee's election, so all 12 nominees have been duly elected.
The ratification of the appointment of Ernst & Young and the advisory vote to approve our executive compensation have each been approved by the requisite vote, and none of the shareholder proposals has been approved by the requisite vote. I would now like to introduce Brian Olsavsky, who will give a financial update after a short video.
Good morning, fellow shareholders. My proposal is to recommend that the board of Amazon establish a public policy committee. Amazon needs a public policy committee...
Welcome to the Amazon.com Annual Meeting of Shareholders. I'm David Zapolsky, Senior Vice President, Global Public Policy and General Counsel. I now call the formal portion of this meeting to order. Today's agenda covers our items of business and rules of procedure. Please note that in the event an unanticipated issue prevents us from being able to continue this annual meeting, we will post updated meeting information on our investor relations website. After the proposals have been presented, we will have a presentation by Brian Olsavsky, our CFO. Angie Quinnell, Director of Financial Communications, will then moderate the Q&A session with Andy Jassy, our CEO. Angie, can you provide details on how to submit a question?
Thanks, David. If you wish to submit a question and have not already done so prior to the meeting, please type your question into the Ask a Question field on the website you used to access this meeting, and then click Submit. Out of respect for your fellow shareholders, we ask that each person be concise and limit themselves to one question.
Thank you. It's now my pleasure to introduce our directors who are attending this meeting, including those joining us remotely: Jeff Bezos, Andy Jassy, Keith Alexander, Edith Cooper, Jamie Gorelick, Daniel Huttenlocher, Judy McGrath, Andrew Ng, Indra Nooyi, John Rubinstein, Brad Smith, Patty Stonesifer, and Wendell Weeks. Also joining us remotely today are representatives of our auditors, Ernst & Young. The polls opened for voting on all matters at the beginning of the meeting, and we will close the polls after presentation of today's proposals. The proposals to be voted on today are set forth in our proxy statement. If you wish to vote during the meeting, please follow the instructions on the meeting website before the polls close. If you have already voted in advance of the meeting, you do not need to vote again unless you requested a legal proxy or wish to change your vote.
A representative of Broadridge was appointed our Inspector of Elections, has taken the required oath, and has certified that notice of this meeting was mailed beginning on April 11th, 2024, to all shareholders of record as of the record date, and that a majority of our common stock is present or represented by proxies. Therefore, a quorum exists for the meeting. I'll now introduce the company's proposals, which are the election of directors, the ratification of the appointment of Ernst & Young as independent auditors for fiscal 2024, and an advisory vote to approve executive compensation. We have 14 shareholder proposals to be voted on if properly presented. To ensure that we have adequate time for our Q&A session later in the meeting, each proponent will have 2 minutes to present their proposal.
If a proponent goes beyond two minutes, we will need to place the line on mute so that we can continue the meeting. Thank you in advance for your understanding. Jing Zhao will now introduce proposal number four, requesting an additional board committee to oversee public policy. Mr. Zhao has pre-recorded the following statement.
Good morning, fellow shareholders. My proposal is to recommend that the board of Amazon establish a public policy committee. Amazon needs a public policy committee to assist the board to oversee public policy issues, including human rights, corporate social responsibility, diversity, equity, inclusion, The Climate Pledge , renewable energy, net zero carbon shipment, vendor chain management, charitable giving, political activities and expenditures, governmental regulations, international relations, unionization, and other public policy issues that affect Amazon's operations, performance, public reputation, and the shareholders' value. Many public policy issues have been voted at our shareholder meetings, including at this meeting with 14 public policy issues. Many more public policy issues will come because Amazon does not have a public policy committee. The corporate governance is like a social contract between the public and the corporate board.
The public gives the board a free hand to run the corporate business, so there is no company-wide union in Amazon. There is no employee representation on the board, and the board is nominated and elected without any competition. Particularly for Amazon, the board needs further effort to prevent abusing the public trust. About 7% of the companies in the S&P 500 have a separate board committee responsible for public policy. Considering Amazon's giant size and the complex operations of the business worldwide, even if there are only 0.7% of the companies in the S&P 500 having a public policy committee, Amazon must be one of them. Please vote for proposal number 4 to establish a public policy committee. Thank you.
Thank you. Stefan Padfield will now introduce proposal number five, requesting an additional board committee to oversee the financial impact of policy positions. Mr. Padfield has pre-recorded the following statement.
My name is Stefan Padfield, and I am the deputy director of the Free Enterprise Project, which is part of the National Center for Public Policy Research. The National Center is a shareholder of Amazon and the proponent of item five, which requests an assessment of the impact of the company's policy positions, advocacy, partnerships, and charitable giving on its financial sustainability. In our proposal, we provide four examples of the sort of corporate behavior this proposal seeks to address. First, Amazon opposed common sense voting integrity provisions that most Americans support. Second, Amazon contributed tens of millions of shareholder dollars to organizations it portrayed as combating systemic racism, but which actually did things such as opposing cash bail, which actually puts urban minority groups at increased risk. Third, Amazon donated millions to the Black Lives Matter movement, which has apparently called for the destruction of Israel and boosted antisemitism.
Finally, Amazon is a platinum partner of the Human Rights Campaign and partners with allied organizations, which many view as seeking to sow gender confusion in primary school children while destroying girls' and women's sports and demolishing long-standing religious freedoms. It has a 100% rating on HRC's Corporate Equality Index, which requires spending shareholder assets to embrace highly partisan positions on hot-button issues. As the recent cases of Bud Light, Target, and Disney demonstrate, embracing such radical leftist positions is no longer costless. In fact, it can destroy $ billions of shareholder value. Amazon asserts it already has these issues covered, but if that were the case, we wouldn't need to submit this proposal. For all these reasons, we ask you to vote for item five.
Thank you. Laith Abad will now introduce proposal number 6, requesting a report on customer due diligence. Operator, please open the line for Mr. Abad.
Good morning. My name is Laith Abad, a software engineer at Amazon Games and a proud first-generation Palestinian American. Today, I stand before you with a critical plea: to vote for Resolution Six, proposed by the American Baptist Home Mission Society and co-filers. We urge Amazon's board to commission an independent third-party assessment and report of its customer due diligence process to ensure that surveillance, computer vision, and cloud storage technologies do not perpetuate human rights violations. Some of Amazon's governmental customers are notorious for human rights abuses, posing a real threat of the technologies being misused for mass surveillance. The ambiguous use of recognition technology by law enforcement and instances of Amazon Ring sharing data without consent continue to escalate privacy concerns, especially in marginalized communities.
It's clear Amazon's current customer due diligence processes remain insufficient and fall short of the standards of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. In 2022, an investigation revealed that Amazon may have violated the National Defense Authorization Act ban on contracts with firms that use Chinese surveillance technology, who have been blacklisted by the U.S. government and implicated in mass surveillance, internment, torture, and forced labor of the ethnic Uyghur minority. As a Palestinian American and Amazon employee, I am deeply disturbed by Amazon's involvement with Project Nimbus with the Israeli government, which is implicated in military actions in Gaza, where more than 35,000 have been killed, the vast majority being women and children, and another 10,000 missing.
Additionally, a famine resulting from the Israeli blockade is devastating the Gaza Strip, leaving over 2 million people, half of whom are children, with little to no food, water, or hygiene products. This global perspective on Amazon's role and potential implications is a call to action for Amazon to ensure that its surveillance, computer vision, and cloud storage technologies are not misused to violate human rights. I implore you to vote for Proposal Six. Let's ensure Amazon's technologies foster human progress and respect for human dignity. Thank you for your time.
Thank you. Robert Wotipka will now introduce proposal number 7, requesting additional reporting on lobbying. Mr. Wotipka has pre-recorded the following statement.
This is Brother Robert Wotipka. On behalf of the Province of St. Joseph of the Capuchin Order, I hereby move item 7, asking our company to provide a report on its lobbying expenditures, both directly and indirectly, through its payments to trade associations and social welfare groups. Our company discloses its yearly federal and state lobbying amounts, but it needs to disclose more about its international lobbying. Last month, 14 lobbyists working for Amazon were banned from the European Union Parliament after our company failed to participate in hearings on working conditions in its warehouses. This is the heart of our ask, that the allocation of funds align with values. Amazon discloses payments to some 650 trade associations, social welfare groups, and nonprofits, which received $10,000 or more in 2023 and which lobby indirectly on the company's behalf.
The company does not specify the magnitude of the payments, nor what portion of the payments are non-deductible. Trade associations spend hundreds of millions of dollars to lobby. Amazon belongs to the Business Roundtable, National Association of Manufacturers, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which together spent more than $101 million on federal lobbying in 2023. Yet Amazon just fails to disclose what portions of its trade association payments are used for lobbying. Many of Amazon's third-party lobbying positions contradict company public positions, resulting in values misalignment and reputational risk. Amazon co-founded The Climate Pledge , yet the Business Roundtable opposed the Inflation Reduction Act and its historic investments in climate action. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce reportedly has been a central actor against climate legislation for over two decades.
Amazon supports controversial nonprofits like the Independent Women's Forum, which is attacking so-called woke capitalism, and it has long opposed the Equal Rights Amendment and paid family and medical leave. Amazon supports dark money social welfare groups like the National Taxpayers Union and Taxpayers Protection Alliance to fight antitrust laws. Lobbying disclosure is a safety mechanism for our company, its reputation, and its shareholders. What is disclosed is managed. Full disclosure of Amazon's lobbying will ensure proper oversight of our company's actions. We urge shareholders to vote for this proposal. Thank you.
Thank you. Joan Morris will now introduce proposal number eight, requesting additional reporting on gender and racial pay. Ms. Morris has pre-recorded the following statement.
Hello, my name is Joan Morris, and I work at Amazon as a warehouse associate at the ATL6 facility in East Point, Georgia. Today, I am speaking on behalf of Arjuna Capital to move proposal eight, asking Amazon for a report on median racial and gender pay gaps. I present this proposal as a warehouse associate who is concerned about Amazon's continued treatment of its employees. While my colleagues and I struggle to support our families due to Amazon's low wages, unstable work schedules, and lack of job opportunities, the company promotes a different version of itself. Amazon talks a lot about supporting employees in their career advancement, but I've seen coworkers repeatedly apply to open positions and then be denied without explanation. When associates don't see a path forward, they leave.
This contributes to Amazon's high turnover problem, which has ranged from 70%-100% in recent years and is estimated to cost the company $8 billion a year. I myself attend school for HR management, but I wonder whether there will actually be a place for me, a woman of color, in an HR role at Amazon in the future. This proposal is straightforward. Median pay gap data shows whether minorities and women have the same pay opportunities as their colleagues across the company. Simply put, it depends on whether they hold and have access to the same higher positions. This differs from the statistically adjusted data the company publishes, which only measures whether they are similarly paid to direct peers. I think it's time the company acts, not only for its workers' benefit, but to reduce turnover and improve our company's performance.
Thank you for your support of transparent, honest, pay equity reporting. Please vote yes on proposal eight. Thank you.
Thank you. Walker Wildman will now introduce proposal number nine, requesting a report on viewpoint restriction. Mr. Wildman has pre-recorded the following statement.
My name is Walker Wildman, and I am Vice President of American Family Association, an Amazon shareholder. We ask that the board review the effect that its content creation has on our users and customers. Amazon has repeatedly been the object of negative publicity due to deplatforming of content. Alliance Defending Freedom is the leading religious liberty litigation firm in America. It has played a major role in 74 Supreme Court victories. But when the scandal-ridden Southern Poverty Law Center labeled this mainstream institution a hate group, they were promptly banned from Amazon's Smile program. Amazon also denied digital cloud service to the conservative social media company, Parler. Our company banned a book by respected conservative intellectual, Ryan Anderson, critiquing transgender ideology. A positive documentary about Clarence Thomas was pulled off the streaming service.
The Viewpoint Diversity Index gives our company an abysmal 3% out of 100 because of the company's extremely vague, offensive products policy, which bans, quote, "products that promote hatred or religious intolerance," end quote. Of course, we all know that pretty much any debate in America today devolves into accusations of hate speech. A ban of, quote, unquote, "hate," amounts to Amazon giving itself permission to ban anything it doesn't like. And given Amazon's long history of taking sides on the most divisive social issues of our time, from voter ID to sexual identity teaching in Florida's kindergarten classrooms, and the board bias report's finding a 36-to-1 ratio of giving to Democrats over Republicans among the Amazon board of directors, we have a pretty clear idea of which ideas Amazon does and doesn't like.
I know that we will almost certainly lose today's vote, but that doesn't stop you from doing the right thing. The world's largest bookseller should not be banning books, films, or causes just because they appear on some activist group's hate speech list. You sell the books and documentaries, and we'll sort out the good and the bad for ourselves.
Thank you. Jesse Moreno will now introduce proposal number 10, requesting additional reporting on stakeholder impacts. Mr. Moreno has pre-recorded the following statement.
Good morning. My name is Jesse Moreno, and I am an Amazon driver in California and a proud member of the Teamsters Local 396. I'm presenting our shareholders resolution to demand a just climate transition strategy for Amazon's workers like myself.
... Amazon pats itself on the back for its climate efforts, but the company does next to nothing to protect its workers who are suffering climate change every single day, or ensure that folks like me and my coworkers don't get the short end of the stick as the company pushes advanced technologies like autonomous vehicles, which their manufacturers promote as climate-friendly solutions. What should a just transition look like for drivers like myself? I work in California's high desert, where it is regularly over 100 degrees during the summer, but Amazon sends us out in these trucks and these vans with broken air conditioning and windows that don't open. It feels like an oven in the back of these vans. It's hard to breathe, and you feel lightheaded just for being back there for simply a couple of minutes, looking for a package.
But Amazon says our safety is not their responsibility. We wear their uniforms, we drive in their vans, but Amazon has created a system of subcontractors to dodge accountability. Amazon should stop polluting the environment, but Amazon also needs to say how it is going to keep workers safe in its vans and its warehouses as summer temperatures keep increasing. A just transition begins with respecting and listening to workers. As Amazon addresses its climate pollution, workers need a seat at the table. That's why I urge shareholders to support item ten.
Thank you. Conrad MacKerron will now introduce proposal number 11, requesting a report on packaging materials. Mr. MacKerron has pre-recorded the following statement.
I'm Conrad MacKerron, Senior Vice President of As You Sow, the filer of item 11 on your proxy, Sustainable Packaging Policies for Plastics. The growing plastic pollution crisis poses increasing risks to Amazon. Corporations could face an annual cumulative financial risk of $100 billion should governments require them to cover the waste management costs of the packaging they produce, a policy that is increasingly being enacted around the world. This proposal asks the company to set time-bound goals to make all its packaging curbside recyclable, reusable, or compostable, and to set goals to reduce the amount of plastic used in company packaging. Following the filing of a similar proposal last year, Amazon took a positive step by releasing some data for plastic packaging used in its fulfillment centers.
However, it still does not disclose how much packaging it uses overall, as it did not include packaging related to products generated by its Whole Foods subsidiary or more than 100 of its private label brands. As a result, the company still lags competitors who have disclosed this data and made commitments to reduce virgin plastic use by a specific amount and to make plastic packaging recyclable by a specific date. At least 17 other consumer goods companies, including competitors Walmart and Target, have virgin plastic reduction goals. Reducing Amazon's plastic packaging and making all its packaging recyclable are necessary steps to combat the plastic pollution crisis. Our company is overdue on taking action on this important issue.
Shareholders will benefit from this proposal by being able to clearly assess company policies and practices versus peers if Amazon agrees to report on its plastic footprint across company sectors and commits to goals to reduce the amount of plastic used for packaging globally. Please vote yes on this shareholder proposal number eleven. Thank you.
Thank you. Sarah Couturier-Tanoh will now introduce proposal number 12, requesting additional reporting on freedom of association. Operator, please open the line for Ms. Couturier-Tanoh.
My name is Sarah Couturier-Tanoh, Director of Shareholder Advocacy at SHARE. SHARE, alongside an international coalition of more than 20 investors, representing over $3.5 trillion in assets under management, have filed this proposal out of concern for the long-term risk that Amazon's approach to labor rights represents to its shareholders. This is the third time we are filing this proposal, so I will be brief. In the past years, there have been ongoing efforts from Amazon workers to form unions across North America and Europe. Numerous public reports allege anti-union practices such as intimidation, retaliation, and surveillance that are contradicting the human rights standards set by the ILO declaration and core conventions, including the principle of non-interference.
In the past three years, we have asked Amazon to conduct a third-party assessment, reviewing how its conduct aligns with its stated commitment to respect for association and collective bargaining rights as protected by those instruments. We believe this request is very reasonable, especially considering the degree of controversy and risk to which we are exposed in our investments. As institutional investors, we only wish for the long-term success for the company. In our view, deploying so much effort and resource to undermine workers' rights to exercise one of their most fundamental human rights would not be in the best interest of shareholders. We hope that this vote will be seen by the board of directors as a landmark for a real change, and I hope that the board will also see an opportunity to revise its approach to shareholder engagement.
Once again, I reiterate for the group the request to speak with the board about these important issues. Thank you.
Thank you. Andrew Shalit will now introduce proposal number 13, requesting alternative emissions reporting. Mr. Shalit has pre-recorded the following statement.
Thank you. I'm speaking on behalf of Green Century and Amalgamated Bank, lead filers of proposal number 13.
... 2023 was the hottest year on record globally. Immediate and sustained greenhouse gas emissions reductions are required to avoid the worst effects of climate change. Amazon is the world's second-largest retailer, and its emissions are likely equally substantial. Emissions measurement is an essential first step in understanding the extent of a company's climate impact and how to reduce it. Unfortunately, Amazon's emission reporting is incomplete. Our company only reports product-related Scope 3 emissions from approximately 1% of its sales. This means that Amazon does not disclose emissions from about 99% of the products sold on its platform. This incomplete reporting leaves shareholders uninformed about the company's exposure to climate risk and its contributions to climate change. The European Union and California have passed mandatory greenhouse gas reporting requirements for companies.
If Amazon does not report emissions from all products sold, our company risks falling into regulatory non-compliance in these global markets. Walmart, Amazon's foremost peer, follows established best practices by reporting product-related Scope 3 emissions from all products sold on its platform. Walmart is especially relevant as a peer because it functions as both a marketplace and a retailer of its own private label and third-party branded products. Walmart has correctly determined that it should report product-related Scope 3 emissions from all items sold on its virtual and physical shelves. To mitigate material risk, reduce its contributions to climate change, and align with the well-established best practices used by peers, Amazon should report all product-related Scope 3 emissions. For these reasons, we urge you to vote for our proposal.
Thank you. Tejal Sambhu will now introduce proposal number 14, requesting a report on customer use of certain technologies. Operator, please open the line for Ms. Sambhu.
My name is Tejal Samb and I'm the Technology Policy Program Director at the ACLU of Washington, presenting proposal 14 on behalf of Harrington Investments. This proposal calls on Amazon to commission an independent study of Rekognition to understand the extent to which this facial recognition technology may threaten or violate privacy and civil rights and unfairly target or surveil people of color, immigrants, and activists in the United States and worldwide. The dangers posed by facial recognition technology are well documented. Facial recognition allows police to track protesters at political rallies, ICE to spy on immigrants, and cities to routinely monitor the activities of their own residents. It can also enable governments to track and discriminate against people for their race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, and political beliefs. Independent research shows that facial recognition technology is rife with racial and gender biases.
When these technologies make errors, they can have drastic consequences, such as wrongful arrests made by law enforcement. In response to these threats, at least 24 U.S. jurisdictions have adopted bans on governmental use of facial recognition technology, including King County in Washington, home of Amazon's headquarters. Nearly 70 organizations have called on Amazon to stop selling Rekognition to governments. Each year, this proposal to conduct an independent study on Rekognition has gained increasing support from Amazon's own shareholders. By ignoring these calls, Amazon is dismissing a threat that continues to grow. We urge Amazon instead to make a good-faith commitment to responsible and ethical development of facial recognition by commissioning an independent study of Rekognition's impact on privacy and civil rights. We urge shareholders to vote in support of Proposal 14 as a first step in protecting our democracy and liberties here in the U.S. and around the world.
Thank you.
Thank you. Paul Chesser will now introduce proposal number 15, requesting a policy to disclose directors' political and charitable contributions. Mr. Chesser has pre-recorded the following statement.
There are many reasons why the request in our proposal, item 15, asks for directors and director nominees to provide their political and charitable donation information for Amazon's voting shareholders. It's so investors can cast more fully informed ballots. Amazon claims it prioritizes a diversity of perspectives for its directors, pointing out race and gender as two such points of diversity. I did not know that the color of one's skin was a perspective, nor did I know that the chromosomes and genitalia that one possesses determine another monolithic perspective. What I have discovered, however, is that whatever immutable characteristics an Amazon board member possesses, almost all of them end up being far-left political donors. Of the 13 directors listed on Amazon's website, only one board member has given mostly to Republicans, but not many of them.
Many of the rest of the Amazon directors are massive Democrat donors, and those that don't spend as much still donate to only Democrats. Jeff Bezos has given to a few Republicans, but we know Mr. Climate Pledge Arena is woke at heart. These leftist ideologues control Amazon's Nominating and Governance Committee and its Leadership Development Committee . That means there is zero ideological diversity that informs the addition of new board members and the addition of new executive leadership for Amazon. That's why the company's censorship is almost entirely against conservatives and why it gives to corrupt organizations like Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation as just two examples of biased management. According to Pew Research, 44% of U.S. adults believe Big Tech favors liberals, while only 15% believe the opposite.
Like it has with Bud Light and Disney, insular management and governance will catch up with you one day. Please vote for item 15.
... Thank you. Isaiah Thomas will now introduce proposal number 16, requesting an additional board committee to oversee artificial intelligence. Mr. Thomas has pre-recorded the following statement.
Good morning. My name is Isaiah Thomas, and I hereby introduce proposal number 16, submitted by the AFL-CIO Equity Index Funds. I'm a union organizer with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. As a former employee at Amazon's warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, I want you to know that working in an Amazon warehouse is hard, demanding work. According to 2023 data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Amazon's injury rate for warehouses with 1,000 employees or more is nearly triple that of Walmart. The pace of work for Amazon warehouse workers is set by a computer algorithm, and we are subject to discipline if we do not stay on pace to meet Amazon's productivity quotas. Demanding production quotas can increase the risk of ergonomic injury. Last year, Amazon introduced new artificial intelligence-powered robots into its warehouses.
While robots in the workplace can enhance employee productivity, they also create occupational safety risks when working alongside humans. For example, 24 Amazon warehouse workers in New Jersey were hospitalized in 2018 after a robot accidentally tore a can of bear repellent spray in a warehouse. The right to a safe and healthy workplace is an internationally recognized human right. The adoption of artificial intelligence can also impact workers' rights in other ways. For example, in 2015, Amazon scrapped an artificial intelligence human resources tool that reportedly had taught itself to discriminate against women job applicants. Our proposal requests that the board of directors form a new committee of independent directors to address the human rights risk associated with artificial intelligence. Such a committee should be empowered to meet with employees and other stakeholders.
As Amazon maintains a leading role in developing and deploying artificial intelligence technology, we believe that appointing an independent board committee is warranted and appropriate as a matter of good corporate governance. For these reasons, we urge you to vote in favor of this proposal. Thank you.
Thank you. Constance Ricketts will now introduce proposal number 17, requesting a report on warehouse working conditions. Ms. Ricketts has pre-recorded the following statement.
Good morning. I'm Constance Ricketts, speaking on behalf of Tulipshare in support of Proposal Seventeen, requesting an independent audit of the working conditions and treatment of Amazon warehouse workers. Amazon's injury rates are alarmingly high. In 2023 alone, there were nearly 40,000 recordable injuries, with 94% categorized as light duty or lost time, meaning the majority of those workers were either hurt so badly that they couldn't perform their regular job functions, or they were forced to miss work entirely. Amazon's oppressive surveillance and performance quotas yield an unsustainable business model, with one of the highest turnover rates in the world at 150%, costing our company an estimated $8 billion annually. Amazon's safety reports use data where Amazon represents 71% of the sample, skewing averages and masking the true problem.
OSHA data shows injury rates well above industry norms across all Amazon warehouses, indicating systemic safety and job design issues. The Department of Justice and the Senate Health Committee are currently investigating whether Amazon misreported its true number of injuries and probing Amazon's safety practices, including relentless work pace and the grueling conditions workers face, underscoring the need for transparency and reform. Several state laws and the new Federal Warehouse Worker Protection Act seek to regulate Amazon's treatment of warehouse workers, banning harmful algorithm-determined quotas, which push workers beyond their physical limits and fire those who fail to meet undisclosed targets. Our workers are the backbone of Amazon's success, so their safety is paramount. Supporting Proposal 17 will protect our workforce, ensure regulatory compliance, and enhance our reputation.
Thank you. The proxy statement for this meeting explains the reasons for the company's recommendation against each of the shareholder proposals appearing in the proxy statement. We have received some questions regarding the subject matter that touch on these proposals. Thank you for these questions, and in response, I invite you to review the board's statement and recommendation as applicable on each of the proposals as set forth in the company's proxy statement. That concludes the presentation of the proposals. The polls are now closed on all proposals, and the formal portion of this meeting is now adjourned. Based on a preliminary vote, based on preliminary voting results, each nominee for director received a majority of the votes cast for such nominee's election, so all 12 nominees have been duly elected.
The ratification of the appointment of Ernst & Young and the advisory vote to approve our executive compensation have each been approved by the requisite vote, and none of the shareholder proposals has been approved by the requisite vote. I would now like to introduce Brian Olsavsky, who will give a financial update after a short video.
At Amazon-
We're working hard to make our customers' lives better and easier every day. Amazon teams around the world are always innovating on their behalf, in everything from fast delivery, where regionalizing our operations network helped us deliver at our fastest speed ever, to inventing new services for companies to build generative artificial intelligence applications.
After delivering at our fastest speeds ever in 2023, we already set new records in the first three months of 2024. In January through March, we delivered more than 2 billion items the same day or the day after a customer placed their order.
Innovators all over the world are relying on AWS to drive their businesses, including leading enterprises from across every industry.
We are committed to and investing in sustainability because it's a win all around. It's good for the planet, for business, for our customers, and for our communities.
In 2023, Amazon was once again the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy for the fourth year in a row, and now we have even more than 500 solar and wind projects worldwide.
Safety is integral to everything we do. We continue to invest heavily in technologies, resources, training, and programs that aim to reduce and eliminate risks for our employees, partners, and communities.
Sequoia really changes the game when it comes to fulfillment. It allows us to not only be more productive inside of our fulfillment centers, but also safer.
Amazon offers a range of benefits that support employees and eligible family members. Our company-funded training programs, such as AWS Intelligence Initiative and Career Choice, help employees learn critical skills to move into in-demand, higher-paying roles within Amazon.
Career Choice equipped me with the skills and education that I need for my new role as a multi-site environmental manager.
We invest in the success of entrepreneurs, artisans, and small businesses. When they thrive, our customers benefit from the products and services they offer.
Being a local business owner and partnering with Amazon Hub Delivery, it's been great. It's allowed me to add to my bottom line. It's additional revenue stream incorporated into my business, and most importantly, it allows me to connect with my community.
Amazon continues to look ahead to what's possible as we focus on inventing the future for the planet, our people, our customers, our communities, and for business.
Hello, everyone. I'm Brian Olsavsky, Amazon's Chief Financial Officer. Today, I will share a recap of our 2023 financial results. But first, I will highlight some of the key things we did for customers during the year. Throughout 2023, we remained focused on the inputs that matter most to our customers: price, selection, and convenience. We delivered to Prime members at our fastest speeds ever during the year, with more than 7 billion items arriving same or next day. In the U.S., this was due in part to our regionalization efforts, where we rearchitected the network from 1 national region to 8 separate regions, enabling shorter distances and fewer product touches to get items to customers. Additionally, in the U.S., we expanded our same-day facilities and increased the number of items delivered same day or overnight by nearly 70% year-over-year.
These efforts have trimmed transportation distances, helping to lower our cost to serve. Also, in 2023, we reduced our cost to serve on a per-unit basis globally. In the US alone, cost to serve was down by more than $0.45 per unit year over year. This was the first year since 2018 that we had lowered our global cost to serve. In AWS, we helped customers navigate an uncertain macroeconomic environment as they sought to optimize their cloud spend across our broad set of services and features. At the same time, we leveraged our technology and experience to introduce many generative AI-related innovations for our customers. These include Amazon Bedrock, which lets companies leverage existing models to build generative AI applications, and our next generation of generalized CPU chips in Graviton4 , and specialized chips for generative AI workloads in Trainium and Inferentia.
In Amazon Q, the most capable generative AI-powered assistant for accelerating software development and leveraging companies' internal data. While it's still relatively early in this space, we're very excited about the opportunity and the rapid rate of innovation and customer adoption. In 2023, we had meaningful improvement across our financial results. Net sales were $575 billion, an increase of $61 billion year over year, or 12%, excluding the impact of foreign exchange. Turning to our segment financial results, our North America segment sales grew to $353 billion, up 12% year over year. International segment sales grew to $131 billion, up 11% year over year. We're enthusiastic about the business we're building internationally.
In addition to our established international countries in Europe, Japan, and the UK, we have added more than 10 new countries in the past 7 years, including Brazil, Australia, and most recently, South Africa. Across all countries, we've made meaningful improvements in our delivery speeds. As a result, we have seen increased purchase frequency by our Prime members. We've also seen strength in demand in everyday essentials, categories like beauty and health and personal care, where speed is even more important to consumers. Third-party sellers remain a key contributor to our offering.... In 2023, sellers represented over 60% of all units sold on Amazon. That's the highest annual seller percentage mix we've ever had. Sellers help us to increase our selection for customers, and we work hard to help our sellers grow their businesses on Amazon.
Advertising Services is an important contributor to both our North America and international segments and continues to grow at a rapid pace, reaching $47 billion in net sales for 2023, an increase of 24% year-over-year. We continue to see many opportunities to grow our offerings, both in areas that are driving growth today, like Sponsored Products, and in areas that are newer, like streaming TV ads. AWS segment sales grew to $91 billion, up 13% year-over-year. In Q1 of this year, we reached an annualized sales run rate of more than $100 billion. During 2023, we saw enterprise customers of all sizes trying to save money in an uncertain economy. We worked with those customers to use the cloud more efficiently.
This was a headwind to short-term revenue but was key to how we seek to build customer relationships for the long term. As we moved throughout 2023, we saw these cost optimizations diminish and our revenue growth rate accelerate. We're pleased with our recent growth. We continue expanding our generative AI offerings in AWS and are encouraged by the response from customers. In 2023, we made significant progress to lower our cost structure and improve overall profitability across all three of our segments. During 2022, we faced a number of challenges. We saw prominent macroeconomic headwinds as the world adjusted to life post-COVID, including the highest levels of inflation we've seen in Amazon's history and an overall uncertain consumer environment. At the same time, we made significant investments across the business, both in capital expenditures and in fixed costs.
Last year, I described how we were working hard to return to our operations to pre-pandemic efficiency levels, and we've made good progress towards that goal. I'm happy to report that through all our hard work, combined with strong demand from our dedicated customer base and lower inflation, all this resulted in 2023 operating income of $37 billion, more than triple 2022's operating income of $12 billion. There are three primary drivers for this improvement. First, in stores, our focus on reducing cost to serve, which benefited from our shift to a regionalized fulfillment network. Second, we saw continued growth in advertising in AWS, which are both high-margin businesses. Finally, we grew our fixed costs at a slower rate than our revenue growth.
We are pleased with the increase in profitability we saw in 2023, and we think there are a number of opportunities to improve our operating income moving forward as we continue to deliver for our customers. In 2023, we invested approximately $48 billion in capital investments. This is down approximately $10 billion from 2022, primarily driven by lower spend on fulfillment and transportation. Our CapEx mix has shifted over the past several years towards infrastructure, and in 2023, over 60% of our CapEx was for infrastructure, primarily to support AWS. We expect this shift to continue as we meaningfully increase our CapEx investments in 2024, primarily driven by higher infrastructure to support growth in AWS, including generative AI. Free cash flow remains our most important long-term financial metric.
In 2023, free cash flow, adjusted for finance leases, was $36 billion, an improvement of more than $48 billion year-over-year. The largest drivers of this improvement in free cash flow are increased operating income and moderated levels of capital investment. We're also seeing improvements in working capital, notably in inventory efficiency, driven by our regionalization efforts. As we've improved our inventory placement across the regionalized network, we've been able to hold less overall inventory while still delivering at faster speeds. As we turn the calendar to 2024, we're excited to continue to build upon the great work the teams have been able to deliver in 2023, and we remain focused on streamlining and prioritizing projects in an effective way that reduces costs and also allows us to continue innovating and inventing for customers.
Thank you, Brian. I would now like to introduce Andy Jassy, who will make a few opening remarks and address questions we have received pursuant to the meeting rules of procedure.
Hi, I'm Andy Jassy. Thank you for taking the time to join us. I wanna start by recognizing our more than 1.5 million employees for all their invention, collaboration, discipline, execution, and reimagination across Amazon, all of which has been at the heart of our continued momentum. I'm proud of the dedication and effort from all our employees around the world. We had a strong year in 2023, and it has continued into 2024, and that's thanks to what our collective teams have been delivering for customers who are always our central focus. I also want to thank our third-party sellers, who now account for more than 60% of all the units sold in our store. Your partnership is very important to us as you are helping us deliver an increasingly vast selection at record speeds, and we know customers really appreciate it.
I'd like to thank all of our AWS partners who are so critical to building in the cloud and are joining us on this very exciting journey into the transformative world of generative AI. From my perspective, I have more enthusiasm and optimism for Amazon's future than ever... We continue to make meaningful progress in our customer experiences and financial results. We are innovating across all of our businesses and have remarkable opportunities in front of us. In our stores business, we continue to make progress in expanding selection, offering low prices, and accelerating delivery speed. We're continuing to lower our cost to serve, challenging every closely held belief in our fulfillment network, and finding several areas where we believe we can lower costs even further, while also delivering faster for customers and keeping employees safe at the same time. In AWS, we're seeing continued momentum.
Before the pandemic, companies were on a march to modernize their infrastructure, which meant moving from on-premises to the cloud. The pandemic and subsequent uncertain economy distracted this march, but we have seen this resume. We're also seeing significant traction in generative AI as customers are gravitating toward our chips, AI services like Bedrock and SageMaker that make it easier to build foundation models and deploy high-quality generative AI applications, and applications like Amazon Q, that is the most capable GenAI-powered assistant for accelerating software development and leveraging internal data. Advertising remains strong, with ad sales up 24% year-over-year, primarily driven by Sponsored Products , supported by continued improvements in relevancy and measurement capabilities for advertisers.
We're also making progress on many of our newer business investments that have the potential to be important to customers and Amazon long term, including what we're doing with Prime Video, grocery, healthcare, Kuiper, and logistics and fulfillment services . I strongly believe that our best days are in front of us, and with that, I look forward to taking your questions.
Thanks, Andy. We'll now move to our first question: Can you provide an update on employee safety in your fulfillment centers?
Safety is priority zero for us. It is the number one priority across our entire fulfillment network, and our goal is to be the best in the industries in which we operate. We invest a lot of time and resource there. We've, we've invested over $1 billion since 2019, and we're making a lot of progress. If you just look at our recordable injury rate, it's improved 30% over the last four years. If you look at the time that people miss because of some sort of injury, the time people miss from work, that's improved over 60% in the last four years. When we look at our...
The latest injury rates that we have and compare them to the last known Bureau of Labor Statistics that we've seen, we're better now than the industry averages in which we operate, which is both warehousing and logistics. But we won't be happy until we're the very best in the industries in which we operate. We have a lot of work to do. We're making progress, but we have a lot of work to do, and it's a priority for the team and me.
Your next question is: What are your plans with Alexa as competitors invest more in this space?
Well, if we wanted Alexa to be a smart speaker, we would've been a good amount of the way there. We'd always have work to do, but a good amount of the way there. But for a long time, we have shared that our vision there is to be, is to build the world's best personal assistant. And I think there have been times over the last few years where people have wondered whether or not that was a realistic goal. But I think if you've looked at what's been happening in generative AI over the last couple of years, if you don't believe there's gonna be a really broad personal assistant, you have your head in the sand. I think that there's absolutely going to be so.
I think if you look at Alexa, where we have over 500 million devices in people's homes, with over 200 million active endpoints across entertainment and smart home and shopping and information, we have a very significant chance to be the leader here, and we have a pretty significant large language model that we've built that runs underneath Alexa. But we're in the process of building a much more expansive one that we think will meaningfully improve the experience for our Alexa users. I'm very optimistic that we will be a leader here, and I think our future is bright.
Thanks, Andy. Can you give us an update on regulation and any potential impacts on your business?
Well, starting about 10 years ago, as we started having success across a number of different businesses at Amazon, we knew that we were gonna be scrutinized more, and that's just what happens as you get larger. And so what we said to ourselves across all our businesses was that we just have to make sure we run the businesses and build customer experiences that we're proud of and will be proud of when people come and look more closely. And I think that's what we've done over the last, you know, really since the beginning of Amazon.
You know, we spend a lot of time making sure that as a team and as individual teams, the majority of our energy, the vast majority of our energy and attention, goes towards trying to provide the best possible customer experience that we can deliver for customers. You know, I think that all the machinations around what will happen in the regulatory world will take a long time. It's just the nature of how they work in our legal system, and I can't say very much specifically on the FTC suit, except to say that we believe they're wrong on the facts and on the law. But I think that we have to be careful in Western countries to think about what we're trying to regulate and what we're trying to accomplish, because you can have really negative, unintended consequences.
I think a pretty good example of that is what happened with the iRobot acquisition that we were doing. So this, it's a really interesting story where you had, you know, an American entrepreneur, outside of Boston, who invented a product, really the Roomba, which is the robotic vacuum cleaner, and really invented the category and, and built a significant business, about a billion-dollar business. And as what happens with all businesses that are good customer experiences, is you end up with competitors because it's a, an attractive value proposition. And so they ended, it ended up attracting a couple very large Chinese companies as, as competitors, and they needed scale. And scale really matters in business because it allows you to, buy components at lower costs, and allows you to invest in R&D in, in a significant way.
They merged with Amazon to get that scale. The European Commission decided to block that acquisition under the auspices that if it happened, Amazon would self-preference the Roomba vacuum cleaners versus other competitors, which isn't really our model, if you look at what we, what we do, just because we make at least as much money selling third-party products as our own. And then, when they blocked it, the FTC very quickly came out and said, "Well, if they hadn't blocked it, they would've blocked it." So what happens is we, we abdicate the acquisition, and that same day, iRobot has to lay off a third of their staff, and their stock price substantially goes down. And now, there's a real question whether or not they're gonna be a going concern.
By the way, one of the interesting things about those robotic vacuum cleaners is that they have to be able to track and map the inside of people's homes to make sure they don't bump into objects. So really, what the regulators effectively were saying was that they somehow trust Chinese companies to better map the inside of Western customers' homes than Amazon, who's been a pretty amazing steward of customer data on the consumer side and the AWS side. I don't think that's what we were really going for. So I think we just have to be careful with regulation, that we know what we're trying to do, and we don't create negative unintended consequences because we're opening up the market for a lot of other, you know, non-US players that we may not intend to.
Could you please expand on the ads business, including Prime Video ads?
Well, we're very pleased with the progress we've made in our, in our ads area. You know, we grew 24% year-over-year on a, on a pretty big base, from $38 billion in 2022 to $47 billion in 2023. You know, I think most of our ads revenue today is from Sponsored Products in our marketplace, and advertising really only works if the ads are helpful to customers and relevant to what they're shopping for, which, you know, ultimately leads to customers taking action and buying, and, and success for advertisers, too.
You know, the lion's share of our time spent on Sponsored Products and a good amount of the people that we have in our advertising business are really machine learning expert practitioners who are working constantly to keep honing, to make sure that the results are more and more relevant for customers. I think we've had a fair bit of success, but we're still. We'll always have work to do there. I think that we're still very early in figuring out how to thoughtfully place advertising in video, and sports, and audio, and grocery products. We have recently launched Prime Video ads, which is off to a really good start. Brands are really excited about being able to reach over 200 million monthly viewers, and you know, I think we still have quite a bit of opportunity in advertising.
It's still early days for us there.
Thanks, Andy. Many other large tech companies, large cap tech companies, have a dividend. Has the Amazon board had talks about issuing a dividend?
Well, we always look at all the different ways to best leverage and invest the cash that we have, and we are very convicted that the best use of this cash for customers, and the business, and shareholders right now is investing in the businesses in which we're pursuing. And I think if you look at our existing large businesses, and stores, and AWS as examples, they're they still require very significant capital to pursue the very large opportunities that we have. I think it's important to keep remembering that, you know, in our, in our stores business, which is roughly a $500 billion annual revenue business, we're still only about 1% of the worldwide market segment share in retail, and about 85% of it still lives in physical stores.
And this-- You know, it's a similar story in AWS, where it's a $100 billion annual revenue run rate, but about 85%-90% of the global IT spend is still on premises. And if you believe those equations are gonna flip, which we do, we have a lot of growth in front of us. And, you know, you layer on for AWS, the fact that generative AI is this very transformative, substantial opportunity, almost all of which will be built from the get-go in the cloud, and there's real good uses, I think, of capital to keep growing those businesses.
Then we, you know, we have a lot of passion for the newer businesses and investments that we're making, that we've discussed in the past, in areas like Prime Video, and healthcare, and Kuiper, and Zoox, and grocery, and some of the logistics and fulfillment businesses we're pursuing, that we're really excited about what's possible. We will always look at alternative ways to invest cash, and if we find better ways than what we're investing in, we'll do it.
This will be the last question: How are Amazon and AWS progressing in generative AI, and what competitive edge do you have?
Well, as I was just saying, we believe generative AI has the potential to transform virtually every customer experience that we know of today and invent new ones that we didn't think were possible before. And we're seeing a lot of momentum right now in generative AI and AWS. It's already, you know, if you look at our AI business, it's a $multi-billion-dollar annual revenue run rate business, and it's still pretty early for us. And I think a lot of the discussion over the first couple years has really been at the application layer and some about the models, but we see three macro layers in the generative AI stack, all of which are humongous, and all of which we're very aggressively pursuing.
I think at that bottom layer, it's for people that are building models themselves, largely from scratch. And the two most important things for those customers are the compute that they use to train their models and then run predictions or inferences, and then also having services that make it much easier for them to, to build those models. And, you know, on the compute side, we are the broadest and leading partner for NVIDIA. We have the broadest selection. They lead their new products almost always with AWS. But at the same time, our customers would like us to find ways to give them better price performance than what they get today because they know how much they're gonna spend, not just in training models, but also in running the inference around these models. And so we've been pursuing our own custom silicon.
We've built a training chip that we call Trainium, an inference chip that we call Inferentia. They're on the second versions of both of those. They're gonna have meaningfully better price performance than alternatives today. And I think a lot of the future generative AI is and model building is gonna be built on top of those chips. And then I think you're starting to see more and more customers standardize on our service called SageMaker to build their models, which makes it much easier to get the data in, to wrangle the data, to have an infrastructure around training, to do experimentation, to deploy into production. And so, SageMaker is really broadly being used. So I think we have very strong services for people at the bottom of the stack and that are building their own models.
And then, you know, the middle layer is really for those companies and individuals who aren't looking to build their own model from scratch, but instead want to leverage an existing big foundation model and customize it with their own data, and then have features that make it much easier to build high-quality generative AI applications. And that's why we built Amazon Bedrock, which has the broadest selection of third-party and first-party models. And so we have foundation models from Anthropic, where Claude 3 is the best performing model on the planet right now, and Llama 3 from Meta, and from Mistral, and from Cohere, and from AI21, and several of our own models under Titan as a title.
So we have the broadest selection of foundation models, but then also, really importantly, we have a set of features that make it so much easier to build a high-quality, production-level generative AI application. So these are things like guardrails to make sure that the model doesn't answer questions in ways that you don't want, or a RAG to make sure you have the most up-to-date information, or model evaluations so you can tell between different models, or agenting capabilities, so you can do multi-step actions and have them executed in a successful and accurate way. And what we see is that at this relatively early stage, but we see this continuing over time, is that customers are gonna use multiple models. They're gonna use multiple model sizes.
They're gonna have times where they want certain questions to go to the most sophisticated model, because it's hardest to answer, and many others that go to a good model, but that's not quite as sophisticated for lower latency and better price performance. And customers want it to be easy to move across all these capabilities, and that's what Bedrock gives customers, and it's part of why it's resonating, I think, so significantly. It has a lot of traction. And then at the top layer of the stack are really the applications. And, you know, we, we've built an application called Amazon Q, which is the most capable generative AI-powered assistant for software development and leveraging your own data.
And so Q does things like it writes code, it tests code, it debugs and looks for coding conflicts and automatically remediates it. It transforms code from you know old versions of Java to new versions of Java, or you know soon it will transform from .NET to Linux implementations or ultimately even help you with mainframes. So it does all those things on the coding side, and then for all of your internal data repositories, you just point Q at it, and it allows you to ask any question where it can summarize the data across all your different disparate internal resources. It allows you to be able to answer questions, to be able to have a conversation about it.
We built something called Q Apps that we just released, which allow people in natural language to talk about the applications they wanna build on top of their internal data, and the applications get built for them. So this is another service that we see customers very excited about and gravitating towards. So, yeah, I think we have quite a bit of momentum and an unusually compelling offering at all three layers that stack. And I would tell you also that I just wouldn't overlook the importance of security in these generative AI models. The reality is, for most companies, some of their very most sensitive data is gonna be in these models, and it's gonna be critically important to be able to protect these models.
And I think you just only have to look around at some of the security issues with some of the other providers over the last year to realize that not all the providers have the same capabilities on the security and operational performance sides. AWS has a very significant advantage and edge here, which is another reason why customers are moving so quickly to AWS for generative AI. So I'm very, very bullish that the largest number of generative AI apps are gonna be built on top of AWS. And as I mentioned earlier, one of the interesting things is that, you know, in, in kind of the non-generative AI part of AWS, all of the enterprise movement is migrations.
You know, it's a lot of new applications, but it's also a lot of migrations, and it's very doable, and we've gotten very proficient at helping enterprises do so. But it takes work to move those applications and time to move those applications. Whereas in generative AI, almost all of the applications are gonna be built from scratch, from the get-go, on the cloud. So very significant opportunity for us. As that concludes our Q&A, I just wanna thank everyone again for joining us today, particularly our longtime shareholders. We appreciate your support and your interest in what we're doing. It means a lot, and we really do value it. Rest assured, we're gonna continue doing our part, inventing and taking care of our customers, employees, and communities to make their lives better and easier every day. Thank you very much.