Welcome to the Amazon.com Annual Meeting of Shareholders. I'm David Zapolsky, Senior Vice President and Chief Global Affairs and Legal Officer. 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 a 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 use to access this meeting and then click Submit. Out of respect for your fellow shareholders, we ask that each person please 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 Garelick, Daniel Huttenlocher, Andrew Ng, Indra Nooyi, John Rubenstein, Brad Smith, Patty Stonecipher, and Wendell Weeks. Also joining us today remotely 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 10, 2025, 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 2025, and an advisory vote to approve executive compensation. We have eight 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 two 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. Proposal number four requests a mandatory policy requiring that the roles of CEO and Chair of the Board remain separate. The proponent has voluntarily ceded its time for making a statement, and so the proposal is hereby presented at this meeting. Todd Russ will now introduce proposal number five, requesting a report on advertising risks. Mr. Russ has prerecorded the following statement.
I'm Todd Russ, State Treasurer for the State of Oklahoma, Chairman of the Board of Investors for the Oklahoma Tobacco Settlement Endowment Trust Fund, follower of item number five. This proposal asks Amazon to commit to politically neutral advertising policies. More and more companies from Meta to McDonald's are moving away from taking political sides in their business practices. Why? Because neutrality is becoming the best practice. It avoids controversy, protects brand reputation, and focuses on business, not politics. Now, one of Amazon's leadership principles is that a great company seeks diverse perspective. That's a great goal. If diverse perspectives matter, then political neutrality should be part of that vision, especially when it comes to where and how Amazon spends its ad dollars. Unfortunately, Amazon was a member of the GARM, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media.
That group worked to keep advertising money away from platforms they labeled as promoting disinformation or hate speech. In reality, this often meant targeting conservative media outlets like the Daily Wire or platforms like Spotify for hosting voices like Joe Rogan. It wasn't about responsibility or fiduciary duty; it was about politics. GARM used enormous amounts of ad spending to push activist goals, and it backfired. There was legal and political pushback. Elon Musk even filed a lawsuit after GARM targeted its platform, X. Eventually, the group shut down, and an antitrust nominee for President Trump's DOJ said GARM was probably a form of illegal collusion. The damage was done. Shareholders are right to expect Amazon to step back from partisan ad policies and commit to neutrality going forward. That's what proposal number five is about.
It's a chance for Amazon to rebuild trust with shareholders and focus on what matters for Americans for every walk of life: fairness, neutrality, and smart business. Please vote yes on proposal number five. Thank you.
Thank you. Giovanna Eichner will now introduce proposal number six, requesting alternative emissions reporting. Ms. Eichner has prerecorded the following statement.
Hello. My name is Giovanna Eichner. I'm speaking on behalf of Green Century Capital Management and shareholder representative, as you saw. Lead filers of proposal number six requesting Amazon disclose the material Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions associated with all its retail sales. Climate change is already projected to cost the global economy $38 trillion per year by 2050, and the retail sector is responsible for 25% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Transparent and accurate emissions disclosures are an essential first step toward understanding the extent of a company's climate impact, how to reduce it, and its associated reputational and regulatory risks. Amazon's emissions reporting is incomplete. The company only reports product-related Scope 3 emissions from its own branded products, which are 3% of its retail sales. This incomplete reporting leaves shareholders unaware of the emissions from 97% of the products Amazon sells and of its exposure to climate-related risk.
While the European Union and California greenhouse gas reporting requirements are evolving, these laws will require Amazon to report the material Scope 3 emissions from its retail sales. If the company does not meet this standard, it risks falling into regulatory non-compliance. Of the largest U.S. retailers, Amazon is the only one that reports product-related Scope 3 emissions from only its own branded products. Considering that these own-branded products make up just 3% of Amazon's retail sales, this disclosure is misaligned with peers, confusing, and potentially misleading to investors. To mitigate material regulatory and reputational risks, reduce its contribution to climate change, and align with the well-established best practices used by its peers, Amazon should report the material Scope 3 emissions from all its retail sales. For these reasons, we urge a fore vote on proposal number six. Thank you.
Thank you. Eliza Pan will now introduce proposal number seven, requesting additional reporting on the impact of data centers on climate commitments. Operator, please open the line for Ms. Pan.
Hello. I'm an Amazon investor, and I also worked at Amazon for six years. I'm here to point out a problem that Amazon execs have a blind spot about: its fossil-fuel-powered data center buildout. As investors, we need more information than management is giving us about how they're handling these risks. I urge shareholders to vote for proposal seven, requesting additional reporting on the impact of data centers on climate commitments. In 2019, after being pushed by its workers, Amazon made a climate pledge that was a big step forward but still gravely inadequate. Every season, we see more fires, more heat waves, more multi-billion dollar disasters, and in many countries, the impacts are far worse. Given that the current administration has abandoned climate efforts, this is a moment when companies must decide if they truly want a sustainable future. AI is a climate disaster.
Google and Microsoft's carbon emissions have risen 30%-50% as a result of AI growth. Amazon? We don't know. They won't say. Amazon prefers a fog around the fact that data centers are a massive source of emissions because data centers are also its biggest source of profit. Executives say they're committed to the climate pledge, but in 2023, Amazon was dropped from the Science-Based Targets Initiative and is now listed as having its commitment removed. With no interim goals nor a science-aligned plan to reach net zero, investors need more information about how Amazon is meeting its targets. Even when data centers purchase renewable energy, they're often displacing the use of that energy by households rather than catalyzing new renewables. Real commitment would be a public plan with interim milestones to meet Amazon's net zero goals despite AI growth.
Real answers mean no risks obscured, no solutions conflated or exaggerated. Andy Jassy, are you committed to the climate pledge? If you are, then Amazon needs to detail to investors how it will meet its climate commitments even as AI-powered demand is expected to double within two years and to continue growing long past that. It's not just the future of the company that depends on it. All our futures depend on it. Thank you.
Thank you. Isaiah Thomas will now introduce proposal number eight, requesting an assessment of board structure for oversight of AI. Mr. Thomas has prerecorded the following statement.
Good morning. My name is Isaiah Thomas, and I hereby introduce proposal number eight submitted by the AFL-CIO Equity Index Funds. I'm a union organizer with the Retail Wholesale and Department Store Union. Our proposal requests that the Board of Directors commission an independent third-party assessment of the Board of Directors' oversight of human rights risks associated with artificial intelligence. The right to a safe and healthy workplace is an internationally recognized human right according to the International Labor Organization. As a former Amazon warehouse employee in Bessemer, Alabama, I want you to know that working in an Amazon warehouse is hard, demanding work. The pace of work for Amazon warehouse workers is set by a computer algorithm, and Amazon employees are subject to discipline if we do not stay on pace to meet Amazon's productivity quotas. Demanding production quotas for warehouse workers can increase the risk of ergonomic injury.
Last December, Amazon entered into a corporate-wide settlement with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to better protect employees from hazardous working conditions that can result in musculoskeletal injuries. Amazon has introduced new AI-powered robots in its fulfillment centers to assist warehouse employees in packaging customer orders. While automation can help prevent ergonomic injuries from repetitive motions, robots also create occupational safety risks when working alongside humans. 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. Amazon has said that the full board has overall responsibility for risk oversight. To assist the board in fulfilling these duties, this proposal requests that the board obtain a third-party assessment of the board's structure in overseeing AI-related risks.
For these reasons, we urge you to vote in favor of this proposal. Thank you.
Thank you. Conrad McCarron will now introduce proposal number nine, requesting a report on packaging materials. Operator, please open the line for Mr. McCarron.
Good morning. I'm Conrad McCarron, Senior Vice President of, as you saw, the filer of item number nine on the proxy. I hereby move proposal nine, which asks the company to assess the reputational, financial, and operational risks of continuing to use non-recyclable flexible plastic packaging. Flexible plastic packaging includes pouches and sachets and is especially susceptible to becoming plastic pollution, as its multi-layer, multi-material nature makes it virtually impossible to process in conventional recycling systems. Amazon uses flexible plastic for primary packaging applications at several of its private label brands and at Whole Foods Market. Competitors Target and Walmart have disclosed the volume of plastic packaging for their products, as well as the subset that is flexible packaging. Amazon has not. At least 60 consumer goods companies, including Target, Unilever, and Walmart, have adopted time-bound goals to transition their packaging to be recyclable, reusable, or compostable. Amazon has not.
Without new commitments throughout the plastics value chain, plastic pollution of oceans could nearly triple by 2040. Corporations could face an annual financial risk of up to $100 billion should governments require them to cover the waste management costs of their packaging. In its statement in opposition, the company does not acknowledge or respond to the core focus of our proposal, that it has not released any information about the amount of flexible or other plastic used for primary packaging of its products. In conclusion, the company needs to urgently accelerate a transition away from problematic flexible formats of product packaging to match commitments by competitors to make all packaging recyclable. The lack of disclosure is a concerning lapse in corporate responsibility that leaves investors in the dark about company performance against critical plastic packaging goals accepted by many competitors. Please support proposal number nine. Thank you.
Thank you. Antoine Argouge will now introduce proposal number ten, requesting a report on warehouse working conditions. Mr. Argouge has prerecorded the following statement.
Good afternoon. I am Antoine Argouge, CEO of the impact fund Tulip Share, speaking in support of item number ten. Tulip Share is a long-term shareholder in Amazon. As investors, we are deeply committed to the company's sustained financial performance and to the health and resilience of all stakeholders, including the workforce that is the heart of the company. It is from this perspective that we have filed a shareholder proposal requesting that Amazon commission an independent audit and publicly disclose a report on the working conditions and treatment of its warehouse employees. The rationale for this proposal is clear and rooted in material risk. Public data and independent studies consistently show that Amazon warehouse workers suffer injuries at rates significantly higher and more severe than those at other leading warehouse operators. A recent U.S.
Senate investigation further alleged that Amazon has repeatedly ignored internal safety recommendations in an effort to maintain its aggressive productivity target. This is not a social issue. It is a financial and governance concern. Reputational damage, regulatory scrutiny, employee turnover, and litigation are all the material risks that could affect long-term shareholder value. For three consecutive years, our proposal has received substantial investor backing, including a high of 44% support in 2022. This level of support signals a clear message. Shareholders expect greater transparency and accountability from Amazon on this issue, yet to date, the company has neither addressed the substance of this concern nor engaged in constructive dialogue with us. We believe it is in shareholders' financial and fiduciary interests to support item number ten.
Independent oversight of workplace conditions would not only mitigate legal and reputational risks but also support Amazon in building a safer, more resilient workforce, ultimately reinforcing long-term value creation.
Thank you. Luke Perlott will now introduce proposal number eleven, requesting a report on data usage oversight in AI offerings. Mr. Perlott has prerecorded the following statement.
Good morning. Artificial intelligence is reshaping every corner of Amazon's business, from Alexa and Ring to AWS and the company's new Bedrock and Q offerings. AI is only as trustworthy as the data that trains it. While Amazon's competitors are focused on developing consumer-oriented AI models, Amazon's focus has been on internal development. That is where Amazon faces a material self-inflicted risk. Internal security leaders have previously warned that the company's customer data had become too expansive and unwieldy for the security division to map. Alexa voice snippets have been shared with dozens of advertising partners, and confidential enterprise data leaked during the preview of the Q chatbot. These lapses reveal a pattern. Amazon builds powerful AI behind closed doors, while the public, regulators, and investors remain in the dark about where its training data comes from and how securely it is handled.
Competitors such as Microsoft, Google, and Meta are already battling lawsuits over data scraping and copyright infringement. If Amazon ignores the warning signs, the company could encounter the same litigation, regulatory fines, and consumer backlash, threatening the very trust that underpins Amazon's $2 trillion valuation. Our proposal is simple: publish an annual board-level report that, one, identifies the operational and financial risks created by unethical or illegal data sourcing for AI, and two, details the safeguards Amazon employs to prevent those abuses, and three, explains how the company measures their effectiveness. Privacy-centric companies win customer loyalty. Those that violate it lose in court and in the marketplace. For these reasons, I urge shareholders to vote for item eleven so that we can ensure Amazon's leadership in AI is matched by leadership in data ethics. Thank you.
Thank you. That concludes the presentation of the proposals. 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 those questions. In response, I invite you to review the board statement and recommendation, as applicable, on each of the proposals as set forth in the company's proxy statement. The polls are now closed on all proposals, and the formal portion of this meeting is now adjourned. Based on a preliminary vote result, each nominee for director received a majority of the votes cast for such nominees' 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.
The world changes pretty quickly. Technology changes. Competitors change. Companies change. I think we have a chance to build the most remarkable company in the history of business. I think we're on our way, and a business that our kids and our grandkids will be proud of.
We're not just a bookstore anymore. There has never been a time in Amazon's history where we felt that there's so much opportunity to make our customers' lives better and easier. Today, we continue to operate in times of unprecedented change that come with unusual opportunity for growth across the areas in which we operate. As our store's business has grown substantially and our supply chain becomes more complex, we've had to develop a slew of capabilities in order to offer customers unmatched selection at low prices and with very fast delivery times. In media and advertising, content will continue to migrate from linear formats to streaming. Globally, hundreds of millions of people who don't have adequate broadband access will gain that connectivity in the next few years. Generative AI may be the largest technology transformation since the cloud, and perhaps the internet.
This Gen AI revolution will be built from the start on top of the cloud. The amount of societal and business benefit from the solutions that will be possible will astound us all. How do we continue to invent for customers? At the highest level, we're aiming to be Earth's most customer-centric company, making customers' lives better and easier every day. This is not easy to do in general, let alone year after year. In fact, it's actually quite hard, especially with the rapid rate of change in technology, customer habits, and new products from large and small companies alike. If we want to have a chance at succeeding in our mission, we have to constantly question everything around us. A lot of invention is about trying to open doors that have historically seemed bolted shut.
Over the past 30 years, we've found one of the most important keys to unlock these doors has been a simple question: why? That's because Amazon is a why company. We ask why and why not constantly. It helps us deconstruct problems, get to root causes, understand blockers, and unlock doors that might have previously seemed impenetrable. We operate like the world's largest startup, in large part because of our culture of why. We don't always get everything right, and we learn and iterate like crazy. But we're constantly choosing to prioritize customers, delivery, invention, ownership, speed, scrappiness, curiosity, and building a company that outlasts us all. It remains day one.
Hello, everyone. I'm Brian Olsavsky, Amazon's Chief Financial Officer. Today, I'll share a recap of our 2024 financial results. First, let me highlight some of the key things we did for customers during the year. As always, we remain focused on the inputs that matter most to our customers: price, selection, and convenience. We continue to be the place that customers rely on for sharp pricing. In addition to our low everyday prices, we held multiple shopping events throughout the year, including our Big Spring Sale in March, Prime Day in July, Prime Big Deal Days in October, and our Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping event. In the fourth quarter alone, customers saved more than $15 billion with our low everyday prices and record-setting events.
Our speed of delivery continues to improve, and in 2024, we delivered to Prime members at our fastest speeds ever, delivering over 9 billion units the same or next day around the world. We expanded the number of same-day delivery sites by more than 60% in 2024 and now serve more than 140 metro areas. Our speed is also driven by improved inventory placement, which helps lower transportation distances and results in lower shipping costs. Overall, we've reduced our global cost to serve on a per-unit basis for the second year in a row, while at the same time increasing speed, improving safety, and adding selection. In AWS, we've continued innovating so that companies of all sizes can harness the power of the cloud and realize the benefits of generative AI to improve customer experiences, to drive productivity, and to unlock new insights and analytics.
In 2024, we launched our custom AI silicon Trainium 2, and EC2 instances with these chips are typically 30-40% more price-performant than other currently available GPU-powered instances. We continue to iterate quickly on Amazon Bedrock, our fully managed service that offers a choice of high-performing foundation models with the most compelling set of features that make it easy to build high-quality generative AI applications. We announced Amazon Nova, Amazon's own family of foundation models that compare favorably in intelligence against the leading models in the world but offer better latency, lower price, and integration with key Bedrock features like fine-tuning, model distillation, and more. 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 2024, we had a strong improvement across our financial results.
Net sales were $638 billion, an increase of $63 billion year-over-year, or 11%. Turning to our segment financial results, our North America segment sales grew to $387 billion, up 10% year-over-year. International segment sales grew to $143 billion, up 10% year-over-year, excluding the impact of foreign exchange. We are enthusiastic about the business we are building internationally. In addition to our established international countries in Europe, Japan, and the U.K., we have added more than eight new countries in the past five years, including South Africa in 2024 and Ireland earlier in the year. Our relentless pursuit of better selection, price, and delivery speed drove accelerated growth in Prime membership worldwide in 2024. We have also seen strength in everyday essentials, categories like beauty and health and personal care, where speed is even more important to our customers. Third-party sellers remain a key contributor to our store's offering.
In 2024, sellers represented 61% 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 them 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 $56 billion in net sales for 2024, an increase of 20% year-over-year. We continue to see many opportunities to grow across our full-funnel advertising offerings, allowing brands to drive awareness in offerings like streaming TV all the way to the point of purchase, like in sponsored products. AWS sales grew to $108 billion, up 19% year-over-year, and in Q4 2024, reached an annualized sales run rate of more than $115 billion.
This was driven by growth in both generative AI and core offerings as companies turned their attention to newer initiatives, brought more workloads to the cloud, restarted or accelerated existing migrations from on-premises to the cloud, and tapped into the power of generative AI. We are pleased with our recent growth as we continue expanding our generative AI offerings and are encouraged by the response from our customers. In 2024, we continued to make significant progress to lower our cost structure and improve overall profitability across all three of our segments. While 2022 was an outlier year with a challenging macroeconomic environment coming out of the pandemic, in 2023, we made substantial improvements in profitability, getting back on track to where we were in 2020 and 2021. In 2024, we continued to make progress in our profitability and reported $68.6 billion of operating income.
This was the result of hard work and discipline across all of our teams. There are three primary drivers for this improvement. First, in stores, our focus on reducing cost to serve, driven by improving inventory placement across all of our regional fulfillment network and investments in our re-architected inbound network. Second, we saw continued growth in advertising and AWS, which are both high-margin businesses. Finally, we grew our fixed costs at a lower rate than our revenue growth rate. We are pleased with the increase in profitability we saw in 2024, 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 2024, we invested approximately $78 billion in cash CapEx.
This is an increase of approximately $30 billion from 2023, primarily to support the growing need for technology infrastructure and generative AI services, things like data centers, chips, and servers. This investment primarily relates to AWS, but also goes to support our North America and international segments, with innovations like our shopping assistant, Rufus, and Alexa Plus, our next-generation Alexa personal assistant. We also continue to invest in capacity for our operations network to support future growth, accelerate our delivery speed, improve safety, and lower our cost to serve. Free cash flow remains our most important long-term financial metric. In 2024, free cash flow was $38 billion, an improvement of more than $1 billion year-over-year. This was driven by an increase in operating cash flow of $31 billion, coupled with increased capital investments of approximately $30 billion.
We see further opportunities to improve our operating cash flows and profitability as we scale our capital investments. As we've turned the calendar to 2025, we are excited to continue to build upon the great work the teams have been able to deliver in 2024. This external environment is certainly complex, but as we have done throughout our history, we will remain focused on the inputs that we can control to protect the customer experience. We will work hard to remain the place customers trust for sharp prices, broad selection, and customer convenience. We will remain focused on driving a better customer experience and believe putting customers first is the only reliable way to create lasting value for our shareholders. Thank you.
Thank you, Brian. I would now like to introduce our CEO, 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, and thank you for taking the time to join us. We had another strong year in 2024, and it has continued into 2025. The team's constant focus on how we can make customers' lives easier and better, and their long-term thinking about the products and services we can deliver for customers are responsible for what you can see in our 2024 results and for so many things that will become visible over the next few years. We are seeing some of the results of this hard work in our financial performance. Our total revenue in 2024 grew 11% year-over-year to $638 billion. In our stores business, we substantially expanded selection, continued lowering prices, which always matters a lot to customers, perhaps even more so right now, and for the second year in a row, we shipped at record speed to our Prime members.
We've made significant progress in making our fulfillment network more cost-effective, and we're expanding our delivery stations in rural areas of the United States. In AWS, we had strong growth with revenue increasing to $108 billion, or up 19% year-over-year. For perspective, just 10 years ago, AWS revenue was $4.6 billion, and in that same year, Amazon's total revenue was $89 billion. There is so much more opportunity ahead of us. We continue to help organizations of all sizes accelerate their move to the cloud, helping to modernize their infrastructure, lower costs, and speed up innovation. In Amazon Ads, we're working hard to be the best place for brands to grow their businesses, and we've seen strong growth on a very large base. In 2024, we grew advertising revenue 20% year-over-year to $56 billion, more than double what we generated just four years ago.
We're seeing strength across our broad portfolio of full-funnel advertising offerings, from top-of-funnel capabilities to drive brand awareness, to the bottom-of-funnel offerings where we measure outcomes at the point of conversion. As you've seen, we're investing very aggressively in AI. Until a couple of years ago, it was pretty difficult to invent with AI, and that changed with the arrival of foundation models and generative AI. This made the technology much more accessible so that people could see the power and magic of what generative AI can do. We happen to believe, and we've been saying this for a long time, that virtually every customer experience that we all know will be reinvented using AI. Altogether, new experiences that we only dreamed of before are going to be possible with generative AI.
Now, if you have that belief, and if you serve customers across the breadth of businesses that we do at Amazon, and if your mission is to make customers' lives easier and better every day, it means you're going to invest expansively in AI across your company, which we're doing in a very significant way. You can see that in the 1,000+ generative AI applications we're building across Amazon. You can see that in what we're rolling out in Alexa Plus, which is the next-generation Alexa personal assistant that's meaningfully smarter, more capable, and is the first personal assistant that can take significant actions for customers on top of providing intelligent answers to virtually any question.
You can see that in our retail shopping assistant in Rufus, or in how we're helping our independent sellers more easily create new product detail pages or get counsel on how to be even more effective as a seller in our marketplace, or in how we're helping customers get faster and even more accurate customer service, or in knowing what the right personalized size is in apparel brands that customers may or may not have tried before, or in how we're using AI in our fulfillment network for better inventory forecasting and placement, or in robotics to assist our robots, intelligence, movements, and efficiency, or in how we're making it easier for brands to create new advertising creative, or in how we're enabling Prime Video customers to get recaps of each episode or season, regardless of where they start to watch. You can see it everywhere across the business.
You can see it in the set of building blocks we are delivering to make it easier for developers and companies to build generative AI applications.
From custom silicon in our Trainium 2 chips to making training and inference much more price-performance, to services like SageMaker to make new foundation model building much easier or Bedrock to allow customers to leverage leading frontier models and features to build high-quality generative AI applications, to our own frontier model, Nova, that has comparable intelligence to the leading foundation models in the world, but meaningfully lower latency and cost, to apps like Amazon Q that is the most capable AI-powered coding assistant, or AWS Transform, which makes it much easier to migrate from old, new versions of frameworks like Java, or from VMware to native cloud, or from .NET on Windows to .NET on the more cost-effective and secure Linux platform, or from archaic mainframe architectures to modern cloud. I could go on, but I think you get the idea.
We're investing very deeply in AI to enable internal and external builders to leverage this transformational technology to reinvent their customer experiences and businesses. It's a very unusual opportunity for customers, businesses, and Amazon, and we believe our long-term shareholders will be happy we're pursuing it as aggressively as we are. Beyond generative AI, we're also making progress in 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, and Kuiper, which recently launched its first 27 satellites into space with more to come this year. I feel incredibly optimistic and energized by what lies ahead. I want to close by thanking our customers, including consumers, sellers, brands, developers, enterprises, and creators for inventing and partnering with us.
We have made a lot of progress together with a lot more in front of us. I want to thank my teammates throughout the company, whose collective accomplishments represent a lot of invention, hard work, and thoughtful execution across Amazon. I look forward to taking your questions.
Thanks, Andy. We'll now move to our first question. Can you respond to reports that Amazon is reducing AI investment and explain how AI is tangibly benefiting the company?
First, we have no plans to reduce our AI investment, so that's not accurate. In terms of how AI is tangibly benefiting the company, I would say that there are two macro areas today that we see companies getting benefit out of AI. The first is cost avoidance and productivity, and the second is altogether new applications. You are seeing at Amazon significant benefits across these two macro areas as well. If I look at cost avoidance or productivity, I can give you a few examples. If you look in customer service for us in our retail business, we built a chatbot from AI several years ago, but we completely rebuilt it and re-architected it with generative AI. It already had pretty high accuracy scores and customer satisfaction scores, but they are meaningfully higher with our new generative AI chatbot.
You can see it with our independent sellers in our marketplace. To create new product detail pages, it's important that they're organized so that customers can find things with the right information the way they want, but it's somewhat onerous at times for sellers to complete all the lines and the forms that are required. What we've done is we've built a generative AI application that lets our sellers fill out a couple of lines of text or take a picture or point at a URL, and then the generative AI will fill in most of the rest of what's required to create a new product detail page. That form is so much easier for our sellers. If you look at what we have to do in fulfillment across our fulfillment network, we have over 1,000 facilities.
It's actually quite challenging to get the right items in the right quantities in the right buildings. The team has built a generative AI set of applications that do better forecasting. What we found with that application is that we're getting 10% better forecasting accuracy and 20% better region predictions, which at our scale is a big deal. Those are a few of many of the cost avoidance and productivity capabilities that we're getting from leveraging generative AI. If I look at altogether new customer experiences, again, you can see it in a lot of different examples. You can see it in what we're doing with Alexa Plus, which is our next-generation personal assistant for Alexa, which customers are really liking quite a bit. You can see it with our shopping assistant in Rufus.
You can see it in areas like customer reviews, where today customers have always relied on our customer reviews for being really an independent and unbiased characterization of what products are like. Before, you had to scroll through lots and lots of these reviews to get a sense. We've built a generative AI application that summarizes the customer review sentiment so you can understand what customers are saying much more quickly. You can think about experiences like in our retail business, where if you shop across apparel, many times you don't really know if a particular brand runs small or large, and you don't know what size you would be.
We've taken our corpus of all these apparel brands and then what the relative fits are across these brands, such that when customers come to a new apparel brand that they haven't seen, that generative AI application is able to predict what size they need to make it much more accurate and easy to buy. We have, as I mentioned earlier, over 1,000 generative AI applications that we've either built or are in the process of building at Amazon. We're getting very meaningful value from AI so far and still relatively early days.
Our next question is, how does Alexa Plus use AI?
Alexa, from the very start, has always used AI. Alexa Plus, which is the next generation of Alexa, uses AI even more expansively. There are several ways. I'll give you a few examples. First, we use automatic speech recognition to translate spoken words into text. We use natural language understanding to interpret the meaning and the intent behind those text words, which we either then represent in text on surfaces that use text, whether it's on an Alexa-enabled screen or on the new mobile or desktop apps for Alexa Plus, or we translate that text back into speech when you hear it come out of an Alexa speaker or device. Alexa Plus has also re-architected the brains and the orchestration of Alexa. It's built on multiple foundation models, primarily on top of Amazon Nova, which is our own frontier model.
What this new brain is doing is it's better able to understand queries, to route them to the right experts, and respond more intelligently, and then to take action. Most of the scaled generative AI applications today are largely question-and-answer chatbots. Alexa is very intelligent on question-and-answers, but it also takes real action. You can do everything from ask it to play music, ask it to play video, move media in your house from one speaker or one media device to another. It controls your smart home. It allows you to set timers and alarms and all sorts of routines. It allows me to say things like, "I have friends coming over for dinner tonight.
Can you please lower the curtains, put the lights on the front porch and in the driveway, raise the temperature five degrees, and put music on that's going to be great to have dinner to? All those types of things, it's able to take real action, which means that you need to have these AI models that can route to the right APIs and digital assets and exercise them and also have agentic capabilities because a lot of websites and a lot of digital assets don't have APIs, but you still want to be able to take actions on those entities. Being able to navigate to them and complete tasks for customers, those are agentic capabilities on the AI side that we've built in Alexa Plus. It all comes together in this very compelling Alexa Plus personal assistant.
We're in the process of rolling out broadly here in the U.S., and customers are really enjoying it.
Thanks, Andy. What are the implications of the government's new tariff policies on Amazon?
It is very hard to know at this point where the tariffs are going to settle and where they are going to end up at. As we have all seen, there have been a lot of changes over the last several weeks. We have done some things to try to keep to do everything we can to try to keep prices as low as possible for our customers. We did some forward buying in our first-party retail business. We have also done a lot of forward receiving from our independent sellers so that we have as much inventory as we can at as low prices as possible. I think it is also useful to understand some things, which is so far, we have not seen any attenuation of demand at this point. We also have not yet seen any meaningful average selling price increases.
I think that when you have hundreds of millions of SKUs or items and you have about 2 million sellers all over the world, you have a better shot at having the right selection for whatever matters to people in any discontinuity and at better prices. The reality is that when you have 2 million sellers, they're not all going to take the same action. They're not going to all decide to do the same thing. You may have some people where if their costs increase, who will increase their own prices. You can have others who see it as an opportunity and don't increase prices. I think the diversity and the size of our marketplace really helps customers have the best selection at the best prices.
Regardless, we will stay very focused on what we know matters most to customers, which really is having the broadest possible selection at the lowest price with very speedy delivery.
Your next question is, do you still see the opportunity in grocery?
I'm very bullish about grocery. I think some folks don't realize how large a grocery business Amazon has today. If you look at our center of aisle things, these are things like consumables, canned goods, pharmaceutical items, beauty products, really everyday essentials. If I just exclude Whole Foods Market and Amazon Fresh, we did over $100 billion of gross sales in our grocery business on these items last year alone. It is a very significant business. I think we have a bunch of other areas that will allow us to grow in this area. I'm excited about what I'm seeing with Whole Foods Market. It is growing meaningfully faster than the grocery industry in general, with a really good profitability trajectory with the changes we've made over the last couple of years and a great customer experience.
I'm also excited about the new smaller format and daily shop that we launched in New York City, where customers have really responded excellently to it, even better than we anticipated. You can expect us to roll more of those out over time. We know if we want to serve as many customers as we want, we need to have a broader mass perishables offering. We have several efforts here. We've been working on the second version of our physical Amazon Fresh stores, and those are showing meaningful progress in terms of what the performance looks like versus the first version of those Fresh stores. We've also been experimenting with a number of other concepts that we think have promise.
These are things like at Whole Foods Market stores, where we have a store within a store where we're able to have items that maybe Whole Foods Market doesn't supply, but that a lot of families want to shop when they do their weekly grocery shopping for. Similar type of idea of being able to get some of those items in micro-fulfillment capabilities on locations at certain Whole Foods Market stores. An offering that I would say we have seen some very early success on that's very promising, which is we have these same-day facilities that we fulfill millions of SKUs out of for our retail business, typically same day. We have started adding a number of perishable items to some of those select same-day facilities. We've experimented in Phoenix, in Kansas City, in Orlando at this point.
Now when you're getting those items that you get same day, you can add perishables like eggs or milk or bread or yogurt. That experience is really resonating with customers. We're seeing very significant adoption. I'm optimistic as we roll that out to many more of our same-day facilities that that will lead to more of our customers buying perishables from us. I think that the way people buy groceries is going to continue to evolve over time. I continue to be very bullish on our grocery business. It's large today and has a chance to be much larger in the future.
Your next question is, what improvements is Amazon making in warehouse working conditions?
There is nothing more important to Amazon than making sure that we have the right safety for our teammates. Our goal is to be the safest workplace in the industries in which we operate. We are not there yet, but we have made a lot of progress. If you look at our recently released 2024 data, you can see that the recordable incident rate has improved 34% in the last five years. You can see our lost time incident rate, which measures work-related incidents that keep people out of work. That has improved 65% over the last five years. The most common injuries in any workplace are musculoskeletal disorder injuries or MSD. These are typically what you think of as strains or sprains. If you look at the last five years, our MSD recordable incident rate is 32% better. Pretty significant improvement.
We've worked hard on reducing our MSD injuries. We've done things like retrofitted all our sites with adjustable height workstations and carts. We've implemented inventive ErgoPick technology, which we've created ourselves to ensure that employees are picking items within their ergonomic power zones. We've increased the use of robotics in our facilities all over to handle more repetitive tasks and heavy lifting. It is a lot of work that we've been doing, but we're very encouraged by the results. I'd also say that we're investing really heavily in the pay and benefits for our fulfillment network teammates. We've raised our average pay to $22 an hour, a little bit over $22 an hour, which is three times the U.S. minimum wage. We provide people full benefits from their first day of employment at Amazon. It is full health insurance, it's 401(k), that's up to 20 weeks of parental leave.
It includes our very creative Career Choice program, which allows our frontline employees who want to get some sort of, whether it's a college education or advanced education, to be able to do so and we'll pay for it. We have made a lot of progress across the board, but we won't be satisfied here until we're the very best on safety in the categories in which we operate. We won't be satisfied until that number is zero.
Thanks, Andy. This will be the last question. I would love to see you conjure up a uniquely American solution to affordable healthcare for all. You have a knack for making the incredibly complex simple and delivering all manner of things.
I appreciate the question and I appreciate that feedback. We have a mission across every one of our businesses at Amazon to make customers' lives easier and better every day. That is absolutely true in the healthcare space, where I would say in most countries, but I'll just stick with the United States to begin with, the healthcare experience is quite frustrating today. In the same way that when I tell my kids that when I grew up, there was no internet or there were no cell phones and they kind of rolled their eyes, I think that when we tell our grandkids what the healthcare experience was in the United States for so long, they're going to roll their eyes and they're not going to believe it.
They're not going to believe that what we used to have to do was to make a doctor's appointment many weeks in advance, drive 20 minutes to the doctor, park the car, wait in the waiting room for 20 minutes, finally get into an exam room, wait for 15 minutes for a doctor, the doctor came in for five minutes, then you had to leave the doctor's office, drive 20 minutes to the drugstore to pick up whatever your medicine was. I mean, just people are not going to believe that was the experience. That is going to very significantly change. We are trying to be a meaningful part of changing that. You can see that in a couple of different areas.
If you look at our One Medical offering, our Amazon One Medical offering, now you have a simple but powerful app that has all your medical information in one place. You can talk to medical practitioners via chat or video conference. You can pay by the visit for acute issues, or you can get a subscription for chronic issues or primary care to see a primary care physician and a consistent team. When you have that One Medical subscription, you can obviously interact and chat or video conference, but you can also visit one of our many physical clinics in metropolitan areas. You can get appointments same day or next day. We also have relationships in every city in which we reside with specialists where you can get in for referrals and appointments also on their calendar in very short order. Customers love this experience.
I think that what you see is instead of doctors coming in and speaking with you for five minutes, they spend considerably more time with their patients, in part because that's the way that we've set up the customer experience, because we know patients want to be able to have time to ask medical practitioners questions. We have also been inventing on the technology side where we've used our AWS HealthScribe AI service to do a lot of the transcription for doctors of summaries so they don't have to spend so much time with their paperwork. You can get One Medical, you can get a subscription for $9 a month or $99 a year as a Prime customer. We are very excited about how this is continuing to grow. On the pharmacy side, I think the team has built a truly outstanding customer experience.
We're hearing that feedback over and over from customers and seeing them vote with their purchases. We have same-day delivery of prescriptions now to eight cities across the United States, including Los Angeles and New York City, with more coming this year. We've built programs like RxPass, which for $5 a month for Prime members gives our Prime members unlimited access to 60 common medications with very fast delivery and 24x7 pharmacy support. We are changing this customer experience that people have had to endure on the pharmacy side for a really long time. We're changing it very significantly. I really encourage you to check it out if you haven't. It's a very different experience from the physical pharmacy experience. It's growing very well.
I'm excited about what we're doing here, but I would also tell you that we have so much more that we're going to deliver for customers over the next couple of years that you can look out for more here in the healthcare. We're really working to try to help change this customer experience. That concludes our Q&A. I just want to thank everyone again for joining today, particularly our longtime shareholders. We appreciate your support and your interest in what we're doing. It means a lot and we appreciate it. We're pleased with our progress, but not close to being done, making our customers, employees, and communities' lives better and easier every day. Thank you.