[Music] hi i m carl azuz for cnn 10. we've got something special lined up for you today this show is centered on a single big topic because in the business world there are few bigger topics than amazon in 1995 the company had launched as a retail website that sold books and not much else from there well it's grown a bit amazon sells most of the stuff you can buy at a mall at a grocery store and a lot of other types of stores too it offers online content cloud computing movies music and it not only still sells books it helps people publish them today amazon is one of the top five most valuable companies on the planet it's worth more than one and a half trillion dollars and it grew that big in a relatively short amount of time its founder jeff bezos with a net worth of more than 180 billion dollars according to the forbes business magazine however the company he founded has seen its share of bumps in the road amazon has been criticized in the past for what it paid its employees three years ago the average salary for an amazon employee was twenty eight thousand dollars per year that was twenty thousand less than the average yearly salary in america amazon has raised its minimum wage to fifteen 15 an hour for all employees since then as people spent more time shopping online and less in retail stores the infamous amazon effect occurred in america with thousands of physical stores shutting down and tens of thousands of retail jobs lost and while alexa amazon's virtual artificial intelligence assistant has found a place in many homes in recent years privacy advocates have raised concerns about smart speakers because they're always listening as a company amazon is massive even as other businesses laid off employees because of the effects of the coronavirus pandemic amazon grew tremendously hiring half a million people in 2020 increasing its workforce to more than one million two hundred thousand it's a complicated company like some of the challenges it's faced it's also changed the way the world buys goods [Music] welcome so i've been here amazon goes the ultimate grab-and-go shopping experience literally grab it off the shelves and go you use the app to enter the store once you're in you can put the phone away and you shop the rest of the store just like you would any other store with one key difference when you're done you could just walk out nothing is simple about the technology behind this cashier-less store the amazon go market uses artificial intelligence to monitor what you've reached for on the shelf and to make sure you're charged for what you walked out with and nothing else what we had to do unique in this use case was build the sensors the cameras all these cameras the cameras the cameras in the ceiling we had to build a specific machine learning algorithms the problem that we have to solve in amazon go is who took what when i take this item off the shelf it's in my virtual cart when i put it back the item goes back it's an easy problem to solve when you have a single person in the store but when there's multiple people a lot of products if you look around look very similar to each other right so that's where the challenge comes in [Music] the amazon go store is by no means the only place where amazon uses ai we've got hundreds of teams working on artificial intelligence programs across amazon artificial intelligence like machine learning powers the simplicity that we always want to offer to our customers whether it's fulfilling orders or delivering packages those teams are working constantly to improve the customers experience inside amazon's warehouses ai is hard at work these are amazon robotics drive units once a customer actually purchases an item either on their mobile app or on their computer or laptop the system identifies the pod where the item is actually located in a field and the bot maps out the most efficient way through using machine learning to get that pod which has that item that that customer purchased to the associate so there's some people out there that will hear robots machine learning ai and think jobs they're going to be gone what we've actually determined when we've actually deployed our solutions in our fulfillment networks is that we actually are relying a lot more on our associates we've increased their efficiency and it really gives them the ability to work on different tasks and we've actually grown our associate employments across the globe to date alexa order dog biscuits and of course [Music] the ai tool you're most familiar with here's what i found is always learning new tricks achieving what alexa is right now is a super hard challenge going from that to the future um i would like alexa to respond to the your mood your sentiment your feelings as expressed in your speech the one key advantage we have is we now have so much more data so is it a big challenge yes are we up to that challenge heck yes an evolution of alexa is it still in its infancy is it a toddler now or is she a teller now an adolescent teenager certainly hasn't graduated from college no a.i hasn't graduated from college overall right and i think ai as a field is in its infancy think of it as a older toddler you know who's going to grow up to be an adult that just stuns us with her brilliance right is where we are is amazon a monopoly well it's not really an easy question to answer first you have to understand what the core tenant of jeff bezos's business philosophy is patience go back to the original letter that jeff bezos wrote investors in 1997. he wrote that investors to amazon shouldn't expect amazon to operate like most companies because amazon wouldn't judge itself by short-term profits you know anything that almost every other company cares about only the long-term and bezos and amazon stayed true to that its first few years amazon barely made a profit it invested billions of dollars back into the business and it just kept growing and growing and growing and growing and now that patience has paid off with incredible profits over the last few years we all know on some level what a monopoly is we've played the game but in the context of antitrust law it's a specific thing it's meant to stop a company from forming they can dominate the market in such a way that competition is impossible those who do not think amazon is a monopoly say that because amazon is offering its customers lower prices it can't possibly be an anti-trust case those low prices are a benefit to consumer welfare and it would be impossible to regulate exactly how low is too low for prices the load star of antitrust enforcement is how are consumers affected do consumers pay more do they have less choice then it's time for the antitrust cops to get on the beat this is david balto he worked on antitrust cases for the justice department and the fdc for years and is skeptical about amazon being a monopoly when consumers are paying less and have a greater amount of choice which seems to be the simple message from amazon's business model there's not a reason for intense anti-trust scrutiny but some say that business model is a direct threat to customers this is lena khan she's a lawyer who has really helped shape the debate around amazon and anti-trust law people like her amazon's willingness to sustain massive losses isn't just a savvy business move it's an example of predatory pricing so predatory pricing is when a company prices a good below cost and is doing so basically in order to drive out its competitors so that it is able to kind of enjoy a dominant place in the market all of those things are a really high bar for the government to prove and because of that a successful case on predatory pricing hasn't been litigated in decades that's not for a lack of will we certainly at the ftc and the clinton administration had predatory pricing investigations but at the end of the day you have to convince yourself that consumers would be better off if you stop these practices and that's like looking for a unicorn but to those who do think amazon right now is acting as a monopoly the government's view of predatory pricing is outdated the reality is with tech companies um you have a marketplace where that is winner take all so if you're a facebook or an amazon or google your main goal is to try and acquire as many users as possible at the very earliest stages because once you have a lot of users it's going to be much more difficult for rivals to divert users away from you and so in that scenario predatory pricing actually becomes very rational it's important to note that the question of predatory pricing is really only one of the questions surrounding amazon there are also concerns about just how large amazon has become as a business so in addition to be an online retailer it also is a huge content producer is a book publisher it has a huge cloud computing service the fact that amazon is involved in all these different lines of business positions it to use its dominance in the online space in order to benefit its other lines of businesses and i think that's something that's really problematic what we want from a consumer's perspective is for those people who provide services for us to use the bargaining leverage of having all those customers to lower costs as much as possible and that's fundamentally what amazon has done so whether amazon has an unfair advantage over its competitors whether it's a monopoly all those things are an open debate but what is not a debate is right now amazon is winning [Music]