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☆ These Wall Street analysts explain why they think tech is headed for a huge rebound in 2023 after the 'carnage' in the market this year
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-23 | by ( Emilia David | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

But analysts at Wedbush say tech will grow in 2023, with nowhere to go but up. But in a new note to clients, analysts at Wedbush say that amid the 'carnage' comes the opportunity for growth in 2023. Ives told Insider that the tech sector is well-positioned to thrive even amid a potential economic downturn. All the angst around valuations and macroeconomic conditions are already priced into tech stock prices, Ives suggests, meaning there's nowhere really to go but up. Whichever way 2023 shakes up, Ives thinks there's no reason to miss out on tech stocks next year.

☆ Here's a strong signal that America's inflation woes may be ending. Amazon economists expect the price of the company's products will rise slowly next year and start to fall in 2024.
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-23 | by ( Eugene Kim | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Amazon's product prices grew at a slower pace than US inflation this year. Amazon's economists believe its product prices will increase at a slower pace going forward. Amazon's product prices increased by 6% in 2022, which is below the average inflation range of 7% to 9% in the US this year, the document said. Amazon expects its product prices to grow below 3% in 2023 and then turn negative in 2024, it added. In an email to Insider, Amazon's spokesperson said the company's leadership team disagreed with its own economists.

☆ Leaked internal documents show Amazon is cutting costs further in anticipation of a severe economic downturn
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-22 | by ( Eugene Kim | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

Amazon's economists expect the company's growth to slow as cost cuts continue. They said Amazon's growth and profitability have historically been "negatively correlated." Amazon is cutting costs across the board in anticipation of a severe economic downturn. That likely means Amazon's revenue growth will also slow down, according to an internal macroeconomic report obtained by Insider. The report, put together by Amazon's economic, finance, and science teams, is part of the company's internal research into the broader macroeconomic landscape.

☆ Leaked internal document shows Amazon expects a soft landing for the US economy and little chance of a recession, a rosier outlook than many other forecasters
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-22 | by ( Eugene Kim | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Amazon estimates a 30% chance of US recession in the next 6 months, internal analysis shows. Amazon anticipates a soft landing for the US economy, according to the leaked analysis. A leaked internal document from Amazon suggests a brighter outlook, especially for the US economy. Yet, even if a recession were to come and unemployment rose, Amazon appears less concerned about the impact on its sales. The internal report from November said the US economic outlook for 2023 has "worsened significantly" and baseline forecasts now see growth falling below 1%.

☆ A key executive involved in Amazon's 'earth's best employer' initiative was investigated by the company after allegations that she created a hostile work environment
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-14 | by ( Eugene Kim | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +7 min

An executive involved in Amazon's "earth's best employer" initiative was recently investigated by the company after multiple employees alleged she created a hostile work environment, according to people familiar with the situation. Hastings' team of researchers, data scientists, and economists is generally tasked with studying and improving workplace culture across Amazon. The company's investigation lasted several months, much longer than the typical few weeks, seven people familiar with the investigation told Insider. We thoroughly investigate and take action where necessary," the spokesperson for Amazon told Insider. Those deemed to be underperforming are put into Amazon's Focus system.

☆ A brutally honest internal study about Amazon's 'Earth's Best Employer' project slammed the company for creating 'stress, burnout, churn, and a cut-throat atmosphere'
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-14 | by ( Eugene Kim | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +7 min

Amazon has made becoming "Earth's best employer" one of the company's top priorities. The study identified six focus areas for Amazon to work on to become Earth's best employer. To fix those issues, the company identified six improvement areas, according to a copy of the "Earth's Best Employer Discussion" study seen by Insider. And 7.5% of Amazon tech employees said ideas related to social impact were the one thing Amazon could do better to be EBE. "We want to lead with an innovative and inspiring approach to being Earth's Best Employer," the document said.

☆ Amazon thought Alexa would be the next iPhone. Turns out it's a 'glorified clock radio.'
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-30 | by ( Jake Swearingen | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Amazon's Alexa was Jeff Bezos' pet project; now it's a target for the company's cost-cutting. The Amazon Echo debuted in 2014 and was the company's first real success as a hardware manufacturer. The stand-alone voice assistant was immediately useful, and by 2018, the company sold more than 100 million Alexa-enabled devices. It even licensed the Alexa voice assistant to other manufacturers, hoping to make the assistant ubiquitous throughout people's homes. But as Amazon faces a new era of cost discipline, a "glorified clock radio" can't lose $10 billion a year or employ 10,000 people.

Over a dozen current and former employees told Insider's Eugene Kim that the division is in crisis — and the mounting losses and massive cuts underscore the swift downfall of Alexa. Go inside Amazon's Alexa unit. Jerod Harris/Getty ImagesWalt Disney stunned Hollywood this week by reinstating Bob Iger as its chief executive, and company insiders told us that his return to the throne came together in a matter of days. Getty ImagesTwitter's remaining employees are now expected to keep its CEO Elon Musk up to date on everything they work on each week. Responding to a tweet citing correspondent Kali Hays' report on the leaked email, Musk said the decision was "not unreasonable."

☆ As Amazon's Alexa unit faces layoffs, insiders describe a department in crisis
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-21 | by ( Jordan Parker Erb | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Today, we're taking a look inside the rise and fall of Amazon's Alexa unit, and detailing more potential layoffs at Twitter, so we're not off to a great start — but let's keep our fingers crossed. Employees took us inside Amazon's floundering Alexa unit. With Amazon's Alexa — and the devices team at large — the prime target of the biggest layoffs in the company's history, Insider's Eugene Kim spoke with more than a dozen employees to understand the current state of the unit. Employees told Insider a combination of low morale, failed monetization attempts, and lack of engagement across users and developers made them feel as though the team was deadlocked over the last few years. Here's everything employees told us.

☆ Leaked email from Amazon executive shows the Astro home robot will survive a massive cull of jobs and projects across the company
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-21 | by ( Eugene Kim | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

VP of consumer robotics Ken Washington reaffirmed commitment to home robots in an email to employees last week. Washington's team is primarily in charge of Astro, the home-roaming robot Amazon revealed last year. While the company has been unusually vague about layoff details, one team appears to have continued support: consumer robotics. Washington reports to Dave Limp, Amazon's SVP of Devices and Services, who confirmed layoffs in a team-wide email last week. "We are committed to the future of consumer robots and, as Dave said, we will further prioritize what matters most to our customers and the business," Washington wrote in the email.

☆ Amazon is on pace to lose $10 billion this year from Alexa and other devices
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-21 | by ( Britney Nguyen | Eugene Kim | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Amazon is on pace to lose $10 billion this year on some devices, include its voice assistant Alexa. The team working on Alexa was one of the most supported by Jeff Bezos because it was his brainchild. Most of the loss was due to Alexa and other Amazon devices, a person familiar with Worldwide Digital previously told Insider. When Alexa launched in 2014, Amazon wanted to make sales through people using Alexa, not necessarily through people buying the Echo devices that have the Alexa voice assistant. Last week, reports of layoffs at Amazon showed they could primarily affect the team working on Alexa.

☆ Amazon is gutting its voice-assistant Alexa. Once founder Jeff Bezos's pet project it's now the primary target of historic layoffs.
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-19 | by ( Eugene Kim | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +11 min

Amazon's Alexa and the devices team at large is now the prime target of the biggest layoffs in the company's history, according to press reports and an internal email seen by Insider. Instead, Amazon wanted shoppers to buy more things through Echo devices by placing orders through the voice-assistant. Reports of Alexa mistakenly sending voice recordings to the wrong person or Amazon employees secretly listening to private conversations stoked fear of privacy concerns. But even so, its financial contribution often fell short of expectations, more than half a dozen employees told Insider. Employees told Insider the product is Bezos's latest pet project.

☆ Amazon's job cut plans show that tech isn't out of the woods just yet
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-15 | by ( Matt Weinberger | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +6 min

Indeed, as Insider reported last week, Mark Zuckerberg isn't ruling out the possibility of more layoffs at Meta. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy Dan DeLong/GeekWire1. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg Photo by Liu Jie/Xinhua via Getty2. The tech titans are known for paying the big bucks, but that's not the only way to make it in tech. Tech leaders like Ancestry CEO Deb Liu and Scale AI CEO Lucy Guo will appear on stage.

☆ Inside an Amazon rocked by news of 10,000 planned layoffs, employees are livid that there has been no official communication from executives
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-15 | by ( Eugene Kim | Katherine Long | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

Amazon employees slammed the company's lack of clarity over layoffs in internal Slack channels. But many employees first learned that the company planned to lay off 10,000 through news coverage Monday, sparking outrage among some workers about a lack of communication from executives. one employee asked in an internal Slack channel with thousands of members, echoing the sentiments of other employees. In one of the Slack channels, some Amazon employees warned against rumor-mongering, pointing to the fake Twitter employees who pretended to have been fired last month. "A reminder to take comments from people purporting to be (ex-) Amazon employees with a grain of salt today.

☆ Amidst the layoffs at Amazon, the company's ultra-secretive research lab is at risk of being shut. It's a sign things are changing 'dramatically' at the company.
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-14 | by ( Eugene Kim | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +14 min

Early last month, members of Amazon's secretive in-house research lab, Grand Challenge, were called into an unexpected video meeting. Weibel announced 3 of the 5 projects Grand Challenge was working on would shut down, effective immediately. When other team employees wanted to collaborate with the team, they needed additional approvals from its leadership. Amazon Glow was among the Grand Challenge projects to be discontinued at the end of this year. Getting support promoting Grand Challenge projects was a challenge too.

☆ Leaked email shows Amazon is cooperating with the FTC's investigation by urging employees to preserve evidence
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-01 | by ( Eugene Kim | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Amazon emailed a group of employees on Friday, ordering them to preserve all files that may be relevant to FTC's investigation into its Prime membership program. It shows Amazon is taking FTC's investigation seriously and wants to ensure there's no evidence tampering. Amazon ordered employees to save all documents and data related to the Federal Trade Commission's ongoing investigation into the Prime sign-up and cancellation process. They are "required to preserve relevant documents and data" stored in their work and home computers, as well as personal devices and even CDs and DVDs, the email said. The company's cooperation shows it is taking the FTC's investigation seriously and aims to avoid evidence tampering by its employees.

☆ Amazon's cloud business just reported its slowest growth ever, and executives hinted it could get even worse
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-27 | by ( Eugene Kim | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Amazon's cloud business grew 27% in Q3, the slowest pace since disclosing that number in 2014. CFO Brian Olsavsky said the growth rate was even lower in the back-end of the third quarter. On Thursday, Amazon's cloud business reported a 27% revenue growth rate for the third quarter, the slowest expansion since the company started disclosing the number in 2014. During Thursday's analyst call, Olsavsky said AWS's growth rate decelerated as the third quarter progressed, falling down to the "mid-20% growth rate" in the latter part of the period. To help those customers, AWS is offering lower-priced options and a more cost-efficient chip processor service, he said.

☆ Amazon reporter Eugene Kim shares how he gets inside one of the most powerful — and feared — companies in the world
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-26 | by ( Sarah Belle Lin | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

This week, Sarah Belle Lin, an Insider fellow, interviews Eugene Kim, our Amazon reporter and chief tech correspondent, about covering the US's largest online retailer. You're an Amazon reporter whose expertise lies in Amazon, Jeff Bezos, Andy Jassy, e-commerce, and cloud computing. I started out as an enterprise-tech reporter in 2014 covering business software like Salesforce, Oracle, and Dropbox. We didn't have a full-time reporter covering Amazon at the time because it wasn't as big. Both of those things have been integral to Amazon's corporate culture for a very long time, so it's fair to say they are key parts to the company's success.

☆ Amazon is shutting down teams that make free AWS tutorials and other online courses as cost cuts grow
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-26 | by ( Eugene Kim | Katherine Long | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Amazon is shutting down the team responsible for creating cloud computing tutorials. It also axed an online test-prep app for prospective engineering and medical students in India. Amazon is planning to shut down an Online Learning team that was responsible for creating online programming and cloud computing tutorials, Insider has learned. The company currently offers hundreds of online courses, many of which are free, across topics including data science and software engineering on its Online Learning site. Amazon is also shutting down an online learning platform in India that offers tutorials for students preparing to take the country's highly-competitive engineering and medical college entrance exams, according to a current employee.

☆ Amazon's moonshots lab recently shut down several secret projects, shocking members of the team. Here are the initiatives that got the chop, and the ones that survived.
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-25 | by ( Eugene Kim | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

Amazon's Grand Challenge division recently shut down three confidential projects, a cost-cutting move that shocked and disappointed members of the secretive moonshots lab, Insider has learned. Two healthcare projects survived the cull. The healthcare projects that survived are a new type of at-home fertility-monitoring device and a therapeutic treatment to protect against antibiotic resistance, these people said. The decision to keep two healthcare projects reflects CEO Andy Jassy's ambition in this field. Glow, a video-calling device that Amazon shut down earlier this month, was also part of the broader Grand Challenge team.

☆ In internal meetings and leaked documents, Amazon dreams of taking on Google's DeepMind by using machine learning to revolutionize drug discovery, genomics, clinical trials and more
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-21 | by ( Eugene Kim | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +7 min

Amazon held an internal machine learning conference last week. The deployment of machine learning across healthcare was a major topic. The event was all about machine learning, a powerful type of artificial intelligence that has already transformed Amazon's business and those of other tech giants. He was joined at last week's Amazon Machine Learning Conference by Amazon's chief medical officer Taha Kass-Hout. One of the workshops was about machine learning for "human health."

☆ Amazon, Meta, and other big tech firms have entered the 'Great Hesitation' — cutting hiring and other costs in fear of an economic downturn
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-16 | by ( Rob Price | Eugene Kim | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +10 min

Leaders at large-cap tech companies are in an anxious waiting game, battening down the hatches as they prepare for the storm to hit. Some tech firms will be hurt moreAmong the biggest players in the tech industry, the impacts of a crash will not be felt evenly. "I look at these large tech companies, and over the last couple of years, obviously money's been free, everything got bloated, and all these tech companies — excluding Apple — have effectively doubled their head count over a three-year period, right? Beyond head count, tech companies are cutting back on extras, imperiling their famously lavish meal options. The largest tech companies are also signaling their anxiety by trimming budgets for their more experimental businesses and research projects.

☆ The creator of Amazon's Kindle has left the company, along with a top Alexa executive, adding to a leadership exodus under new CEO Andy Jassy
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-13 | by ( Eugene Kim | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

President of Lab126 Gregg Zehr retired in August, the same day as SVP of Alexa Tom Taylor. They are the latest high-profile executives to leave Amazon. Almost 90 VP or higher level executives have left Amazon since early 2021. Taylor and Zehr are the latest high-profile executives to leave Amazon. Zehr and Taylor's departures leave a big leadership hole at Amazon's personal devices business.

☆ Leaked Amazon slides instruct employees to 'double down on frugality' in all-hands meeting
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-12 | by ( Ashley Stewart | Eugene Kim | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

Amazon urged frugality in an all-hands meeting this week, according to excerpts reviewed by Insider. The comments signify the tone shift at Amazon, as it tightens its belt in the face of a looming recession. Amazon's leadership team urged employees to "double down on frugality" in an internal all-hands meeting this week, according to slides and excerpts viewed by Insider. The slides instructed employees to "accomplish more with less," meaning to adjust hiring, reduce costs, and inventory levels. At the meeting, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy conveyed a similar message when asked about the economic downturn and its effect on Amazon's future investments.

☆ Amazon is cutting some robotics projects in a reorganization of its research efforts in this field. Canvas, which it bought for over $100 million, is the latest casualty.
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-11 | by ( Eugene Kim | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Amazon is consolidating robotics research projects to focus on those that help customers most. Amazon is shutting down Canvas, the warehouse robotics startup it acquired for over $100 million in 2019, Insider has learned, as the e-commerce giant continues to cut costs. Employees are being given the choice to transfer to a different team within Amazon or leave with severance pay. Last week, Amazon shut Scout, a mini home delivery robot it launched in 2019. The company has implemented a broader hiring freeze in its retail business too, while scaling back several warehouse expansion plans this year.

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