Looking past earnings calls: Amazon's broad GenAI investments

It's another earnings season where companies are competing to emphasize their GenAI primacy. According to Factset, Meta, NVidia and Microsoft all mentioned AI more than 70 times in their Q1 earnings. However, as Bloomberg Beta's James Cham wrote on X a while back, "Press releases and speeches tell me corporate aspirations, but job listings tell me where companies really want to go."

I looked at GenAI projects mentioned in global job posts over the 12 months to October 2024 and extracted which teams are hiring. (See a full feed of GenAI projects on Sumble.) I extracted the team name from those job posts to try and get a sense of where and how broadly they are investing.

According to this analysis, it's Amazon making the broadest investments in GenAI. They had 228 teams across the company with job posts that mentioned GenAI projects (full company listing).

One thing that is striking about Amazon is how broad-based the investment is. They have made posts from the core research teams, Alexa, customer service, seller experience fulfillment, and catalog selection teams (full team listing). Some examples:

• Creative X Team: generating high-quality text, images and video for advertisers (job post)
• Geospatial Science Team: for global address parsing and validation (job post)
• Selection and Catalog Systems Team: improve the completeness and correctness of product data for Amazon shoppers (job post)

Of course, job posts are an interesting but imperfect measure. Companies like Meta and Google might have more in-house talent already, so they have less need to hire externally. Or that Amazon job posts include more detail, allowing us to identify GenAI projects in their posts.

Whether or not this is a perfect measure, job posts offer a deeper look into what companies are doing with GenAI. And this analysis suggests that Amazon is making broad investments across many lines of business.