Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

Detail about the sustainability initiatives Kara mentioned are online at https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/. Businesses interested in working with – or just learning from – Amazon’s sustainability efforts can learn more on the Exchange at https://exchange.aboutamazon.com/.

Our host, Maureen Metcalf, posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI, or check out the Kindle version at https://amzn.to/44buVz8 . The audiobook version is now available at  https://amzn.to/4dTCleZ.

Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Books we’re reading for fun or personal development right now include:

• Take Back Your Power: 10 New Rules for Women at Work by Ancestry CEO Deb Liu, on how to overcome the obstacles women still face in the workplace – especially in tech. It’s in hardback at https://amzn.to/47OUO9E, and audio at https://amzn.to/3Y6EmOQ.
• Covert Cows and Chick-fil-A by Steve Robinson; it’s available in hardback at https://amzn.to/460LnmQ, on Kindle at https://amzn.to/3RVXhZs, and as an audiobook at https://amzn.to/3xPjBgn.
• The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. Paperback = https://amzn.to/3VEl7cU, Kindle = https://amzn.to/45JGm1L, and audiobook = https://amzn.to/3RPhC2y
• Everyday Ubuntu: Living Better Together, the African Way by Mungi Ngomane. Hardback (https://amzn.to/48Doh6j) and audiobook (https://amzn.to/48YCRF4)

NOTE: As an Amazon partner, we may make a small commission from books you buy through these links.

Other episodes you’ll enjoy:

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Kara Hurst leads Amazon’s sustainability efforts, overseeing the company’s initiatives on environmental sustainability and social responsibility. Under her leadership, Amazon announced its commitment to be net-zero carbon by 2040 and co-founded The Climate Pledge, which now has over 525 signatories. Before joining Amazon, Kara was CEO of The Sustainability Consortium and served as Vice President at BSR, where she led global partnerships and built sustainability programs for businesses. Kara holds a BA from Barnard College of Columbia University and a Master’s in Public Policy from the University of California, Berkeley.

Ryan Redington oversees all aspects of Amazon Music, including strategy, product development, licensing, marketing, and industry relations. He has led the service’s growth into one of the world’s leading audio streaming platforms. Prior to becoming General Manager, Ryan was Vice President of Music Industry, where he led partnerships with artists and labels. Ryan started his Amazon career in the Prime Video division before moving to Amazon Music, where he initially managed the physical music category. Ryan sits on the boards of the Academy of Country Music and the Country Music Association. He holds a BS in Industrial Engineering and a minor in Business Administration from the University of Iowa.

Transcript
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Maureen: [00:00:00] This is Innovating Leadership: Co-Creating Our Future. I’m your host, Maureen Metcalf, the founder and CEO of the Innovative Leadership Institute, where we make leaders future ready. Today we return to Nashville to learn about some sides to Amazon you may not know much about: music and sustainability.

We’ll start on the music side. I talked with Ryan Redington, the general manager of Amazon music about their search for new artists. So Ryan, first of all, thank you for being here.

Ryan: Oh, I’m so thrilled to be here. Thank you.

Maureen: You did a keynote last night and we got to see all about what you’re doing with Amazon music.

One of the things that stood out to me is your breakthrough artist [00:01:00] program. Can you say a little bit about that? Because having had a very, very brief stint in managing a band, getting bands exposure is almost impossible, especially post COVID. Folks are just dropping right and left as professional musicians.

Ryan: Breakthrough is something that we’re incredibly proud of. We started the program three or four years ago, and it was really out of the necessity of making sure that we didn’t spend all of our energy on superstar artists and that we were doing our part to help break artists into the mainstream. And I give credit to a lot of our curators, the folks that do the playlists and the stations.

They’re the team that works with our marketing team and artists and label relations team on identifying who these artists are. And so there’s a little bit of data, but there’s a lot of ear and a lot of gut that goes into it. So it’s a really an interesting kind of combination of what’s happening, what’s trending in the music space, but what do we like?

You know, what does the team like and what’s really hitting? And the breakthrough program really gives us a platform for artists to take advantage of the different things that Amazon can bring to the table. So additional marketing dollars, if they’re interested in music videos, I talked about Breland last night and some of the visuals that he wanted to accompany his album.

And so we really start with what’s the vision [00:02:00] for the artists, how to work backwards from that and building really great marketing campaigns and then making sure that we’re supporting them through the entire process. And like the Breland example last night, you know, his first album hit gold. Amazon Music has over 50 percent of its streams.

So I think it’s really putting the money where our mouth is at, as far as supporting the artists and making sure that we’re helping them reach new audiences, and really helping them break through. Another example that I think is amazing is Chapel Rhone, was our breakthrough artist last year, and if you followed the festival circuit at all this summer, it was Chapel Rhone’s summer.

It took a year from when she was into our program to where she’s at now, but I think the outcome of that is really indicative into the work that the team’s put in, and helping break these artists.

Maureen: And I love the idea that it’s certainly data and AI, which we put a lot of emphasis on, but also your brilliant curators, ears and guts.

Ryan: That’s right. Yeah, we have an amazing team and they spend so much time listening to music, the amount of music created now, it’s absolutely incredible. Like our catalogs are exploding. Part of that’s due to it’s just really easy for somebody in their dorm room to make music on their computer. And there’s plenty of DIY distribution platforms where you can get music on to all the music services.

And so [00:03:00] the explosion of music also makes it hard to really start to cut through what’s great music. And so we have an amazing team of brilliant curators all around the world, listening to new music, identifying the trends, building the playlists, informing our station strategy. So yeah, really proud of that team.

Really strong.

Maureen: What one accomplishment over the last five years is most exciting to you about you and the team?

Ryan: Five years is an interesting time period simply because that puts us into COVID. And during COVID, it was a really challenging time for the music industry, you know, especially artists. You make a livelihood being on the road, selling tickets.

And all of a sudden that goes to zero. So it was really tough. And so we spent time with artists, with managers and with record labels saying, okay, you know, how are we going to manage through this time period? And how can we help? We have Twitch that we partner closely with it inside Amazon. We also have prime video.

And we came up with this idea of like, what have we started doing? Some live streams still allow you to connect to your fans during this time period. It started with artists literally on a keyboard in their basement or guitar in their bedroom. We did some partnerships with the red cross to help raise money for charity, for COVID relief music cares as well as a big charity that we’re a part of and that little idea of like, Hey.

This is a [00:04:00] need. Let’s come up with an idea to help create a solution started to blossom into a real big live streaming idea that the team had. And if you fast forward to today, today, We’re live streaming festivals all around the world. We’re at Fuji rock in Japan. We’re a wireless in the UK. We were at Primavera in Spain.

We’re outside lands in the Bay area. We did stagecoach down in Palm Springs. What we’re doing now is enabling reach of artists to people that can’t get to a festival all around the world. And if you’re sitting at home watching stagecoach. In between sets, we’re doing artist interviews so you can learn more about the artists and really bringing a great customer experience to those that can’t actually reach the festival itself.

And then you start to say, okay, this festival thing is really working. What are properties that we could build ourselves that could also add value to fans and to artists? I think that through line of like, if it’s great for fans, if it’s great for artists, if you work backwards from that, you can start to come up with some really interesting ideas.

And so it’s kind of got back to the Thursday night football conversation around, Hey, let’s do live streams after Thursday night football. We call that Amazon music live. We’ve got a platform there. We also started a live streaming product called city sessions, which are in our office, much lower scale [00:05:00] production.

We just had our breakthrough artist, Nate Smith, who’s a new breakthrough artist, perform in Brooklyn, in our office in Brooklyn. But like those little things are connecting artists and fans in different ways that didn’t exist five years ago. I think it was a really great work by the team that make it as big as it is now.

Maureen: So it sounds like you’ve got smaller scale and large scale and then the merchandise, because that’s another thing that is a range of lovely to a nightmare, depending on what side of the experience you’re on. So how have you played in that space to completely eliminate a lot of the friction?

Ryan: I think it’s important to step back and think that with Amazon Music, we have our music service that’s on Alexa and you can download our music, our music app on your phone or your iPad.

It’s on Fire TV. But also we have the live streaming component and we have a big commerce business and we have physical music CDs and vinyl and we actually put CDs and vinyl merch. It’s a sign of fandom. You think about people buying vinyl today, you’d be shocked how much vinyl growth we’ve seen in physical music.

We still sell a lot of it. We still sell a lot of CDs. But taking physical music and calling it merch allows us to think differently about, Hey, how can we create exclusive merch pieces in vinyl with artists and make [00:06:00] that available to our artists? But in merch, thinking about like t shirts and hoodies, you know, that again is like kind of another Unmet customer need that we saw in the marketplace.

Amazon has logistics. We have commerce. We have these great artist relationships and I don’t know about you, but the first show I went to was Tom Petty and I bought the shirt, I bet I had it for 15 or 20 years before it completely fell apart. But the memory of that part of buying merch at a show is the memory, but that experience hasn’t changed.

Like I go to a show today, I still wait in a long line. May or may not get the size or the color that I want. As soon as the first notice hit, everybody runs to their seats. So all those people end up not buying merge because it’s too difficult. And so we saw that as an opportunity saying, Hey, if we combine the strengths across Amazon that we have in commerce and logistics and point of sale, these great artists relationships.

Is there a way for us to reinvent or reimagine the merch experience? Certainly we can do it online, work really closely with artists. We did a great drop with Beyonce around an artist merch collection that ranged everywhere from t shirts and hoodies to shower mats. So it doesn’t have to be the traditional merch as you think about it at a show.

It’s wide ranging and that’s really led by the artists and what’s important to them. But if you take [00:07:00] that and say, how do we start to think about in venue experience? How can we make the routing across the country more efficient, more green? You think about trailers going from venue to venue, is there a more efficient way to do that?

How do we think about inventory management? That’s something Amazon does very well. How do we make sure you have the right size, the right colors, and as we analyze the data around trends, making sure that each venue location has the right amount of inventory to fulfill the needs of the customers there.

And then you start to think about some of that innovation around, what if I could pre order the merch and actually just pick it up in a fast line? That way I’m guaranteed. I have the right size, the right color, and I get the merch that I want. I still have the memory of getting in the venue. Or, if I don’t want to wait in a long line, how could I pre order in the venue, and just, maybe by the time I’m home, or certainly the next morning, it could be sitting on my doorstep, so that way I can do it that way.

And so, I think when you start to work backwards from like, where are there opportunities to improve the customer experience, and do we have capabilities in those areas? Then I think there’s some business ideas that come to life. And certainly, you know, that’s where the merge component came from.

Maureen: I love the idea of leveraging the brilliance of the supply chain distribution of Amazon to analyze what [00:08:00] gets sold and sizes in Columbus, Ohio, are going to be different than Phoenix.

Getting all of that right so that the artists are focusing on their music and you’re focusing on the merch. Yeah,

Ryan: and we even sit down with the artists at the very beginning of the process and say, What is your vision? What type of merch do you want to create? And do we need to bring in some designers to help from the outside to help us think about the creative designs?

And so we literally start at the blank piece of paper and where do we want this to go? What’s the collection going to look like? Once we identify the designs, The name is on music team takes over. We go source out the manufacturing and then run the logistics and to your point, making sure the inventory management is correct and going from there.

Maureen: And now you’ve added podcasting.

Ryan: Yeah. So we added podcasting two or three years ago to our music service. We’ve been really impressed with the adoption. I think spoken word in general, as you all know well, it’s such a great format and the storytelling. I think the narratives of storytelling and music and the narratives of storytelling and spoken word podcasts.

Actually quite similar. And what we found is that people love to move between podcasts and music in the audio format. And one of the things that we’ve really learned over time, the last couple of years in the podcast space has been the one challenge in podcasts [00:09:00] is discovery, like how do I find podcasts specifically on topics that I’m interested in, let’s take this podcast.

I want to learn more about Amazon music. Well, how do I go find a podcast around Amazon music? Typically people know podcasts by names, but they may not know like each topic and some podcasts vary by topics. And we kind of felt like, well, if customers are giving this feedback, like maybe we should use tech to solve that problem for them.

And so we’ve started to use what we call topics within podcasts. We’ve got our top couple thousand podcasts. This is now rolled out to, it’s just started to roll out this year. And we’re using large language models and AI in the background to really understand what the topics within each podcast are.

And then when you’re on the podcast detail page, we’re actually playing, we highlight the different topics. And so, for example, I was listening to Acquired, which is a great business podcast. I was interviewed with Mark Zuckerberg. Within the detail page where I’m listening to the podcast on my phone, inside the Amazon Music app, it shows me pills that I can click on for Facebook.

For Meta, for AI, these are all things that Mark talked about in his interview on that podcast. And when I click on the pill that says Facebook, I now see a list of all the podcasts that are talking about Facebook. So instead of title driven podcast search, [00:10:00] it’s topic driven, and that’s kind of using tech to solve a customer problem that we were hearing feedback on.

Maureen: So next week when someone goes to listen to a podcast and you appear, Amazon, Amazon Music. That’s right,

Ryan: exactly. Yeah. So it’s pretty exciting, you know, and if the listener want to learn more about Amazon music after hearing this podcast, and they’ll click on that pill, you can get them all the other podcasts that are related to Amazon music.

One of the things that I try to convey is the breadth of Amazon music is beyond a music service and includes the live stream commerce with merch. The way that we interact with the music industry is just a bit different than other folks because of the capabilities that Amazon has and our conversations with artists definitely invoke those capabilities.

And we’re really starting to capitalize on them. And so I think that’s an important piece.

Maureen: I love the integration of, I’m not a football fan, but sports and music. Yeah. How do we get our artists exposure? It’s on football.

Ryan: That’s right.

Maureen: Cause we are a country of football fans. And

Ryan: I think if you really step back and think about it, culture is defined by sports and music.

And so anytime that you’re at the intersection of sports and music, and then you put, Tech on top of that. It’s really, really interesting. And for [00:11:00] us, you know, music comes out on Thursday nights, so it’s a bit serendipitous that the deal that Prime Video did with NFL is Thursday night football. It’s actually more relevant than Monday night football for us because new music drops at nine o’clock on Thursday nights Pacific time.

Nine o’clock Pacific times kind of roughly when a Thursday night football game ends. You know, the game ends maybe around 20, 30 minute post game show. You’re kind of like in that ballpark of around when new music’s dropping. So the kind of light bulb moment was like, this is amazing. There isn’t a football.

New music dropping. We’ve got these great artists relationships. We have video distribution with prime video on Twitch and we take an audience that’s watching football and move them over into watching a live stream of music. And so giving that artist exposure to the millions and millions of people watching Thursday night football, it’s one of the top rated programs of all programs all week long.

It’s an incredible platform for the artists to talk about their new music, to market themselves, which we’re really excited to bring to them, and then deliver an amazing live stream performance. It’s live live, you know, they’re doing this live at that time. So we’re super excited about it.

Maureen: What has allowed [00:12:00] you to step into a place where you’re comfortable taking risks and changing an industry?

Ryan: That’s a great question. Part of it probably starts with my family. I have an awesome wife, two boys that are 10 and 12, and you kind of need a supportive village, and I definitely have that at home, which I’m very thankful for. I’ve been at Amazon for over 15 years and over that time I’ve seen really great leaders in the company.

See how they think about business problems, how they analyze different data points, how anecdotes feed into your thought process, you know, over that time, partially through osmosis, partially through observing, you can learn a lot and I’ve really kind of taken advantage of that over the years and really paid attention to some of the great leaders I’ve seen come and go from Amazon.

And I think that’s really helped inform my thinking and especially the early days around Alexa and Echo and really transformative technology. I mean, the first time I had an Echo in beta that was sent out to the public yet, you have this device that’s a speaker and you could speak to it. Within a second or two, it was speaking.

You kind of forget now Alexa and Echo kind of a bit more mainstream, but in 2015, it was like, wow, like this is unbelievable. And the learnings that we went through [00:13:00] from a music service perspective, well, how are people going to integrate or ask for music that’s different than how they type, which is dramatically different.

Natural language understanding and how people speak is much different than how people type into an app or to a website. And so, you know, going through that process of like, okay, like these are the problems that we need to solve. This is how data informs it. But this is also like, as us being an end user and music fans, these are the challenges that we have and how do we build our music catalog to support that.

And so I think it’s piece by piece over the years, you take bits of information from people and from projects. And then I think that starts to inform your point of view of like, yeah, this is worth taking a risk. This is an unmet need. This is an area where we can add a lot of value both for customers and for artists.

And that kind of gives you conviction on where to go big and also starts to build conviction of like, I don’t think this is a real opportunity. We need to move on to something else.

Maureen: I heard the phrase today one way door and two way door. How does that impact your willingness to take risks?

Ryan: That mental model is incredibly powerful.

And I would argue the vast, vast majority of decisions you make in a business are two way door decisions. And so a two way door decision effectively means if [00:14:00] I go forward with this particular project or whatever it is that you’re working on, it doesn’t work out as I thought life is going to be okay. We can come right back, go back through the door and move in a different direction.

It’s not catastrophic. It’s not a massive decision. A one way door decision is where you are making a very strategic decision that is almost impossible to unwind. It has pretty large implications to the future of your business. With two way door decision making, what you want to do is encourage your team to say, Hey, this is a two way door decision.

Move fast. You know, speed matters and innovation speed is really, really important. And if it’s a two way door decision, it doesn’t work out, that’s okay. Like, that’s what we want. And just walk it back and we’ll move in a different direction. If it’s a one way door decision, you really want to spend the time to analyze the data, review documents, debate the pros and cons of moving in a certain direction.

And then, after a long period of review and conversation, sometimes up to a year, maybe longer, depending on the size of the decision, The new side to go forward, but that’s a heavily vetted decision, and that’s really where the one way doors come in.

Maureen: But you wouldn’t have gotten where you’ve gotten if every

Ryan: decision was a one way door.

Correct, yeah. And I think Like the live streaming [00:15:00] example, that’s a two way door decision. Let’s start to stream some stuff on Twitch and prime video and kind of see where it goes, if it doesn’t work out, we’ll move in a different direction. And now it’s a massive, massive business for us. And so that’s an example where two way doors can be seeds into some really big ideas, and if you don’t go through the door to try it, you never have a shot.

Maureen: Brian, thank you. And thank you for what you do. I love my Amazon music station.

Ryan: Oh, thank you.

Maureen: Like any other major corporation, Amazon can have a major environmental impact. Unlike other major corporations, they have a very vigorous sustainability program to minimize that impact. Kara Hurst is in charge of it and told us all about it.

Welcome Kara Hurst. Thank you so much for joining us. Your role is sustainability. Tell us a little bit about how you got here.

Kara: Sure. And thanks for having me. My role in sustainability, I have the privilege of leading this great team across all areas of Amazon. So I joined the company 10 years ago, and I was brought in to help us think [00:16:00] about how to integrate sustainability across all areas.

It’s all of Amazon’s businesses globally, which is a really fun challenge. What’s the pledge? The pledge is something that we created five years ago and really the lead up to that was that we had been building these teams, looking at the size. science of climate change. So looking at things like the IPCC reporting, which is the International Panel on Climate Change, a bunch of scientists who were telling us that the effects of climate change were becoming more evident, being seen in more devastating ways, really, on the planet.

Things like the storms that we see in our communities, what’s happening right now with hurricanes, and we’re becoming more frequent, more devastating. We were seeing this in our communities. We were seeing this in the science, and then we were seeing in our operations and the responsibility that we have to the impact that we have on the planet.

We were also taking a look at all of the ways in which Amazon operates within different industries and the potential that we had as one [00:17:00] company to send big demand signals. So we operate in logistics and transportation and fulfillment. We have a lot of buildings and buildings have a big impact on the environment.

We operate in a retail environment and we make big decisions. Products around the world. So we were taking a look at both the science and our impact on the world. And we wanted to set goals for the company. All of the lead up to that is to say, we were building our own tech systems. We’re taking a look at the science and we wanted to set a goal for the company, which was to be net zero carbon by 2040.

In setting that goal, we did that in 2019, but we also created the climate pledge. And that was an invitation to other companies to come alongside of us and Join us in that pledge and say, we can send these big demand signals. In industry together, because no one company is going to solve this alone. And sending those big demand signals in industry is really what’s needed.

And we really believed that if Amazon was going to step into this and do this, 10 years ahead of what most companies were [00:18:00] taking at the pledge or commitment to 2050, so we’re going to do this on an accelerated timeframe, that that could be inspirational, hopefully. And that we were going to be willing to share solutions.

As a company that was known for innovating and known for being science led. So here we are five years later, 525 companies have signed the pledge across 45 countries and 59 different industries. So we have just an incredible community of committed organizations and companies

Maureen: who have really been leading the way.

Once companies sign the pledge, I assume you’re sharing information. So you’re experimenting in a significant way across a range of areas.

Kara: Couple different things. Companies who commit to sign the pledge, it’s very simple, actually. Simple but hard to do. So they commit to doing three things. They commit to measuring, mapping, reporting on their greenhouse gas emissions.

They commit to decarbonizing their own operations. And then where you can’t get to zeroing out your emissions, you commit to utilizing offsets. Ones that are socially beneficial and real [00:19:00] and permanent. We have been steadfast in those three things as being the tentpoles of the pledge. But most importantly, you’re committing to sharing both lessons learned.

You’re committing to sharing what you know about how to decarbonize in your industry and both the opportunities that exist, but also some of the things that have not. It’s a very open environment. We’re all in this together. We’ve not decarbonized the global economy before. We don’t know how to do this.

So some of the risks that we’re taking are not going to work out. So you have to be willing in a vulnerable way to share both successes and failures. And one of the things that we’re doing together is we’ve created joint action projects. That took a little bit of time to get off the ground, but we now have 19 joint action projects that we’re working on together as industry.

Those are a wide range of things, you know, in the transportation industry, the maritime industry, the built environment industry, where companies are coming together and saying, you know, we are, as an industry, going to take this action on decarbonizing our operations together, and [00:20:00] it’s been phenomenal.

Sure. I can think of two off the top of my head in the transportation industry. One is called Lane Shift. This one I love because it’s actually a public private partnership. We did this in conjunction with a group called C40, which is a group of mayors around the world that are leading on climate.

Originally, I think 40 mayors, but now a group of over 100. And we partnered with them both in India and Latin America. It is six cities in India and four in Latin America. We’re working with them on sort of heavy duty vehicles. And working to electrify transportation networks in their cities. These are cities that are growing very fast.

And so you can imagine emissions are growing. This heavy duty trucking is growing. We have companies that have operations in those cities and want to invest in electrification infrastructure. We can procure vehicles. We can build infrastructure. Amazon has actually built the largest private charging network in the United States.

That’s great. But we need also to have these charging infrastructure available for [00:21:00] everyone. Cities want to have this. They don’t want to rebuild old infrastructure, right? You want to just move to electrification. So we’re working with these mayors in these cities that are growing very, very fast and that want to have clean air and new technology and electrification coming.

So LaneShift has been a phenomenal effort in these cities in India and Latin America. The other one is called JUUL, and that is happening, I believe, in Mumbai. That is a specific last mile electrification effort where we’re partnering with like Mahindra Electric and I think Uber and other electrification charging infrastructure powered by renewable energy, and that’s more of a last mile effort.

So it’s availability of these solutions in places that are fast growing, where emissions are rising, but you wanna just get to the right solutions fast.

Maureen: Those will roll out in Africa and other places that don’t yet have the infrastructure. At some point

Kara: you always wanna get to places that are fast growing and where emissions are growing and where there’s new technologies.

You mentioned Africa. One of the other things that we’ve launched at Amazon, this isn’t, it’s open to some companies, you know, in the climate pledge for [00:22:00] sure, but we have a climate gender equity fund. That’s another really interesting lens on the fight against climate change is many of the people most affected by climate change are women.

And a lot of times they also have the best solutions, but they are the last to get funding. And we know this, we know this in most venture capital availability of funding and most venture capital women don’t receive the funding. I think it’s less than 2 percent globally. And so we set aside 52 million out of our climate pledge fund.

And we said this is going to be dedicated towards women led startups. And we also partner with USAID, and so we’ve started this whole Climate Gender Equity Fund. And the first three investments we made out of that fund were in Africa. And these were incubators of women led startups, and they have phenomenal ideas.

Women are leading the ways on a lot of climate tech.

Maureen: Is there a startup that has materialized that you’re most proud of?

Kara: Wow. You know, we’ve made 31 investments so far out of this Climate Pledge Fund, and that was a fund, it’s a 2 billion fund that we started in 2020, so a year after we established the pledge.[00:23:00]

We have made a range of investments out of that fund. Regenerative ag to electric aviation, to the hydrogen economy, to things in transportation, I would say there are things that we are utilizing at scale. That’s where I get really excited. Things that where we can take those technologies and deploy them at scale in Amazon.

And so I think of things like carbon cure that we’re utilizing in our buildings. We built our second headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, utilizing carbon cure. And when you see a building go. up like that where we have employees who come to work every single day and they’re in a building that’s utilizing one of the technologies we’ve invested in.

I get really excited about that.

Maureen: What is Carbon Cure?

Kara: It’s an additive that put into cement that helps to sequester carbon. That’s one that’s been tested and tried. I think it’s in over 40 buildings in the Northern Virginia area now. So that’s kind of a more developed technology. And then some of the ones we had here today at Delivering the Future, they’re kind of NASA and a new so they’re growing so it’s a it’s a real range of things.

I also had the chance to go and visit a startup that we invested in called [00:24:00] hippo harvest down in Petaluma, California, doing robotic farming. And so they’re growing lettuces with less water and fertilizer and utilizing less land. When we were serving some of their product today at our lunch. And so, you know, it’s a whole range of things.

It’s really interesting.

Maureen: And water is going to become another big issue, especially with generative AI. So that being carbon neutral takes on a very different tone.

Kara: Water is a really interesting issue around the world. And I think it, you know, rising in people’s consciousness as they’re understanding water scarcity, as.

Places are becoming some places are becoming hotter. Access to water is certainly coming an issue. We’ve taken a goal at Amazon, particularly for our Amazon web services business to be water positive by 2030. So what that means is that for the places where we operate data centers, we will put more water back into the communities where we operate by 2030.

We announced this July that we’re already 41 percent of the way towards that goal.

Maureen: That’s a phenomenal commitment. [00:25:00] It’s a big commitment, yeah. I read recently that an AI search, 100 words, write me an email, takes a container of water, like a bottle of water. So if we think about all of the training of models.

Kara: I think you’re making a great point in the sense that one of the things you need to do, like any kind of material use that we think about, you think back to your grade school days, you think about the three R’s. The first is reduce, then you reuse. Then you recycle, right? So the same goes for water, whether it’s in our data centers or in any facility, we first want to build really efficient data centers.

So first we build data centers that are using less water to cool and that are recycling that water that they use. We’re doing all these kinds of improvements to our buildings where we’re getting very, very efficient about the kind of water we need to use to begin with to cool and evaporative cooling systems that are advanced.

And then we are building recycled water systems and we have great water recycling in our fulfillment network as well. And then, if you are [00:26:00] using water, you want to have a replenishment strategy. And then we have great partners on the ground like Water. org and others who help us in those communities and address water scarcity issues.

It is a whole life cycle approach to when you think about water.

Maureen: Cara, thank you. This is incredibly insightful. And I love the commitment, not only for Amazon to perform, but to really share the technologies and the fun. funding so that communities around the globe can also thrive.

Kara: I want to be really specific about some of the things that we’re doing because I think the more that you can give these tangible examples and we have lots of information online, we’ve established an Amazon sustainability exchange where we’re trying to also share what was formerly proprietary information and get that out there.

So thanks for allowing me the opportunity to share a lot of what we’re doing.

Maureen: Share again that website.

Kara: Well, we have our Amazon sustainability website, and then we also have the Amazon sustainability exchange where we’re sharing a lot of our information for how we’re doing all of these sustainability initiatives.

Maureen: Brilliant. Thank you so much. [00:27:00] Thank you.