Amazon shareholders reject all 14 proposals on issues related to climate, AI, working conditions

(GeekWire File Photo)

Investors representing a majority of Amazon’s shares voted against all 14 outside proposals submitted for the annual meeting of shareholders Wednesday morning, according to the company.

The announcement of the preliminary results at the virtual meeting followed more than 30 minutes of comments by proponents including Amazon employees, activists, and others on issues such as climate, workers’ rights, racial and gender pay gaps, corporate governance, facial recognition technology, working conditions, and artificial intelligence.

Detailed results are typically released a few days after the meeting.

Amazon’s 12-member board, which was re-elected as part of the meeting, had recommended that shareholders vote against all 14 outside proposals.

One proposal requested that Amazon create an additional board committee to address human rights risks associated with the development and deployment of AI systems.

Other proposals focused on the company’s climate impact, requesting that Amazon disclose “Scope 3” greenhouse gas emissions and report how it could reduce its plastics footprint.

Nine of the 14 proposals are repeat proposals that failed in prior years. Some of the proposals “contain assertions that we believe are incorrect or that reflect fundamental lack of understanding of how our business operates,” Amazon said in a proxy statement.

The annual meeting, which previously drew protesters to Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood, has been held virtually since the onset of the pandemic.

During the Q&A portion of the meeting, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy answered questions submitted by shareholders. Selected questions focused on topics including warehouse injuries; the future of Alexa; generative AI; government regulation; Amazon’s advertising business; dividends; and more. Here are a few excerpts from Jassy’s answers, edited for brevity and clarity.

On plans for Alexa: “If you look at what’s been happening in generative AI over the last couple years, and you don’t believe there is going to be a really broad personal assistant, you have your head in the sand. If you look at Alexa, we have over a half billion devices in people’s homes with over 200 million active endpoints across entertainment, smart home and shopping. We have a very significant chance to be the leader here. We have a pretty significant large language model that runs underneath Alexa. But we’re in the process of building a much more expansive one that we think will meaningfully improve the experience for our Alexa users. I’m very optimistic that we’ll be a leader here and I think our future is bright.”

On the advertising business: “I think we’re still very early in figuring out how to thoughtfully place advertising in video and sports and audio and grocery products. We recently launched Prime Video ads, which is off to a really good start. Brands are really excited about being able to reach over 200 million monthly viewers. I think we have still a quite a bit of opportunity in advertising. It’s still early days for us there.”

On issuing dividends: “We always look at all the different ways to best leverage and invest cash that we have. We are very convicted that the best use of this cash for customers and the business and shareholders right now is investing in businesses in which we’re pursuing. If you look at our existing large businesses — Stores and AWS as examples — they still require very significant capital to pursue the very large opportunities we have. It’s important to keep remembering that in our Stores business, we’re still only about 1% of the worldwide market segment share in retail and about 85% of it still lives in physical stores. Similar story in AWS. It’s a $100 billion annual revenue run rate but about 85% to 90% of the global IT spend is still on premises. If you believe those equations are going to flip, which we do, we have a lot of growth in front of us. You layer on for AWS, the fact that generative AI is this very transformative substantial opportunity, almost all of which will be built from the get go in the cloud — there are real good uses of capital to keep growing those businesses. And we have a lot of passion for the newer businesses and investments we’re making in areas like Prime Video and healthcare and Kuiper and Zoox and grocery and some of the logistics and fulfillment businesses that we’re pursuing. We will always look at alternative ways to invest cash and if we find better ways than what we’re investing in we’ll do it.”