Every meeting at Amazon starts with a document—typically, a six-page narrative-driven memo written in Calibri 10, with a clear header, sections, page numbers, and a stamp proclaiming “Amazon Confidential”.

The ritual at the e-commerce giant goes something like this: employees walk into the meeting room, grab a printed copy of the document, and spend the next 30–40 minutes just reading. No talking, no waffling. Just silence, as everybody pores over the words in front of them. Some mark passages with pencils. Others jot down questions in the margins.

Then the discussion starts. 

“I like a crisp document and a messy meeting,” saidLex FridmanTranscript for Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin | Lex Fridman Podcast #405 Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in a 2023 Lex Fridman podcast. “The document should be written with such clarity that it’s like angels singing from on high…And the meeting is about asking questions that nobody knows the answer to and trying to wander your way to a solution.”

This Amazonian document-writing culture became so legendary that companies from social-media platform Twitter, under founder Jack Dorsey, to cloud-based storage and service provider DropboxTimes of IndiaDropbox CEO is a 'fan' of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' 'Memo' embraced it. 

But that culture is changing at Amazon. Weeks of agonising over these documents is giving way to instantaneous prompts on an AI tool. 

“For last month’s business-performance report, I uploaded a previous document into the AI tool and asked it for a summary,” said a Bengaluru-based executive at Amazon’s cloud-computing subsidiary Amazon Web Services (AWS). “I used that to build context, added data for the current month, and then prompted it to create a structure similar to the previous report. This was my starting point, and I then added the ‘why’.”

This turn towards AI is more company-induced than employee-propelled. Amazon has enabled internal AI tools such as Amazon Q, a generative virtual assistant, and Cedric, an AI chatbot “that is saferBusiness Insider Amazon recently rolled out a new AI chatbot that is 'safer than ChatGPT' for employees to use than ChatGPT” and trained in the Amazonian way of writing.