Amazon confirmed Wednesday that it laid off an unspecified number of employees in its artificial general intelligence (AGI) organization, the division working on the company’s advanced AI models.

The move, first reported by Reuters, comes as the company invests heavily in programs to help businesses implement AI effectively, including a $1 billion initiative to embed AWS engineers with customers building agentic AI systems.

It’s part of a larger shift in the industry as tech giants and AI frontier labs look to make sure the enormous sums they’re spending on AI pay off in tools businesses actually use.

In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson said building large AI models remains “one of the most important things we’re working on,” but said the company is also “sharpening our focus on the initiatives that matter most for customers, so we can move faster on what counts.”

“That focus means some difficult decisions, including eliminating some roles within parts of our AGI organization, even as we continue to invest in the areas most important to our customers’ future,” the spokesperson said.

It’s the latest in a series of changes in Amazon’s AGI group, which despite its name has always been focused more on frontier models than on what the industry considers AGI, the still-theoretical systems that would match or surpass human intelligence.

Rohit Prasad, the senior executive who oversaw Amazon’s AGI work, left the company late last year, and AGI Lab head David Luan departed in February. In December, Amazon folded the AGI group into a larger organization led by senior vice president Peter DeSantis that also includes chip development and quantum computing.

The cuts are the latest in a series of smaller reductions since January, when Amazon eliminated 16,000 jobs across the company. Amazon said U.S. employees whose jobs are cut will receive 90 days of pay and benefits, outplacement support and transitional health coverage, along with eligibility for severance.

Jimothy isn’t just a viral internet sensation — he’s a cause for good.

A painting of the beloved raccoon by Seattle artist Ryan Henry Ward attracted a winning bid of $6,543.21 in an informal Instagram auction this weekend, with all proceeds directed to the Ballard Food Bank.

The winning bidder for the 24-by-24-inch painting was identified by Ward as Angela Galdabini, who posted a picture of the painting hanging on her wall.

Now the auction gift is going viral in its own way, attracting a matching donation from Amazon, which encouraged other Seattle-area companies to follow suit. According to the tech giant on Monday, T-Mobile, Alaska Air and Brooks have all gotten on board.

“When we saw a local artist giving back to the Ballard Food Bank, inspired by a little raccoon that’s brought so much joy, we wanted to help,” Kara Hurst, Amazon’s chief sustainability officer, said in a statement. “Amazon is proud to match the winning bid, and we’re calling on other Seattle-based companies to join us.”

Update: On Tuesday, Microsoft let us know that they, too, had committed funds to the food bank.

Jimothy seemed destined to be captured by Ward, a prolific muralist whose colorful, whimsical work is seen across the Seattle region on buildings, fences, garage doors and elsewhere. His art frequently features a variety of animals and other characters, including Sasquatch.

Ward called Jimothy “the hero we needed” in his Instagram post on Saturday, and said he was giving to Ballard Food Bank because the organization helped him through some of his hardest times.

The viral Jimothy sensation took off last week when the raccoon was spotted in Ballard and a video attracted millions of views on Instagram. The craze spread around the world and other videos have emerged online, sparking immense curiosity and adoration, and a flood of memes, artwork, food, crafts, poetry, songs and more. 

One of Amazon’s top cloud leaders will be joining Meta as the Facebook parent company considers turning its massive AI buildout into a cloud business of its own.

That’s the report from the Wall Street Journal overnight, quoting anonymous sources saying that Dave Brown, the senior Amazon executive who led AWS compute and AI services, will join Meta in the coming weeks to work on its data center build-out.

Meta hasn’t committed to becoming a cloud provider, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said the idea is on the table. He told shareholders in May that companies were regularly approaching Meta to pay for access to its AI models or spare computing capacity — a business that would put Meta in competition with cloud providers it now relies on, including AWS.

At Meta, Brown will report to infrastructure chief Santosh Janardhan, according to the WSJ report. Janardhan co-leads Meta Compute, an initiative Zuckerberg launched in January to plan the company’s data center buildout. Meta has said it expects to spend $125 billion to $145 billion on capital expenditures this year, much of it tied to AI data centers.

Amazon isn’t commenting on the report. We’ve contacted Meta for confirmation and details.

Brown’s departure from AWS was announced on Wednesday, with a warmly worded message from AWS CEO Matt Garman giving no indication that Amazon would try to challenge or restrict his new role on competitive grounds.

AWS has gone to court before to enforce noncompete agreements against departing executives, suing two AWS leaders who left for Google Cloud in 2019 and 2020, respectively. But such agreements have grown harder to enforce. California bars them almost entirely, and Washington — Amazon’s home state — enacted a near-total ban this year, though it doesn’t take effect until mid-2027.

Garman’s message said Brown had decided to take “a new role outside of the company” but did not say where he was going. He’s remaining at AWS through the end of July to help with the transition.

At AWS, Brown will be succeeded by Dave Treadwell, a longtime Amazon executive who has run the technology behind the company’s retail operations and spent 27 years at Microsoft before joining Amazon in 2016. He takes over AWS Compute and ML Services on Aug. 1.

[Update, Friday, July 17: Brown is joining Meta, the WSJ reported. More here.]

Dave Brown, who joined Amazon Web Services as one of its earliest EC2 engineers and rose to lead its compute, AI and machine learning services, is leaving after nearly 19 years. 

AWS CEO Matt Garman told employees in a memo posted publicly Wednesday that Brown will depart at the end of July for an unspecified “new role outside of the company.” Amazon exec Dave Treadwell, who joined the company in 2016 after 27 years at Microsoft, will take over the group Aug. 1.

Brown’s exit comes about three months after Amazon promoted him to senior vice president. Brown had been on the company’s senior leadership team since 2023.

His tenure stretched back to the early days of the cloud. He joined AWS in 2007 in Cape Town, South Africa, where Amazon based part of its early EC2 engineering, before relocating to the Seattle area.

In an interview with GeekWire earlier this year, as the company marked the AWS 20th anniversary, Brown recalled Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, then the company’s top cloud executive, gathering the small Cape Town team in those days and telling them the business could one day be worth a billion dollars.

Brown said he could barely grasp the figure at a time when the service was bringing in tens of dollars a day: “I couldn’t even imagine how much a billion dollars was. It sounded like a lot of money.”

AWS today runs at roughly $150 billion in annualized revenue, and grew 28% in its most recent quarter — its fastest pace in nearly four years.

Brown’s role grew with the business. After starting as an engineer on EC2, or Elastic Compute Cloud, he went on to lead its broader compute organization, including close collaborations with the executives running Amazon’s custom silicon business. His purview also expanded to include the machine learning and AI services now central to AWS, such as the Bedrock and SageMaker platforms.

Treadwell has run Amazon’s eCommerce Foundation, the technical backbone of the company’s online retail operations, since joining in 2016. Before that he spent 27 years at Microsoft, where as a corporate vice president he worked on Windows, Xbox, and the .NET software framework.

In his memo, Garman described Treadwell — known internally as “Tread” — as one of AWS’s largest and most vocal internal customers, someone who pushed the cloud group to innovate and will now lead it.

Brown will remain through the end of July to help with the transition. In his own farewell note, he said it felt like the right time to begin a new chapter. “I’ll be cheering you all on from the sidelines,” he wrote.

— Rina Hahn has left Seattle’s Remitly as chief marketing officer. Hahn joined the remittance company in 2018 as director of digital marketing and rose to CMO after four years. Before joining Remitly, she was an executive at Blue Nile and Big Fish Games.

The publicly traded company helps customers in more than 170 countries send money internationally.

“I’ve seen firsthand the deep love this company has for its customers and the impact that purpose-driven work can have on immigrants and their families around the world,” she said on LinkedIn. Hahn, who is based in London, did not share her next move. Remitly co-founder Matt Oppenheimer stepped down as CEO in February.

— Temporal announced that Preeti Somal has been promoted to executive vice president in a role that will oversee the company’s engineering, product and design operations, which were recently reorganized under a single leader.

The industry is moving so fast that “we can’t afford any distance between the people who decide what to build and the people who build it. Unifying these functions closes that loop,” said CEO Samar Abbas on LinkedIn.

Somal has been with Temporal for three years, joining from HashiCorp where she held EVP roles.

The Seattle-area software company offers a platform for running complex computer workflows more reliably. In February, the business closed a $300 million round that pushed its valuation to $5 billion. Temporal is No. 2 on the GeekWire 200 is a ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.

— Veeam Software, a Seattle-based data protection and ransomware recovery company, appointed Michelle Graff as senior vice president of global partners and channel. She joins from the cybersecurity company Commvault and is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“The future belongs to organizations that can transform trusted data into trusted AI with resilience built in from the start,” Graff said on LinkedIn.

Graff’s hiring is the latest in a string of leadership changes at Veeam, which has made five other executive hires or promotions this year.

— Qualtrics, an experience management technology company with headquarters in Seattle and Provo, Utah, has promoted Ken Hoang to senior vice president of product. Hoang is based in San Mateo, Calif., and will work remotely. He was previously a VP at Apptio in Bellevue, Wash.

Qualtrics had a big leadership shakeup in April, when five executives were let go in what CEO Jason Maynard described as an effort to “simplify our structure and ensure we are positioned for our next phase of growth.” Two product executives were among those who left, and Hoang joined the company around that time.

Qualtrics, which employs more than 4,500 people globally, makes software that helps companies gather and act on feedback from customers, employees and others through surveys, AI-powered analytics and other tools.

— Monica Lazo is now the sales director for Loopr AI, a Seattle startup that sells computer vision quality control software to manufacturing firms. She joins from Neurala, an AI platform automating visual inspections that is based in Boston.

— Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has named atmospheric scientist Larry Berg as the director of the Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement User Facility.

And some departures from Big Tech:

• Mary Birkner is retiring from Microsoft after 21 years, primarily in leadership with Xbox. “I thank you for the laughter and goodness that were part of the journey to all the big work stuff,” she said on LinkedIn.
• Steve Andrews has closed out a 32-year career that included more than 11 years across two stints at Amazon, most recently as senior principal technical program manager. The TPM role “is often misunderstood and misused, so I dedicated a substantial amount of effort helping to set TPMs, their managers, and their teams up for success across the company,” he said. “I hope it made a difference.”
• Jeff Nienaber is departing Microsoft after more than 16 years, leaving the role of senior director and principal PM for the office of the CTO. “I’m really excited to see what tomorrow’s sunrise has in store,” Nienaber said.

Seattle-area startups raised $2.7 billion in venture funding through the first half of 2026, across 163 deals, down about 40% from $4.5 billion in 210 deals during the same period a year ago.

The figures come from the recently released PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor report for Q2 2026. The decline in capital reflects fewer deals across the board in the Seattle region, with much of the funding going to a handful of large rounds for energy, cybersecurity, and space startups.

Here is the region’s top 5 for the second quarter, as tracked in the report:

• Helion Energy’s $465 million Series G round was the biggest deal of the quarter.
• Starcloud raised $170 million for space-based data centers.
• XBOW pulled in $155 million for autonomous cybersecurity systems.
• Starfish Space closed about $110 million for spacecraft servicing.
• Gradial raised $65 million for its agentic enterprise software platform.

Against the AI grain: In Q2 2026 specifically, startups in the Seattle area closed 85 deals totaling $1.5 billion. That was down from 101 deals and $2.3 billion in the same quarter a year ago, but up from Q1 2026, which PitchBook revised to 78 deals and $1.2 billion as part of its regular data updates.

Heavy infrastructure investments by Microsoft and Amazon have helped to establish the Seattle area as an AI hub, but the region’s pure-play AI startups, on the whole, aren’t seeing investment on the same scale as some of their peers in Silicon Valley and other tech hubs around the country.

That creates a disconnect with the larger U.S. venture capital market. AI companies accounted for 86% of all U.S. venture dollars in the first half of the year, according to the PitchBook-NVCA data.

Nationally, it was a record half: U.S. startups raised $412.7 billion through June, already surpassing the full-year record of $358.6 billion set in 2021. But the number is misleading. Deals of $100 million or more accounted for 87.5% of the total, and AI companies captured 86 cents of every venture dollar.

OpenAI and Anthropic alone absorbed roughly 43% of all global venture capital in the first half of the year, by one estimate. The Bay Area, home to both, pulled in $319 billion, about three times its H1 2025 total.

Strip out those two companies and the national picture looks very different. Seed funding fell 27% nationally in the first half, and first-time fund formation is on pace for its lowest year since 2016.

Regional trends: In that way, what’s happening in the Seattle area reflects the current realities of the market. However, the region is also slipping relative to its peers in the latest numbers.

Among the 10 largest U.S. metro areas for venture funding, Seattle ranked seventh by capital invested in the first half of the year, down from fifth in H1 2025. By deal count, the region was last in the top 10.

The data used in this analysis covers the Seattle-Tacoma combined statistical area (CSA), a broader regional boundary that includes communities beyond the core metro region.

Political climate: Washington’s shifting tax and economic landscape adds another variable.

The state now taxes capital gains at up to 9.9%, a new millionaires’ tax takes effect in 2028, and legislators this year floated taxing the federal QSBS exemption that startup founders and early employees rely on when they sell shares at exit. That bill didn’t pass, but generated enough alarm to cause a backlash from startup community leaders and investors.

Looking ahead: Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ Kent-based space company, is reportedly seeking up to $10 billion in what would be its first outside funding round. A deal that size would be larger than every other Seattle-area venture round this year combined.

While investors spent much of the spring concerned that frontier AI models from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI would consume the software industry, Dave Clark was closing a funding round for exactly the kind of enterprise software those models are supposedly going to replace.

Auger, the supply chain technology startup founded in Bellevue, Wash., by the former Amazon executive, has raised $50 million in Series B funding led by Eclipse, with existing investor Oak HC/FT also participating in the new round.

The round brings total funding to $150 million for the company, which has grown to about 130 employees and counts Meta’s virtual and augmented reality division, sports merchandise giant Fanatics, and consumer products maker Kimberly-Clark among its customers.

Clark’s view is that general-purpose AI can generate insights but can’t handle deeply specialized domains like running a supply chain. Making financial and operational decisions and executing them at the scale of big companies requires systems built on strong supply chain expertise — what Auger calls its ontology, essentially a detailed map of how supply chains actually work.

“Many a pure technology company died on the hill of supply chain over the last decade,” said Clark, the company’s CEO, in an interview this week. “You really need to understand the complexity and the contextual requirements.”

Auger sits on top of a company’s existing systems — ERP, warehouse management, transportation management, and demand planning tools — and unifies the data into a single operating layer. Rather than replacing those systems, it connects them, using AI agents and traditional optimization models to make decisions and execute them automatically, as much as possible.

For example, in a recent demo at the company’s Bellevue office, Clark showed how the system would handle a supplier missing a delivery commitment when there isn’t enough product to go around. Auger identifies the shortfall, determines which customers get priority, reallocates inventory, and pushes the updated plan back to the company’s existing systems.

Most supply chain software, Clark said, generates alerts and waits for a person to act. Auger is designed to make routine decisions on its own and flag the exceptions for human review.

“We’re not really a tool,” he said. “We’re really the new employee.”

At Fanatics, the sports merchandise company, Clark said about 85% of decisions in the process Auger manages are happening autonomously, with a goal of reaching the mid-90s soon. In addition to the customers it has named so far, Clark said another eight to 10 companies are in contract negotiations or pilot programs.

Clark spent 23 years at Amazon, rising to lead the company’s worldwide operations and later its worldwide consumer business. He left in 2022 and became CEO of Flexport, the freight forwarding startup, but that tenure lasted less than a year amid a turbulent period for the company.

He launched Auger in 2024 with a team that includes Leigh Anne Clark, his wife, who serves as co-founder and president of the company’s fashion and beauty division, focused on an industry Clark describes as one of the most wasteful supply chains outside of groceries.

Clark moved back to the Seattle area from Texas to tap the region’s talent pool, and raised a $100 million Series A from Oak HC/FT. The company quickly assembled a C-suite drawn heavily from Amazon’s senior ranks, along with leaders from Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, and Salesforce, spanning supply chain operations, AI, data science, and product development.

In March, Auger was named a premier supply chain partner on Microsoft Fabric, the tech giant’s data platform. Auger’s product is built on Azure, and Microsoft sales reps can earn commission on Auger deals. Clark said the partnership has generated engagement but is still early.

Clark said Auger went out for the Series B early, before the company needed it, to avoid the distraction of fundraising during what he expects to be a busy fall of customer onboarding.

With the investment, Eclipse partner Jiten Behl joined the Auger board, which also includes Clark, president and CFO Alex Ceballos, and Oak HC/FT’s Matt Streisfeld.

Auger hasn’t disclosed revenue or other financial metrics, but Clark said the valuation was roughly double the level set by Auger’s initial round. “We didn’t shoot for the crazy astronomical valuation,” he said. “We sat at a place that we felt really comfortable with.”

That pragmatic approach extends to how Auger operates. In Bellevue, the company works out of an office it subleased after Microsoft vacated the space. Auger kept the desks, monitors, and chairs the tech giant left behind, furnishing its new offices for next to nothing.

But Clark’s ambitions for the company are anything but modest. He said Auger’s goal is to have half of U.S. GDP flowing through its platform by 2030, with revenue exceeding $1 billion.

“That requires a pretty steep curve to get there,” he said. “We’re not playing small.”

Rohit Talluri learned the tradition at Amazon: always keep an empty chair in the room to represent the customer — a reminder of the people who will ultimately use whatever gets built.

Now, with AI coding tools creating software faster than ever, Talluri and his co-founders, fellow Amazon veterans Jean Farmer and Gabriel Fong, recognize that the customer can be easily forgotten in the process. So they’re creating a seat at the table for AI agents.

That’s the idea behind Primitive Labs. The startup is building what it calls behavioral intelligence: systems that observe, reason and act as customers would across software platforms and devices, helping product teams learn how people will react to a new feature, design or marketing decision before it ships.

Traditional user research and focus groups can take weeks or months, so teams under pressure to ship quickly are tempted to skip them. Primitive Labs is automating that research with agents that simulate human behavior, aiming to make it a routine step in building software.

“It’s bringing humans back to the center of a world that’s created by AI,” Talluri said. “That is the goal here.”

The mission, according to the startup’s launch post, is to “make human behavior a first-class primitive of software development.” That’s the inspiration for Primitive Labs’ name. The idea is to build products that people will understand, trust and keep using — not the average user, but specific types of users in specific contexts.

Founding team: Talluri, the Primitive Labs CEO, is joined by co-founders Farmer, CTO; and Fong, COO.

Fong and Talluri have worked together since 2020. At AWS in Seattle, Fong held product marketing and enterprise account roles, then led sales and marketing at the cloud consultancy DoiT International.

At Primitive Labs, his role runs broader than sales and marketing, spanning product direction, customer development and operations. Talluri describes him as highly technical and a hands-on contributor to the company’s core product work.

Farmer and Talluri worked together at AWS on large-scale machine-learning infrastructure, including the SageMaker HyperPod training service, before both moved into Amazon’s AGI organization.

Farmer worked on the Amazon Nova models’ ability to use software tools — designing how the models call tools and take actions, and building the systems to test and measure how well the resulting agents perform. That work included benchmarks for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the emerging standard for connecting AI models to outside tools and data.

Roots in AI autonomy: Talluri joined the AGI Autonomy Lab, the group Amazon assembled around talent it hired from Adept, a San Francisco startup building AI agents that operate software on their own.

Amazon had brought on Adept’s CEO, David Luan, a former OpenAI executive, along with other co-founders in 2024, and licensed the startup’s technology, putting Luan in charge of the lab. Talluri worked there on computer-use agents and helped launch Nova Act, Amazon’s agentic computer-use model.

Talluri said he initially came close to leaving Amazon in 2025 to start a company, before leaders there steered him toward the Autonomy Lab to work under Luan (who has since left Amazon).

Funding: Primitive Labs has raised a pre-seed round, led by a16z Speedrun and joined by several small, newer venture funds and a group of angel investors. The company isn’t disclosing the funding amount.

Its launch post lists backers including Olive Tree Capital, Cloverfield Fund and Unexpected Investments (from former TechCrunch editor Josh Constine), plus angels such as Luan, Harsh Patel and Artur Kiulian, and others with backgrounds at OpenAI, Amazon, Google DeepMind, Databricks, Nvidia and Meta.

Primitive Labs will join a16z Speedrun’s cohort starting this month, and expects to raise its next round around the end of the program, in September or October.

Headquarters: The company is based in San Francisco, where it’s working part-time out of a16z’s Speedrun space, with plans to get its own office after making its first hires.

Talluri, a University of Washington graduate who read GeekWire as a student and dreamed of launching a startup of his own, said the choice came down to San Francisco’s talent density and the pace of AI research there, plus the Speedrun program being there.

Primitive Labs posted its first job listings last week — for founding engineers, researchers and an intern, in San Francisco or New York.

Product status: The company is pre-revenue and working with a small group of early customers who are testing its product and helping shape it, including private previews with what Talluri described as Fortune 500 and Fortune 50 consumer-technology and e-commerce brands.

The company plans to launch its products in general availability later this year.

How it works: The agents work across devices including computers and phones, focused for now on digital products and customer journeys. The company says it has also explored using them to gauge reactions to physical products, such as brand and packaging.

The underlying research draws on computational cognitive science, continual learning and custom memory systems modeled on how people store information — work Talluri said the company plans to publish and partly open-source in the coming months.

While other startups are working on agent-based simulation and automated testing of user interfaces, what sets Primitive Labs apart, Talluri said, is the focus on human alignment. That means building agents that faithfully represent a specific product’s users, and making that a standard layer of how software gets built. He described the key measure as behavioral fidelity, or how closely an agent’s choices track human decisions.

Asked whether the startup will keep a chair empty when it gets an office, in the Amazon tradition, Talluri didn’t hesitate. “100%,” he said. And yes, he said, they’ll be envisioning an agent sitting there.

Amazon has cut a total of 57 jobs in Washington state across various teams, including roles at the director and senior manager levels, according to a filing made public Monday morning.

People impacted by the cuts include 16 software engineers as well as product managers and creative marketing employees working in Seattle and Bellevue offices. Nine remote employees, including investigation specialists and risk managers, were also let go.

Employees were notified of the layoffs throughout May and in early June, according to an Amazon filing with the Employment Security Department, released Monday under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act. The roles are scheduled to end in August.

“[W]e filed a WARN notice because a few businesses across the company made organizational changes that each impacted a small number of employees — in most cases fewer than five employees per business,” said Brad Glasser, an Amazon spokesperson, via email.

WARN notifications are triggered by state law when more than 50 Washington-based employees in total are laid off over a period of 30 days.

“We don’t make decisions like this lightly, and we’re committed to supporting the employees who were impacted,” Glasser added.

It’s a sign of the broader belt-tightening across the tech industry. Microsoft separately cut more than 600 jobs in Washington state on Monday morning, part of global layoffs eliminating 4,800 roles across the Redmond company, primarily in sales, consulting and gaming.

The latest Amazon cuts follow layoffs of 2,198 Washington-based employees in February and 2,303 in October 2025. Globally, the company has eliminated roughly 30,000 positions in the past year, cumulatively amounting to the the largest workforce reduction in its history.

The multiple rounds of layoffs have hit wide-ranging positions and divisions, with software engineers the hardest hit. Corporate support, commercial functions, legal, tax, and ad sales positions have all seen cuts, as have Amazon’s core technology organization, gaming division and robotics unit.

The previous larger cuts were part of an effort to “reduce layers, increase ownership, and remove bureaucracy,” according to a memo sent to employees and posted online earlier this year by Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experience and technology.

Amazon’s corporate roles numbered around 50,000 in the Seattle area.

Tech giants nationwide have made round after round of job cuts in the past year as they pour billions into AI data center expansions and gain labor efficiencies through the use of artificial intelligence.

Amazon reported $181.5 billion in sales for the first quarter of this year, up 17% from a year earlier. Profits came in at $30.3 billion, boosted by gains tied to the value of its investment in Anthropic.

— Hrishikesh Aradhye has joined Amazon Music as vice president of product and tech for the streaming service. He spent nearly 19 years at Google, most recently as senior director of engineering leading YouTube Music and Podcasts.

“The music industry is going through a tectonic shift that will unlock entirely new kinds of customer experiences through AI,” Aradhye said.

Earlier in his tenure there, he worked at Google Research, where he helped pioneer computer vision and machine learning systems for YouTube and Android.

— Vasu Jakkal is stepping down after six years as Microsoft‘s corporate vice president of Security, Compliance, Identity, Management & Privacy. She thanked colleagues and customers in a LinkedIn post.

“It’s been an epic journey — six years ago, we formed our Security customer solution area and the growth and impact of Microsoft Security over these past years has been incredible as we built the #1 security business in the world while keeping our mission of building a safer world for all at the heart of it,” Jakkal wrote.

Jakkal is based in the San Francisco Bay Area and previously held executive roles at FireEye and Intel. She did not indicate her next move.

— Mika Yamamoto was named chief marketing and customer AI officer for Veeam Software, a Seattle-based data protection and ransomware recovery company. It’s the latest in a string of leadership changes at Veeam, which has made four other executive hires or promotions this year.

Yamamoto previously worked for Seattle-area companies including F5, Microsoft and SAP, and joined Veeam from Los Angeles-based Blackline.

“She has experienced this industry from every angle — analyst, operator, executive leader — and has consistently put the customer and partner at the center of how companies operate,” CEO Anand Eswaran said in a statement.

— In case you missed it, Microsoft has undergone a leadership shakeup within Copilot as the company works to turn its platform into a “super app.” Changes include:

• Jacob Andreou has moved from corporate vice president at Microsoft AI to executive vice president of Copilot. He joined the company in 2025 from Greylock Partners and before that was at Snapchat-maker Snap.
• Peter Sellis has been named Copilot’s lead of design, growth and engineering, reporting to Andreou. He joins Microsoft from Discord and overlapped with Andreou at Snap, where Sellis was VP of product.
• The reshuffle also comes with a departure. Trevor O’Brien, former VP of product for M365 Copilot experiences, has resigned from his role. “The past two and a half years have been inspiring, chaotic, intense, and deeply rewarding,” O’Brien said on LinkedIn. He did not indicate his next move.

— Seattle-based tech executive Niranjan Vijayaragavan has taken the role of CTO at Five9, a cloud-based contact-center-as-a-service company. He joins Five9 from Nintex, where he served as chief product and technology officer. Other past employers include Avalara and Expedia Group.

“Five9 is at the center of one of the most important shifts in customer experience as AI reshapes how companies engage with their customers,” Vijayaragavan said in a statement. The company is based in San Ramon, Calif., but Vijayaragavan will remain in Washington.

— Maura Mast was appointed president of Seattle University, succeeding Eduardo M. Peñalver, who resigned to lead Georgetown University. Mast is the first woman and first mathematician to hold the top role at the Jesuit Catholic university.

“Our world urgently needs spaces of dialogue and discernment that actively work to heal deep divisions and build a more equitable society,” Mast said in a statement, adding that SU can lead in these areas.

Mast will begin the job on Sept. 1 and joins SU from Fordham University, where she served as a dean and mathematics professor.

— The Cascadia Sustainable Aviation Accelerator named Jake Gentry as its executive director. Gentry helped create CSAA, which aims to make the Pacific Northwest a center for the production of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). He remains a senior director at Seattle’s Earth Finance and is leading the accelerator as part of that organization.

Hawaiian Airlines CEO Diana Birkett-Rakow praised Gentry’s appointment, saying in a statement that he has “the right combination of strategic depth, execution orientation, coalition-building instincts, and commitment to the work.”

Gentry previously held sustainability leadership roles with companies including Point B and Boeing.

— Seattle’s F5 has added Gavin Munroe to its board of directors, where he will serve on the audit and risk committees. Munroe has decades of experience in financial services and most recently was chief information officer and transformation head at Commonwealth Bank of Australia.

— Harini Gokul, a former leader at Microsoft and AWS and past chief customer officer at Entrust, has joined the board of Afiniti. The company builds AI software for call centers that aims to match customers with the appropriate agent. Gokul also serves on the Medina City Council.

— Safe Software, a data and AI enterprise integration platform based in Surrey, British Columbia, has named Nabil Lodey vice president of Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Lodey will help lead the company’s expansion in the UK and Ireland.

— Allison Gruber is now VP and leader of Portland-based Cambia Health Foundation. She previously oversaw Cambia Health Solutions’ Strategy and Innovation team, where she led data-driven strategy initiatives.

— And some more folks are retiring from Microsoft, in addition to those featured Tuesday in a GeekWire story on the company’s first-ever voluntary retirement program:

• Nir Michaely, Azure software engineering manager, closes out 26 years with the company.
• John Ballard, principal security researcher, departs after nearly 30 years.
• Kristen Mattoni, senior product marketing manager, is leaving after 15 years.

Amazon’s carbon footprint jumped 16% last year after several years of little or no increase. The company emitted nearly 80.9 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2025. By comparison, that’s slightly higher than the nation of New Zealand’s emissions.

Amazon disclosed its climate-related data in its most comprehensive sustainability report to date, which includes a breakdown of its carbon sources, water use and other environmental impacts.

Not surprisingly, energy use showed the biggest rate of increase in the 2025 carbon tally as Amazon and other tech companies are working to rapidly expand their data center capacity to meet AI computing demand.

For the first time since 2019, the company also reported an uptick in its “carbon intensity” — a measure of how much carbon was emitted relative to each dollar of revenue. Amazon has promoted this metric as a sign that it can decouple its growth from its climate impacts.

Despite emissions moving in the wrong direction and ongoing data center-driven challenges, the Seattle-area company remains committed to its pledge of net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.

When it comes to that goal, “I remain confident and optimistic in the overarching vision and the long-term progress we continue to make toward it,” said Kara Hurst, Amazon’s chief sustainability officer, in the foreword to the company’s annual report.

The report highlights areas of success that include:

• Data center efficiency: Amazon’s data centers are 9% more efficient than the public cloud average and 30% more efficient than on-premises data centers at directing energy toward computing rather than cooling, lighting or overhead.
• Data center water use: Amazon is seven times more efficient in its water use than the industry average thanks to its use of air cooling at most sites, most of the year.
• 100% clean energy overall: For the third year running, Amazon matched its company-wide electricity use with an equivalent volume of purchased clean energy, although it technically still draws on fossil fuels for some of its energy.
• Electric vehicle fleet: It has the largest corporate EV fleet in North America, with more than 52,700 delivery vans worldwide. It’s halfway to meeting its 2030 goal of 100,000 EVs.

The company also reported improvements in reducing packaging and plastic use in delivered items; increasing use of low-carbon building materials in data center construction; and progress toward becoming water positive at its data centers, meaning it aims to replenish more water to communities than it uses.

The Amazon-backed Climate Pledge — an effort to get other organizations to commit to net-zero carbon emissions by 2040 — has grown to 656 signatories after adding 107 companies this year. It marks a notable increase at a time when companies are growing quieter about climate commitments, with some stepping back from earlier goals.

But the surge in data center investment shows little sign of slowing, which will keep complicating Amazon’s path to lower emissions. CEO Andy Jassy said Amazon expects to spend a record $200 billion in capital expenditures this year, including “AI, chips, robotics, and low-Earth orbit satellites.”

Not all reactions to that buildout have been positive — even within the company. Members of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice this month testified before the Seattle City Council in favor of data center requirements for renewable energy and labor protections, though Amazon doesn’t operate any data centers within city limits.

In response to the sustainability report, the employee group was critical of the increased emissions and accused the company of pressuring carbon accounting standards bodies — including the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and the Science-Based Targets Initiative — to adopt weaker rules.

More than 1,000 employees have signed an open letter drafted last year criticizing Amazon’s “warp-speed approach” to its AI development, the group added.

In the report, Amazon CSO Hurst acknowledged that AI-fueled advances could catalyze sustainability solutions or slow progress toward climate goals.

“But what alternative do we have,” she said, “but to continue to invest, learn, and move forward to try to solve one of the world’s most challenging issues?”

Editor’s note: Story updated at 11:56 a.m. with comment from Amazon Employees for Climate Justice.

Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson last week announced an Economic Development Council to “identify practical actions that strengthen Washington’s economy, expand opportunity and help more Washingtonians succeed.”

To Ferguson’s credit, he may finally be recognizing that Washington’s business climate is deteriorating.

While he didn’t admit any responsibility for that decline, the number of companies and highly successful job creators that have said “Bye Bob” and taken jobs to other states — Starbucks and Janicki Industries to name two recent examples — cannot have escaped his attention.

Who’s who

The council’s composition gives us a glimpse into the governor’s economic mindset. Unfortunately, it isn’t forward-looking.

There are more nonprofits and governmental agencies than businesses. Except for one small homebuilder, none of the participating companies were founded this century. Calling the council a “historic convening” is unintentionally apt.

There is zero representation from entrepreneurs, the startup ecosystem or anyone building the industries of the future. The mayor of Cleveland remains better plugged into our startup community than any politician in Washington.

The largest participants on the governor’s new council are notable for mass layoffs and shifting their workforces out of the state.

Amazon and Microsoft have each cut tens of thousands of jobs, as they become more capital-intensive and lean into AI-driven productivity. Boeing now has nearly two-thirds of its employees outside Washington state, and that shift continues.

Oblivious to AI

Also missing from the governor’s framing is the single biggest force shaping the economy today: AI.

He namechecks quantum computing, advanced manufacturing, and clean energy, but omits AI.

New jobs overwhelmingly come from young growth companies, and AI is driving new company formation. 

Beyond startups, AI is going to dramatically reshape knowledge work and boost productivity in every single organization (including, hopefully, government). 

It is impossible to talk about “the next chapter of economic prosperity for our state” without discussing the implications of AI.

The committee agenda

“The council will meet quarterly and submit advisory reports to the governor with its findings and recommendations.” 

The first report, in its entirety, should say “STOP DRIVING BUSINESS AWAY.”

Starbucks, perhaps not surprisingly, was not invited to participate on the council, though Gov. Ferguson tells The Seattle Times he understands the coffee giant’s importance to the region and “has a direct line of communication with them.”

The governor suggests he “would be open to more aggressive financial incentives to attract out-of-state business,” but why not prioritize keeping companies that are already here? 

The zero-sum view of job creation — that you must pay to lure companies from other states — reflects a profound ignorance of the magic of economic growth.

Just nurture an environment conducive to growth. Effective and efficient delivery of public services, predictable taxes, and sensible regulation. But that would require changes in how state government operates today.

In other words, grow what you’ve got.

Learning from Cleveland

I have argued that the software era is ending, and we need to find our next economic act in Washington state. Prosperity is precarious and can’t be taken for granted. 

The governor was invited, through a representative, to join GeekWire’s recent visit to Cleveland but never responded. I still hope he can learn from Cleveland as part of his interest in economic development.

Cleveland’s experience after its industrial economy fractured painfully demonstrates the potential downside we face. More than a half century later, that city is still working extraordinarily hard to recover. 

The mayor of Cleveland observed that when the Rust Belt started to rust: “We didn’t pivot fast enough, and the world left us behind.”

Today, every level of government in Ohio is laser-focused on jobs, economic growth and prosperity. Our state should be just as focused, especially as our economic tectonic plates shift.

It is a very positive milestone that our governor is seeking “the next chapter of economic prosperity for our state.”

But committees don’t drive economic growth. It starts with “first do no harm.”

Gov. Bob Ferguson last week recruited top executives from Microsoft, Amazon, T-Mobile, Boeing and other major employers to help shape Washington state’s economic strategy, launching a new advisory council as concerns mount that the state is becoming less competitive for business.

The 26-member Governor’s Economic Development Council is the first such governor-led economic advisory body in roughly two decades, reviving an approach last used under former Gov. Christine Gregoire in 2006. The group includes leaders from technology, aerospace, organized labor, higher education, tribal governments, ports and economic development organizations who will advise the governor on policies aimed at strengthening Washington’s economy. (See full list below).

One missing ingredient: No members from Washington’s venture capital or startup ecosystem are on the council, even though they are often considered the bench strength of a growing economy.

The announcement comes as executives, startup founders and business organizations have increasingly warned that higher taxes, rising costs, permitting delays and an uncertain regulatory environment are making Washington a more difficult place to build and grow companies. Ferguson recently signed the so-called “millionaires tax” — a proposed 9.9% tax applied to taxable, personal annual income that exceeds $1 million.

Some of the region’s wealthiest and most prominent entrepreneurs — including Zillow and Expedia co-founder Rich Barton; Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz — have publicly announced moves out of Washington state in recent years.

Starbucks also recently announced a major expansion in Nashville, and Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte of earlier this month announced that Sedro Wooley, Wash.-based Janicki Industries chose Great Falls for the site of an $800 million manufacturing center expected to create 1,000 jobs.

“Washington is our home, and that is not changing,” said John Janicki, president of Janicki Industries, in a press release. “Our footprint in Washington has continued to grow but is slowing due to ever-increasing regulations and lack of business understanding at an executive and legislative level.” 

Meanwhile, a recent survey from the Association of Washington Business found that 24% of businesses are considering a relocation out of the state, up from 17 percent in the prior quarter.

Washington’s economic climate was also one of the reasons why GeekWire recently traveled to Cleveland, where we explored how the Midwestern city was positioning itself for a changing economy, and the lessons that Washington could learn from it.

“We cannot take our strength for granted,” Ferguson said in announcing the council. “I’m launching a historic convening of top leaders from around Washington state to help guide the next chapter of economic prosperity for our state.”

The council will help develop Washington’s long-term economic strategy, identify opportunities to create family-wage jobs, evaluate the state’s competitiveness against other states and global markets, recommend ways to attract new employers and review regulatory barriers that may be slowing economic growth. The group will meet quarterly and submit recommendations to the governor.

The council’s creation comes after months of growing unease within Washington’s technology and business community.

GeekWire has reported extensively on criticism surrounding this year’s tax package, which raised business taxes on many employers and expanded the sales tax to additional services, including advertising. Business groups warned the measures could discourage investment and expansion in Washington, while lawmakers argued the revenue was necessary to close a multibillion-dollar budget gap and preserve essential public services.

The broader economic backdrop remains mixed. Washington continues to rank among the nation’s strongest state economies and remains home to global leaders in artificial intelligence, cloud computing, aerospace and life sciences. At the same time, employers are navigating higher borrowing costs, federal policy uncertainty, trade tensions and intensifying competition from states aggressively courting new investment.

As one example, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine recently encouraged people and businesses from places like Washington to consider Ohio.

“Come work in Ohio,” DeWine noted after a question from GeekWire about advice he’d provide to Washington. “You will not find a better place, better people, quality of life. Cost of living is low compared to the two coasts.”

In the press release announcing Janicki Industries’ Montana expansion, Gianforte was a bit more blunt.

“The Treasure State is proud to attract job creators like Janicki that choose to expand from high-tax, high-regulation blue states to take advantage of our unmatched quality of life, lower taxes, and strong workforce,” he said. “I look forward to seeing the impact of this significant investment.”

Ferguson has sought to make economic development a central priority during his first year in office. His administration has highlighted efforts to speed permitting across state agencies, increase housing production and invest in sectors including quantum computing, advanced manufacturing and clean energy.

However, some have argued that the governor’s efforts come a bit too late, and are only be instituted in response to criticism. Gov. Ferguson shot back at that contention in the press conference last week, saying he doesn’t worry about critics and he’s interested in “solving problems.”

“I didn’t wake up last week and think about forming this council,” he said. “To be clear, as I mentioned in my talking points, this was an effort we really started last year and was an outgrowth of having conversations with many of the folks behind me and many other people across the state.”

Whether the new council ultimately leads to meaningful policy changes remains to be seen. But its creation sends a signal that Ferguson intends to place economic competitiveness — and closer engagement with Washington’s business community — near the center of his administration.

Amazon Chief Global Affairs and Legal Officer David Zapolsky, a member of the newly created council, called the formation of the group an “important step.”

“When the public and private sectors align around shared goals, communities benefit,” he said.

Governor’s Economic Development Council members:

• Michael Cade — Incoming Board Chair, Washington Economic Development Association; Executive Director, Thurston County Economic Development Council
• Dr. Betsy Cantwell — President, Washington State University
• Leonard Forsman — Chairman, Suquamish Tribe
• Denny Heck — Washington State Lieutenant Governor
• Kris Johnson — President, Association of Washington Business
• Trevor Johnson — CEO, Blackwood Homes
• Dr. Robert Jones — President, University of Washington
• Mike Katz — Chief Business & Product Officer, T-Mobile
• Mary Kipp — President & CEO, Puget Sound Energy
• Heather Kurtenbach — Executive Secretary, Washington State Building & Construction Trades Council
• Dr. Thomas J. Lynch Jr. — President & Director, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center
• Julianna Marler — CEO, Port of Vancouver
• West Mathison — President & CEO, Stemilt Growers
• Stephen Metruck — Executive Director, Port of Seattle
• Denise Moriguchi — President & CEO, Uwajimaya
• Stephanie Pope — President & CEO, Boeing Commercial Airplanes
• Heather Rosentrater — President & CEO, Avista
• Michael Senske — Chairman & CEO, Pearson Packaging Systems
• April Sims — President, Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO
• Brad Smith — Vice Chair and President, Microsoft
• Rachel Smith — President, Washington Roundtable
• Bill Sterud — Chairman, Puyallup Tribe
• Shane Tackett — President and Chief Financial Officer, Alaska Airlines
• Monique Valenzuela — Executive Director, Ventures
• Dr. Rebekah Woods — President, Columbia Basin College
• David Zapolsky — Chief Global Affairs & Legal Officer, Amazon

U.S. shoppers spent a record $26.4 billion across all retail sites during Amazon’s four-day Prime Day event, and for the first time, the people most likely to complete a purchase were those who arrived from AI chatbots.

It’s the latest twist in a high-stakes bet by Amazon. The AI assistants now sending retailers their best-converting customers are the same ones Amazon has worked to keep away from its own store, hoping to keep shoppers coming directly to Amazon.com and using its own on-site AI assistant instead.

Adobe reported over that weekend that visitors who clicked through to shopping sites from AI assistants were 40% more likely to make a purchase during the four-day event than those showing up through search, email or social media.

AI still accounts for a small fraction of total shopping traffic, but a trend is starting to emerge. In the past, shoppers sent by AI were the least likely to buy, according to Adobe’s data. The change suggests that ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and others are becoming more effective at giving shoppers the information they need to buy with confidence.

Those figures span all of U.S. retail — “Prime Day” has become much more than a day, and much bigger than Amazon alone. The distinction matters, because Amazon has taken a different path than many of its rivals. While Walmart, Target and others have opened their catalogs to outside AI assistants, Amazon has kept them out.

Agentic AI drives less than 1% of traffic across every major online store, but Amazon’s share is the lowest of the group, at about 0.4%, according to J.P. Morgan data.

That’s by design: Amazon sued Perplexity, for example, over its browser that shopped on customers’ behalf, and won a preliminary injunction barring the tool from the logged-in parts of its site, arguing that unauthorized shopping agents degrade a trusted experience. Perplexity is appealing.

Amazon has separately blocked ChatGPT’s crawlers from reading its listings — even as it has begun buying ads inside ChatGPT to bring shoppers back, a move first spotted by Marketplace Pulse founder Juozas Kaziukėnas and reported by Business Insider and Modern Retail.

On Amazon’s most recent earnings call, in April, CEO Andy Jassy said the company was in talks with the AI companies to come up with a better experience between Amazon and third-party agents to “find something that works for customers and all the companies.”

In the meantime, Amazon is focusing on its own AI assistant.

The tool — launched as Rufus and folded in May into a service called Alexa for Shopping — has drawn more than 250 million users, with monthly users up more than 115% over the past year, the company said. Customers who use it while shopping are more than 60% more likely to buy, and Amazon Web Services has said the tool drove nearly $12 billion in incremental sales last year.

Jassy said on the earnings call that third-party agents weren’t good enough yet — that they lacked a shopper’s history and often couldn’t get prices right — and that people would gravitate to whichever assistant knew them best. That’s the opening Amazon is going after with its own AI chatbot and related tools on Amazon.com.

“We are aiming to have it be the best shopping assistant anywhere,” Jassy said.

The strategy reflects one of the ways Amazon is increasingly making money. Advertising is now among its most profitable businesses. J.P. Morgan expects it to bring in about $83 billion in revenue this year and, because the margins are high, to account for roughly a third of the company’s operating income.

That advertising revenue depends on Amazon getting shoppers to browse its own site rather than handing the decision to an outside chatbot it doesn’t control.

The big question long-term is whether Amazon can maintain its own role as a primary destination for shoppers and avoid becoming just another selection on a chatbot’s shelf.