An outage on Microsoft’s Azure cloud services Wednesday morning disrupted operations for customers worldwide including Alaska Airlines, Xbox users and 365 subscribers.

The incident strikes just ahead of Microsoft’s quarterly earnings call today and follows last week’s outage at Amazon Web Services and a failure of Alaska Airlines’ own data center technology.

The latest outage struck at 9 a.m. Pacific Standard Time, according to Microsoft, when the system “began experiencing Azure Front Door (AFD) issues resulting in a loss of availability of some services. We suspect that an inadvertent configuration change as the trigger event for this issue.

“We are taking several concurrent actions: Firstly, where we are blocking all changes to the AFD services, this includes customer configuration changes as well. At the same time, we are rolling back our AFD configuration to our last known good state,” the company stated. “As we rollback we want to ensure that the problematic configuration doesn’t re-initiate upon recovery.”

Alaska Airlines posted on X at 10:33 a.m., explaining that the Azure outage was disrupting systems including their website function. Passengers flying on Alaska and Hawaiian airlines who were unable to check-in online were directed to airline agents to receive their boarding passes.

“We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience as we navigate this issue,” the post said.

Microsoft did not indicate when the issue would be resolved.

“We do not have an ETA for when the rollback will be completed, but we will update this communication within 30 minutes or when we have an update,” the company posted at 10:51 a.m.

Days after its outage last week, AWS offered a detailed explanation of the event, which was caused by a cascading failure triggered by a rare software bug in one of the company’s most critical systems. The disruption impacted sites and online services around the world.

Alaska Airlines attributed its recent outage to a failure at its primary data center. The company operates a hybrid infrastructure, blending its own data centers with third-party cloud platforms. The incident disrupted travel for more than 49,000 passengers.

Software development engineers make up the largest group of employees affected by Amazon’s latest round of layoffs in its home state.

GeekWire reported Tuesday on a new filing from the Washington Employment Security Department revealing that the tech giant is laying off 2,303 corporate employees, mostly in Seattle and Bellevue. The cuts are part of broader layoffs announced Tuesday that will impact about 14,000 workers globally.

A detailed list included with the state filing reveals which roles are impacted by the layoffs. More than 600 software development engineering roles are being cut among the 2,303 affected workers in Washington — more than a quarter of total cuts.

The trend mirrors layoffs at Microsoft earlier this year, as companies reassess their engineering needs amid the rise of AI-driven coding tools. Amazon itself recently introduced its own AI coding tool Kiro in July, and has reportedly explored adopting the AI code assistant Cursor for employees.

The layoffs of software engineers reflect a striking shift for an industry that has traditionally relied on coders to help build and maintain the backbone of digital platforms.

“This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet,” Amazon HR chief Beth Galetti wrote in a message to employees Tuesday, saying it’s enabling teams to “innovate much faster than ever before.”

Amazon’s engineering layoffs are part of a broader industry reckoning with AI’s impact on traditional tech roles and white-collar jobs. A Wall Street Journal report this week detailed how the adoption of AI is contributing to a wave of layoffs across the country. Axios published a story Wednesday on a similar topic with the headline: How an AI job apocalypse unfolds.

More than 500 manager-level titles were also heavily affected by Amazon’s layoffs in Washington, according to the filing — aligning with a company-wide push to use the cutbacks to help reduce bureaucracy and operate more efficiently.

Amazon also made reductions in recruiting and HR roles. Other impacted areas include marketing, advertising, and legal.

The largest single site impact is at SEA40, Amazon’s Doppler office building on 7th Avenue in Seattle, where 361 employees are affected, according to the filing.

More than 100 remote employees based in Washington are also being let go.

It’s rare for a tech executive to cue up a video mocking themselves — but that’s just what Microsoft President Brad Smith did on Tuesday at the Cascadia Innovation Corridor conference in Seattle. Smith played a clip from The Daily Show in which comedian Jon Stewart lampooned his and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s interviews about AI’s impact on jobs.

The segment poked fun at the idea that displaced workers might become “prompt engineers” — a new job Stewart rebranded as “types questions guy.”

It was a self-aware feature of a talk that balanced enthusiasm for artificial intelligence’s potential with sober reflections on its hype and potential pitfalls.

The Microsoft leader called AI the “next great general purpose technology” on par with electricity. He said AI will transform sectors including health, education, biotech, aerospace, agriculture, climate and others.

That was a theme during Tuesday’s event. Former Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire, who leads the Cascadia Innovation Corridor group, kicked off the day by calling AI “a defining technology of our generation.”

Smith, who in his three decades at Microsoft has witnessed tech bubbles and bursts, also offered a “breadth of perspective” on AI that he hinted might be lacking in Silicon Valley.

“In so many ways, the sky is the limit,” Smith said. “That is exciting, but I don’t want to just be another tech bro who says, ‘Hey, great, here it comes. Get ready, get out your wallet.'”

AI-driven employment threats are becoming increasingly real in the tech sector and beyond. Amazon on Tuesday announced a huge round of layoffs, slashing 14,000 corporate and tech jobs. Earlier this year Microsoft laid off 15,000 employees worldwide. The cuts aren’t all tied to AI, but many executives are talking about worker efficiency gains thanks to the tech.

Despite the recent layoffs, many industry and elected leaders in the Cascadia region, which stretches from Vancouver, B.C., through Seattle and down to Portland, see AI as a promising economic engine that can build on the area’s strong tech foundation. That includes Microsoft and Amazon as well as a growing slate of AI startups, plus institutions such as the University of Washington, University of British Columbia, Allen Institute for AI and others.

But Smith — who manages to strike a persona blending tech evangelist, politician and favorite uncle — also acknowledged concerns about disparities in AI access, whether looking locally at rural versus urban divides, or the gap between AI use in affluent and low-income countries that lack widespread electricity and internet connections.

He also tackled the meta questions around the responsible use of AI and encouraged society to get out in front of the technology with appropriate guardrails.

“What are we trying to do as an industry, as a region, as a planet, as a species? Are we trying to build machines that are better than people? Are we trying to build machines that will help people become smarter and better?” he asked.

“If the experience that we’ve all had with social media over the last 15 years teaches us anything at all,” Smith continued, “it is that the best time to ask these questions and to debate them is before technology answers them for us.”

RELATED: Cascadia’s AI paradox: A world-leading opportunity threatened by rising costs and a talent crunch

More than 117 years after Seattle residents first saw a flying machine in the sky, a unique aircraft over Jet City can still turn heads.

That happened this week with the arrival of Beta Technologies‘ all-electric ALIA CX300 conventional takeoff and landing aircraft as it dropped into King County International Airport – Boeing Field.

Photographer Steve Rice captured the strange-looking airplane with a rear propellor and posted images on Reddit, where aviation geeks launched into a debate about e-planes, range, charging times, vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, and more.

Vermont-based Beta wasn’t just doing a fly-by. The company brought the plane to Seattle for an official demonstration of the ALIA in an event that drew state officials, aviation experts, and industry leaders from across Washington.

In a news release Tuesday, Beta said Washington has a “deep-rooted aviation heritage that has long positioned the state as a global leader in aerospace innovation and manufacturing.” And the company said the state is now “actively advancing the future of flight through strategic investments in sustainable aviation and the critical infrastructure needed to support next-generation technologies.”

Beta founder and CEO Kyle Clark called the event at Boeing Field “a step toward realizing a future where electric aviation is accessible, reliable, and benefits local communities.” 

Founded in 2017, Beta is building two electric aircraft — the fixed-wing ALIA CTOL, and the ALIA VTOL, a vertical takeoff and landing aircraft — at a production facility in Vermont.

The inaugural flight of Beta’s first production model airplane was last November. The ALIA CTOL has a range of 336 nautical miles, and Beta’s planes are designed to carry passengers or cargo.

The company has also developed and is rolling out a network of charging infrastructure for use across airports and the electric aviation ecosystem.

Beta filed for an initial public offering earlier this month with plans to sell 25 million shares at $27 to $33 each — a price range that could value the company at $7.2 billion.

Vancouver, B.C.-based Helijet International previously placed orders with Beta for a fleet of eVTOL aircraft.

Other electric and hybrid aircraft makers are getting their planes off the ground in Washington, including Seattle-based Aero-TEC and Everett, Wash.-based magniX. Arlington, Wash.-based Eviation Aircraft paused work on its Alice airplane earlier this year.

With a new OpenAI partnership in hand, Microsoft is going into its earnings report Wednesday afternoon with a resolution to one of the biggest questions about its business.

The company’s market value reached $4 trillion again as Wall Street reacted to the details of the new Microsoft-OpenAI agreement, which gives Microsoft a 27% equity stake in OpenAI’s new for-profit entity, and a commitment for $250 billion in cloud purchasing by the ChatGPT maker.

Analysts expect the tech giant to report another strong quarter, fueled primarily by continued momentum in its Azure cloud business and growing adoption of its Copilot AI tools.

Quarterly revenue is expected to be about $75.4 billion for the first quarter of Microsoft’s 2026 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, according to numbers tracked by Yahoo Finance. That would represent a 15% jump compared to the $65.6 billion reported in the same period last year. 

Analysts expect earnings per share of $3.66, up about 11% year-over-year from $3.30.

Investors will be paying close attention to the growth rate in Microsoft’s Azure cloud business, with some analysts expecting as much as 39% growth (in constant currency, excluding the impact of exchange rates). Hitting this mark would exceed the company’s prior guidance and maintain the 39% growth pace set in the previous quarter.

Yet the potential for an AI bubble will no doubt be the focus of questions on company’s earnings conference call. Amid surging investment and growing valuations in the AI sector, some analysts and tech leaders are warning that the enthusiasm could outpace the business realities

Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet will both report numbers on Wednesday afternoon, and Amazon the following day, making for quick comparisons across the major cloud platforms.

As of the most recent quarter, ended in June, Microsoft reported more than $75 billion in annual Azure revenue for its just-ended fiscal year, compared to an annual run rate that had surpassed $50 billion for Google Cloud and a run rate of nearly $124 billion for Amazon Web Services (based on its $30.9 billion revenue in the June quarter).

Check back with GeekWire on Wednesday afternoon for full coverage.

A trio of veteran entrepreneurs have joined forces to create a new Seattle startup — and any mentions of the company across the internet will likely be tracked by what they’re building.

Alertmouse generates email alerts for people and brands who want to know what’s being said about them — or anything else they’re interested in — online. The goal is to provide a better offering than other monitoring tools, most notably Google Alerts, which Alertmouse calls “so bad it might as well not exist.”

The startup was created by co-founders Rand Fishkin (SparkToro, Snackbar Studio), Adam Doppelt (Urbanspoon, Dwellable), and Nathan Kriege (Blueprint AI, Fresh Chalk).

Fishkin, the CEO, posted about Alertmouse on LinkedIn this week, saying that while the side project has turned into a full-fledged business, he’s not leaving his other two jobs.

“It doesn’t take a ton of my time but it has been really fun to build this thing that I desperately needed,” Fishkin said in a video on his post, before listing his grievances with Google Alerts, including how it “doesn’t pick up everything you want, it sends you useless alerts” and more.

Fishkin said tracking his mentions or those related to his companies, whether it’s in a news article or in a Reddit thread, allows him to monitor what’s being said and jump in if necessary to reply.

Alertmouse says it searches the index of websites and pages it can reach two or three times each day for the unique string of words/phrases/rules a user has entered. An email is sent with the pages that contained them.

“It’s not rocket science, but it takes a lot of clever programming, testing, and iteration to make a good alert service,” the company says in its FAQ.

In an interview with GeekWire this week, Fishkin said there are enterprise tracking tools that do what Alertmouse does, such as Mentioned, Hootsuite, and Brandwatch, but they can be cost-prohibitive.

“Google Alerts has been this free alternative for a long time, but sometime in the last decade, maybe even before that, it just stopped sending me anything decent,” he said. “I have no idea what they’re doing under the hood. I suspect it’s a defunct product that no one maintains anymore, but I couldn’t tell you what’s really going on.”

On a website loaded with cheesy puns, Alertmouse has four pricing tiers, including Nibble (free), Slice ($120/year), Wedge ($600/year), and Wheel ($1,200/year).

Alertmouse attracted 1,000 sign-ups in the first several hours it was live, and Fishkin credits the fun interface and language on the website, and the fact that it’s easy to use.

“We wanted to make a brand that no one could confuse for AI,” Fishkin laughed. “This is not an AI company. There’s going to be no venture capital, there’s no AI under the hood. It’s just really simple, straightforward, fun, delightful humans.”

Fishkin, an SEO expert who founded and led Moz, a Seattle-based maker of marketing software tools, co-founded SparkToro in 2018. The audience research tool helps marketers and others understand their target audiences. He raised $2.15 million last year for his new independent video game studio, Snackbar Studio.

Doppelt and Kriege previously worked on vacation rental startup Dwellable (sold to HomeAway in 2015), local professional recommendation site Fresh Chalk, and task management company Blueprint AI together. Last year they teamed up to create a resource website for everything you’d ever want to know about smoke detectors.

Fishkin and Doppelt are also part of dedicated group of “Dungeons & Dragons” players.

The Alertmouse website says the startup has no plans to hire. But that could change after a morning in which lots of people were emailing with questions.

“If it keeps going like this we might have to bring someone on,” Fishkin said.

Seattle-based Radical says it has put a full-size prototype for a solar-powered drone through its first flight, marking one low-altitude step in the startup’s campaign to send robo-planes into the stratosphere for long-duration military and commercial missions.

“It’s a 120-foot-wingspan aircraft that only weighs 240 pounds,” Radical CEO James Thomas told GeekWire. “We’re talking about something that has a wingspan just a bit bigger than a Boeing 737, but it only weighs a little bit more than a person. So, it’s a pretty extreme piece of engineering, and we’re really proud of what our team has achieved so far.”

Last month’s flight test was conducted at the Tillamook UAS Test Range in Oregon, which is one of the sites designated by the Federal Aviation Administration for testing uncrewed aerial systems. Thomas declined to delve into the details about the flight’s duration or maximum altitude, other than to say that it was a low-altitude flight.

“We take off from the top of a car, and takeoff speeds are very low, so it flies just over 15 miles an hour on the ground or at low altitudes,” he said. (Thomas later added that the car was a Subaru, a choice he called “a Pacific Northwest move, I guess.”)

The prototype ran on battery power alone, but future flights will make use of solar arrays mounted on the plane’s wings to keep it in the air at altitudes as high as 65,000 feet for months at a time. For last month’s test, engineers added ballast to the prototype to match the weight of the solar panels and batteries required for stratospheric flight. Thomas said he expects high-altitude tests to begin next year.

Thomas and his fellow co-founder, chief technology officer Cyriel Notteboom, are veterans of Prime Air, Amazon’s effort to field a fleet of delivery drones. They left Amazon in mid-2022 to launch Radical and have since raised more than $4.5 million in funding. September’s test of a full-size drone follows up on the 24-hour-plus flight of a 13-pound subscale prototype in 2023.

The company’s manufacturing operation is based in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood. There are currently six people on the team, plus a new hire, Thomas said. “We’re still lean,” he said. “To make this airplane work, it has to be really efficient, right? Really efficient electronics and aerodynamics. And you also need a really efficient team.”

Thomas said Radical has attracted interest from potential customers, but he shied away from discussing details. “We’re working with groups in the government and also commercially,” he said. “Obviously there are applications at the end of this that span everything from imagery through telecommunications and weather forecasting. There are a lot of people really interested in the technology, and the thing that stops us from serving those customers is not having a product up in the sky. So, that’s what we’re working through.”

Radical’s solar-powered airplane, known as Evenstar, is just one example of a class of aircraft known as high-altitude platform stations, or HAPS. Thomas and his teammates use a different term to refer to Evenstar. They call it a StratoSat, because it’s designed to take on many of the tasks typically assigned to satellites — but without the costs and the hassles associated with launching a spacecraft.

Potential applications include doing surveillance from a vantage point that’s difficult to attack, providing telecommunication links in areas where connectivity is constrained, monitoring weather patterns and conducting atmospheric research.

“We have customers who are really excited about the way that this can improve how we understand Earth’s weather systems and climate,” Thomas said. “That’s an application that we’re really excited to get into.”

Evenstar will carry payloads weighing up to about 33 pounds (15 kilograms). “That was based on analysis about major use cases,” Thomas explained. “That payload is enough to carry high-bandwidth, direct-to-device radio communications, or to carry ultra-high-resolution imaging equipment.”

Radical isn’t the only company working on solar-powered aircraft built for long-duration flights in the stratosphere. Other entrants in the market include AeroVironment, SoftBank, BAE Systems, Swift Engineering, Kea Aerospace, Korea Aerospace Industries and NewSpace Research & Technologies. Airbus’ solar-powered Zephyr set the record for long-duration stratospheric flight in 2022 with a 64-day test mission that ended in a crash.

Among those who tried but failed to field stratospheric solar drones are Alphabet, which closed down Titan Aerospace in 2016; and Facebook, which abandoned Project Aquila in 2018.

Thomas said the outlook for high-flying solar planes has brightened in the past decade.

“The key supporting technologies have matured enormously,” he said. “Commercial battery energy density has doubled in that 10-year time period. Solar cells are 10 times cheaper than they were just 10 years ago. And then you have advances in compute and AI, and all of these things feed into the situation we have now, where it’s actually possible to make the models close — whereas when we run the 10-year-old numbers, we can’t close the models.”

The way Thomas sees it, the concept behind Radical isn’t all that radical anymore.

“Not only do our models say this will work, but we have flight data that agrees with our models, and says this is a technology that can serve its purpose and unlock the potential of persistent infrastructure in the sky,” he said. “I can see why other people are pursuing it. It’s not a new idea. It’s one that people have wanted to crack for a long time, and we’re at this critical inflection point where it’s finally possible.”

In the era of AI-generated software, developers still need to make sure their code is clean. That’s where TestSprite wants to help.

The Seattle startup announced $6.7 million in seed funding to expand its platform that automatically tests and monitors code written by AI tools such as GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Windsurf.

TestSprite’s autonomous agent integrates directly into development environments, running tests throughout the coding process rather than as a separate step after deployment.

“As AI writes more code, validation becomes the bottleneck,” said CEO Yunhao Jiao. “TestSprite solves that by making testing autonomous and continuous, matching AI speed.”

The platform can generate and run front- and back-end tests during development to ensure AI-written code works as expected, help AI IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) fix software based on TestSprite’s integration testing reports, and continuously update and rerun test cases to monitor deployed software for ongoing reliability.

Founded last year, TestSprite says its user base grew from 6,000 to 35,000 in three months, and revenue has doubled each month since launching its 2.0 version and new Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration. The company employs about 25 people.

Jiao is a former engineer at Amazon and a natural language processing researcher. He co-founded TestSprite with Rui Li, a former Google engineer.

Jiao said TestSprite doesn’t compete with AI coding copilots, but complements them by focusing on continuous validation and test generation. Developers can trigger tests using simple natural-language commands, such as “Test my payment-related features,” directly inside their IDEs.

The seed round was led by Bellevue, Wash.-based Trilogy Equity Partners, with participation from Techstars, Jinqiu Capital, MiraclePlus, Hat-trick Capital, Baidu Ventures, and EdgeCase Capital Partners. Total funding to date is about $8.1 million.

Amazon will lay off 2,303 corporate employees in Washington state, primarily in its Seattle and Bellevue offices, according to a filing with the state Employment Security Department that provides the first geographic breakdown of the company’s 14,000 global job cuts.

A detailed list included with the state filing shows a wide array of impacted roles, including software engineers, program managers, product managers, and designers, as well as a significant number of recruiters and human resources staff. 

Senior and principal-level roles are among those being cut, aligning with a company-wide push to use the cutbacks to help reduce bureaucracy and operate more efficiently.

Amazon announced the cuts Tuesday morning, part of a larger push by CEO Andy Jassy to streamline the company. Jassy had previously told Amazon employees in June that efficiency gains from AI would likely lead to a smaller corporate workforce over time.

In a memo from HR chief Beth Galetti, the company signaled that further cutbacks will continue into 2026. Reuters reported Monday that the number of layoffs could ultimately total as many as 30,000 people, which is still possible as the layoffs continue into next year.

Reaction to a huge round of layoffs rippled across Amazon and beyond on Tuesday as the Seattle-based tech giant confirmed that it was slashing 14,000 corporate and tech jobs.

We’ve rounded up some of what’s being said online and/or shared with GeekWire:

‘Never been laid off before’

A megathread on Reddit served as a collection of comments by impacted employees who posted about their level, location, org and years of service at Amazon.

Workers across ads, recruitment, robotics, retail, Prime Video, Amazon Games, business development, North American Stores, finance, devices and services, Amazon Autos, and more used the thread to vent.

• “TPM II for Amazon Robotics, 6.5 years there. Still processing this, I’ve never been laid off before.”
• “L6 SDEIII, started as SDEI 7 years ago. I went L4 to L6 in 3 years. My last performance review I got raising the bar. Thought I was a top performer but guess I’m expendable.”
• “Never been laid off before feels overwhelming on VISA! Someone please help me understand next steps in terms of VISA, if I am not able to get H1b sponsoring job in next 90 days will I have to uproot everything here and go back?”
• “I heard AWS layoffs come after re:invent to avoid customer disruption and bad press.”
• “It’s heartbreaking how impersonal and abrupt these layoffs have become. People who’ve given years to a company are finding out in minutes that they’re done.”

Bad news via text?

Kristi Coulter, author of Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career, a memoir about what she learned in her 12 years at Amazon, weighed in about the timing of apparent text messages that were sent to impacted employees.

“Wait, I’m sorry: Amazon made people relocate, switch their kids’ schools, and bookend their days with traffic for RTO only to lay them off via a 3 a.m. text? What happened to the vibe and conversations that only being together at the office could allow?” Coulter wrote on LinkedIn.

‘Reduced functionality’

Some employees shared how they were quickly locked out of work laptops, expressing confusion about whether that was how they were supposed to learn about being terminated.

“I lost access to everything immediately :( ,” one Reddit user said.

Others discussed how they should have found time to transfer important work examples or positive interactions related to their performance over to personal computers.

“One thing I would recommend for everyone is to back up your personal files onto your personal laptop,” one user said on Reddit. “I used to keep all my accolades and praise in a quip file along with all my 2×2 write ups and MBR/QBR write ups cataloging my wins. When I found out I got laid off my head was spinning so I went outside for a walk, by the time I returned I was locked out of my laptop and no longer had access to anything.”

Is this Amazon’s way of saying 100% laid off?

Any Amazon folks on the timeline – seen this before?#Amazon #layoffs #amazonlayoffs pic.twitter.com/1MCxoXjfHQ

— Aravind Naveen (@MydAravind) October 28, 2025

Why layoffs now?

Amazon human resources chief Beth Galetti pinned the layoffs in part on the need to reduce bureaucracy and become more efficient in the new era of artificial intelligence. Others looked for deeper meaning in the cuts.

In a post on LinkedIn, Yahoo! Finance Executive Editor Brian Rozzi said stock price is likely a key consideration when it comes to top execs and the Amazon board signing off on such mass layoffs.

Amazon’s stock was up about 1% on Tuesday to $229 per share.

“If the layoffs keep jacking up the stock price, maybe I can retire instead,” one longtime employee told GeekWire.

Entrepreneur and investor Jason Calacanis posted on X about how AI was coming for middle managers and those with “rote jobs” faster than anyone expected. He encouraged workers to become a founder and do a startup before it’s too late.

Hard-hit divisions

Mid-level managers in Amazon’s retail division were heavily impacted by Tuesday’s cuts, according to internal data obtained by Business Insider.

More than 78% of the roles eliminated were held by managers assigned L5 to L7 designations, BI reported. (L5 is typically the starting point for managers at Amazon, with more seniority assigned to higher levels.)

BI also said that U.S.-focused data showed that more than 80% of employees laid off Tuesday worked in Amazon’s retail business, spanning e-commerce, human resources, and logistics.

Bloomberg and others reported that significant cuts are also being felt by Amazon’s video games unit.

Steve Boom, VP of audio, Twitch, and games said in a memo shared with The Verge that “significant role reductions” would be felt at studios in Irvine and San Diego, Calif., as well on Amazon’s central publishing teams.

“We have made the difficult decision to halt a significant amount of our first-party AAA game development work — specifically around MMOs [massively multiplayer online games] — within Amazon Game Studios,” Boom wrote.

Current titles in Amazon’s MMO lineup include “New World: Aeternum,” “Throne and Liberty,” and “Lost Ark.” Amazon also previously announced that it would be developing a “Lord of the Rings” MMO.

‘Ripple effects throughout the community’

Jon Scholes, president and CEO of the Downtown Seattle Association (DSA), has previously praised Amazon for its mandate calling for employees to return to the office five days per week, saying that the foot traffic from thousands of tech workers in the city is a necessary element to helping downtown Seattle rebound from the pandemic.

On Tuesday, Scholes reacted to Amazon’s layoffs in a statement to GeekWire:

“As downtown’s largest employer, a workforce change of this scale has ripple effects throughout the community — on individual employees and families and our small businesses that rely on the weekday foot traffic customer base. In addition, these jobs buttress our tax base that helps fund the city services we all depend on. Employers have options for where they locate jobs, and we want to ensure downtown Seattle is the most attractive place to invest and grow. We must provide vibrancy and a predictable regulatory environment in a competitive landscape because other cities would welcome the jobs currently based in downtown.”

Less than two weeks ahead of the United Nations climate conference, Bill Gates posted a memo on his personal blog encouraging folks to just calm down about climate change.

“Although climate change will have serious consequences — particularly for people in the poorest countries — it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future,” Gates wrote.

The missive seems to run counter to earlier climate actions taken by the Microsoft co-founder and billionaire, but also echoes Gates’ long-held priorities and perspectives. In some regards, it’s the framing, timing and broader political context that heighten the memo’s impact.

What the world needs to do, he said, is to shift the goals away from reducing carbon emissions and keeping warming below agreed-upon temperature targets.

“This is a chance to refocus on the metric that should count even more than emissions and temperature change: improving lives,” he wrote. “Our chief goal should be to prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world’s poorest countries.“

More than four years ago, Gates published “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” a book highlighting the urgency and necessity of cutting carbon emissions and promoting the need to reduce “green premiums” in order to make climate friendly technologies as cheap as unsustainable alternatives.

“It’ll be tougher than anything humanity’s ever done, and only by staying constant in working on this over the next 30 years do we have a chance to do it,” Gates told GeekWire in 2021. “Having some people who think it’s easy will be an impediment. Having people who think that it’s not important will be an impediment.”

Gates’ clean energy efforts go back even earlier. In 2006 he helped launch the next-gen nuclear company TerraPower, which is currently building its first reactor in Wyoming. In 2015 he founded Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a $1 billion fund to support carbon-cutting startups, which evolved into Breakthrough Energy, an umbrella organization tackling clean tech policies, funding for researchers and data generation.

Earlier this year, however, Gates began taking steps that suggested a cooling commitment to the challenge.

Roughly two months after President Trump took office in January, and as clean energy policies and funding began getting axed, Breakthrough Energy laid off staff. In May Gates announced he would direct nearly all of his wealth to his eponymous global health foundation, deploying $200 billion through the organization over two decades.

At the same time, many of the key points in the memo published today reflect statements that Gates has made in the past.

In both his new post and at a 2022 global climate summit organized in Seattle by Breakthrough Energy, Gates urged people to focus on reducing green premiums more than on cutting emissions as a key benchmark.

“If you keep the primary measures, which is the emissions reductions in the near term, you’re going to be very depressed,” Gates said. At his summit talk, he shared optimism that new innovations were arriving quickly and would address climate challenges.

A curious paradox in Gates’ stance is the reality that people living in lower-income nations and in regions important to the Gates Foundation are often hardest hit by the rising temperatures and natural disasters that are stoked by increased carbon emissions.

Gates acknowledged that truth in his post this week, and said that solutions such as engineering drought tolerant crops and making air conditioning more widespread can address some of those harms. At the Seattle summit three years ago, one of the Breakthrough Energy executives likewise said the organization was going to increase its investment into technologies for adapting to climate change.

On Nov. 10, global climate leaders will meet in Brazil for COP30 to discuss climate progress and issues. Gates has often attended the event, but the New York Times reported that won’t be the case this year.

UN efforts meanwhile continue to emphasize the importance of reducing emissions. A statement today from the organization notes that while carbon emissions are curving downward, it’s not happening fast enough.

The world needs to raise its climate ambitions, the statement continues, “to avoid the worst climate impacts by limiting warming to 1.5°C this century, as science demands.”

Washington state Gov. Bob Ferguson is threading the needle when it comes to artificial intelligence.

Ferguson made a brief appearance at the opening reception for Seattle AI Week on Monday evening, speaking at AI House on Pier 70 about his approach to governing the consequential technology.

“I view my job as maximizing the benefits and minimizing harms,” said Ferguson, who took office earlier this year.

Ferguson called AI one of the “top five biggest challenges” he thinks about daily, both professionally and personally.

In a follow-up interview with GeekWire, the governor said AI “could totally transform our government, as well as the private sector, in many ways.”

His comments came just as Amazon, the largest employer in Washington state, said it would eliminate about 14,000 corporate jobs, citing a need to reduce bureaucracy and become more efficient in the new era of artificial intelligence.

Ferguson told the crowd that the future of work and “loss of jobs that come with the technology” is on his mind.

The governor highlighted Washington’s AI Task Force, created during his tenure as attorney general, which is studying issues from algorithmic bias to data security. The group’s next set of recommendations arrives later this year and could shape upcoming legislation, he said.

States are moving ahead with their own AI rules in the absence of a comprehensive federal framework. Washington appears to sit in the pragmatic middle of this fast-moving regulatory landscape — using executive action and an expert task force to build guidelines, while watching experiments in states such as California and Colorado.

Seattle city leaders also getting involved. Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell last month announced a “responsible AI plan” that provides guidelines for Seattle’s use of artificial intelligence and its support of the AI tech sector as an economic driver.

Ferguson said he’s aware of how AI can “really revolutionize our economy and state in so many ways,” from healthcare to education to wildfire detection.

But he also flagged his concerns — both as a policymaker and parent. The governor, who has 17-year-old twins, said he worries about the technology’s impact on young people, referencing reports of teen suicides linked to AI chatbots.

Despite those concerns, Ferguson maintained an upbeat tone during his remarks at Seattle AI Week, citing the region’s technical talent and economic opportunity from the technology.

He noted that the state, amid a $16 billion budget shortfall this year, kept $300,000 in funding for the AI House, the new waterfront startup hub that hosted Monday’s event.

“There is no better place anywhere in the United States for this innovation than right here in the Northwest,” he said.

Related: A tale of two Seattles in the age of AI: Harsh realities and new hope for the tech community

EVERETT, Wash. — In an industrial stretch of Everett is a boxy, windowless building called Ursa. Inside that building is a vault built from concrete blocks up to 5 feet thick with an additional layer of radiation-absorbing plastic. Within that vault is Polaris, a machine that could change the world.

Helion Energy is trying to replicate the physics that fuel the sun and the stars — hence the celestial naming theme — to provide nearly limitless power on earth through fusion reactions.

The company recently invited a small group of journalists to visit its headquarters and see Polaris, which is the seventh iteration of its fusion generator and the prototype for a commercial facility called Orion that broke ground this summer in Malaga in Central Washington.

Few people outside of Helion have been provided such access; photographs were not allowed.

“We run these systems right now at 100 million degrees, about 10 times the temperature of the sun, and compress them to high pressure… the same pressure as the bottom of the Marianas Trench,” said Helion CEO and co-founder David Kirtley, referencing the deepest part of the ocean.

Polaris and its vault occupy a relative small footprint inside of Ursa. The majority of the space is filled with 2,500 power units. They’re configured into 4-foot-by-4-foot pallets, lined up in rows and stacked seven high. The units are packed with capacitors that are charged from the grid to provide super high intensity pulses of electricity — 100 gigawatts of peak power — that create the temperatures and pressure needed for fusion reactions.

All of that energy is carried through miles and miles of coaxial cables filled with copper, aluminum and custom-metal alloys. End-to-end, the cables would stretch across Washington state and back again — roughly 720 miles. They flow in thick, black bundles from the pallets into the vault. They curl on the floor in giant heaps before connecting to the tubular-shaped, 60-foot-long Polaris generator.

The ultimate goal is for the generator to force lightweight ions to fuse, creating a super hot plasma that expands, pushing on a magnetic field that surrounds it. The energy created by that expansion is directly captured and carried back the capacitors to recharge them so the process can be repeated over and over again.

And the small amount of extra power that’s produced by fusion goes into the electrical grid for others to use — or at least that’s the plan for the future.

‘Worth being aggressive’

Helion is a contender in a global race to generate fusion power for a rapidly escalating demand for electricity, driven in part by data centers and AI. No one so far has been able to make and capture enough energy from fusion to commercialize the process, but dozens of companies — including three other competitors in the Pacific Northwest — are trying.

The company aims by 2028 to begin producing energy at the Malaga site, which Microsoft has agreed to purchase. If it hits this extremely ambitious target — and many are highly skeptical — it could be the world’s first company to do so.

“There is a level of risk, of being aggressive with program development, new technology and timelines,” Kirtley said. “But I think it’s worth it. Fusion is the same process that happens in the stars. It has the promise of very low cost electricity that’s clean and safe and base load and always on. And so it’s worth being aggressive.”

Some in the sector worry that Helion will miss the mark and cast doubt on a sector that is working hard to prove itself. At a June event, the head of R&D for fusion competitor Zap Energy questioned Helion’s deadline.

“I don’t see a commercial application in the next few years happening,” said Ben Levitt. “There is a lot of complicated science and engineering still to be discovered and to be applied.”

Others are willing to take the bet. Helion has raised more than $1 billion from investors that include SoftBank, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sam Altman, who is OpenAI’s CEO and co-founder, as well as Helion’s longtime chair of its board of directors. The company is able to unlock an additional $1.8 billion if it hits Polaris milestones.

The generator has been operating since December, running all day, five days a week, creating fusion, Kirtley said.

Energy without ignition

Helion is highly cautious — some would say too cautious — in sharing details on its progress. Helion officials say they must hold their tech close to the vest as Chinese competitors have stolen pieces of their intellectual property; critics say the secrecy makes it difficult for the scientific community to verify their likelihood of success in a very risky, highly technical field.

In August, Kirtley shared an online post about Helion’s power-producing strategy, which upends the conventional approach.

Most efforts are trying to achieve ignition in their fusion generators, which is a condition where the reactions produce more power than is required for fusion to occur. This feat was first accomplished at a national lab in California in 2022 — but it still wasn’t enough energy that one could put electricity on the grid.

Helion is not aiming for ignition but rather for a system that is so efficient it can capture enough energy from fusion without reaching that state.

Kirtley compares the strategy for producing power to regenerative braking in electric vehicles. Simply put, an EV’s battery gets the car moving, and regenerative braking by the driver puts energy back into the battery to help it run longer. In the fusion generator, the capacitors provide that initial power, and the fusion reaction resupplies the energy and a little bit more.

“We can recover electricity at high efficiency,” Kirtley said. Compared to other commercial fusion approaches, “we require a lot less fusion. Fusion is the hard part. My goal, ironically, is to do the minimum amount of fusion that we can deliver a product to the customer and generate electricity.”

Seattle is looking to celebrate and accelerate its leadership in artificial intelligence at the very moment the first wave of the AI economy is crashing down on the region’s tech workforce.

That contrast was hard to miss Monday evening at the opening reception for Seattle AI Week 2025 at Pier 70. On stage, panels offered a healthy dose of optimism about building the AI future. In the crowd, buzz about Amazon’s impending layoffs brought the reality of the moment back to earth.

A region that rose with Microsoft and then Amazon is now dealing with the consequences of Big Tech’s AI-era restructuring. Companies that hired by the thousands are now thinning their ranks in the name of efficiency and focus — a dose of corporate realism for the local tech economy.

The double-edged nature of this shift is not lost on Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson.

“AI, and the future of AI, and what that means for our state and the world — each day I do this job, the more that moves up in my mind in terms of the challenges and the opportunities we have,” Ferguson told the AI Week crowd. He touted Washington’s concentration of AI jobs, saying his goal is to maximize the benefits of AI while minimizing its downsides.

Seattle AI Week, led by the Washington Technology Industry Association, was started last year after a Forbes list of the nation’s top 50 AI startups included none from Seattle, said the WTIA’s Nick Ellingson, opening this year’s event. That didn’t seem right. Was it a messaging problem?

“A bunch of us got together and said, let’s talk about all the cool things happening around AI in Seattle, and let’s expand the tent beyond just tech things that are happening,” Ellingson explained.

So maybe that’s the best measuring stick: how many startups will this latest shakeout spark, and how can the Seattle region’s startup and tech leaders make it happen? Can the region become less dependent on the whims of the Microsoft and Amazon C-suites in the process? 

“Washington has so much opportunity. It’s one of the few capitals of AI in the world,” said WTIA’s Arry Yu in her opening remarks. “People talk about China, people talk about Silicon Valley — there are a few contenders, but really, it’s here in Seattle. … The future is built on data, on powerful technology, but also on community. That’s what makes this place different.”

And yet, “AI is a sleepy scene in Seattle, where people work at their companies, but there’s very little activity and cross-pollinating outside of this,” said Nathan Lambert, senior research scientist with the Allen Institute for AI, during the opening panel discussion.

No, we don’t want to become San Francisco or Silicon Valley, Lambert added. But that doesn’t mean the region can’t cherry-pick some of the ingredients that put Bay Area tech on top.

Whether laid-off tech workers will start their own companies is a common question after layoffs like this. In the Seattle region at least, that outcome has been more fantasy than reality. 

This is where AI could change things, if not with the fabled one-person unicorn then with a bigger wave of new companies born of this employment downturn. Who knows, maybe one will even land on that elusive Forbes AI 50 list. (Hey, a region can dream!)

But as the new AI reality unfolds in the regional workforce, maybe the best question to ask is whether Seattle’s next big thing can come from its own backyard again.

Related: Ferguson’s AI balancing act: Washington governor wants to harness innovation while minimizing harms

Microsoft and OpenAI announced the long-awaited details of their new partnership agreement Tuesday morning — with concessions on both sides that keep the companies aligned but not in lockstep as they move into their next phases of AI development.

Under the arrangement, Microsoft gets a 27% equity stake in OpenAI’s new for-profit entity, the OpenAI Group PBC (Public Benefit Corporation), a stake valued at approximately $135 billion. That’s a decrease from 32.5% equity but not a bad return on an investment of $13.8 billion.

At the same time, OpenAI has contracted to purchase an incremental $250 billion in Microsoft Azure cloud services. However, in a significant concession in return for that certainty, Microsoft will no longer have a “right of first refusal” on new OpenAI cloud workloads.

Microsoft, meanwhile, will retain its intellectual property rights to OpenAI models and products through 2032, an extension of the timeframe that existed previously. 

A key provision of the new agreement centers on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), with any declaration of AGI by OpenAI now subject to verification by an independent expert panel. This was a sticking point in the earlier partnership agreement, with an ambiguous definition of AI potentially triggering new provisions of the prior arrangement. 

Microsoft and OpenAI had previously announced a tentative agreement without providing details. More aspects of the deal are disclosed in a joint blog post from the companies.

Shares of Microsoft are up 2% in early trading after the announcement. The company reports earnings Wednesday afternoon, and some analysts have said the uncertainty over the OpenAI arrangement has been impacting Microsoft’s stock. 

A new report exploring the potential for the Pacific Northwest to stake its claim as the global leader in responsible AI offers a paradoxical view. The Cascadia region, which includes Seattle, Portland and Vancouver, B.C., is described as a proven, promising player in the sphere — but with significant risks that threaten its success.

“We created companies that transformed global commerce,” writes former Gov. Chris Gregoire in a forward to the document. “Now we have the chance to add another chapter — one where Cascadia becomes the world’s standard-bearer for innovation that uplifts both people and planet.”

The Cascadia Innovation Corridor, which Gregoire chairs, released the report this morning as it kicks off its two-day conference. The economic advocacy group’s eighth annual event is being held in Seattle.

The study is built on an analysis by the Boston Consulting Group that ranks Cascadia’s three metro areas against 15 comparable regions in the U.S. and Canada for their economic competitiveness, including livability, workforce, and business and innovation climate. Seattle came in fourth behind Boston, Austin and Raleigh, while Portland ranked 13th and Vancouver 14th.

Over the past decade, the region’s gross domestic product and populations have both grown significantly, and when combined, their economies approach the 18th largest in the world.

Cascadia’s strengths, the report explains, include tech engines such as cloud giants Microsoft and Amazon in Washington, silicon chip manufacturing in Oregon, and quantum innovation in Vancouver, as well as academic excellence from the University of Washington, University of British Columbia and Oregon State University.

But as time goes on and as business and civic leaders aim for the prize of AI dominance, cracks in the system are increasingly troubling.

• Business costs are rising and there are mounting regulatory concerns — but it’s a tricky picture. Seattle, for example, often turns to B&O and headcount taxes to cover costs, while the state struggles to balance budgets in the absence of an income tax.
• Housing affordability is continuing to decline for many residents in these metro areas.
• Skilled tech workers are leaving Portland, in particular, and Seattle relies heavily on foreign workers receiving H1-B visas, which are less certain under the Trump administration.
• The clean, affordable energy that was once abundant in the Pacific Northwest is decreasingly available as droughts reduce river flows that drive hydropower dams and electricity demand increases with rapid data center growth.

The report notes that multiple regions around the U.S. and Canada have created AI-focused hubs with hundreds of millions of dollars in public and private funding to bolster their hold on the sector.

New Jersey has a half-billion dollar “AI Moonshot” program including tax incentives and public-worker AI training programs; New York’s “Empire AI Consortium” has an AI computing training center at the University of Buffalo and startup supports; and California has a public-private task force to increase AI adoption within government services and connecting tech leaders with state agencies.

For its part, Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell announced a “responsible AI plan” this fall that provides guidelines for the municipality’s use of artificial intelligence and its support of the AI tech sector as an economic driver, which includes the earlier launches of the startup-focused AI House and Foundations.

But what the region really needs to succeed is a collaborative effort tapping all of the metro areas’ assets.

“For Cascadia, the lesson is clear: without a coordinated strategy that links our strengths in cloud computing, semiconductors, and research, we risk falling behind,” states the Cascadia Innovation Corridor report. “Acting together, we can position Cascadia not just to keep pace, but to lead.”

Amazon confirmed Tuesday that it is cutting about 14,000 corporate jobs, citing a need to reduce bureaucracy and become more efficient in the new era of artificial intelligence.

In a message to employees, posted on the company’s website, Amazon human resources chief Beth Galetti signaled that additional cutbacks are expected to take place into 2026, while indicating that the company will also continue to hire in key strategic areas.

Reuters reported Monday that the number of layoffs could ultimately total as many as 30,000 people, which is still a possibility as the cutbacks continue into next year. At that scale, the overall number of job cuts could eventually be the largest in Amazon’s history, exceeding the 27,000 positions that the company eliminated in 2023 across multiple rounds of layoffs.

“This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before,” wrote Galetti, senior vice president of People Experience and Technology.

The goal is “to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business,” she explained.

Galetti wrote that the company is “shifting resources to ensure we’re investing in our biggest bets and what matters most to our customers’ current and future needs” — indicating that layoff decisions are based whether teams and roles align with the company’s direction.

Amazon’s corporate workforce numbered around 350,000 people in early 2023, the last time the company provided a public number. At that scale, the initial reduction of 14,000 represents about 4% of Amazon’s corporate workforce. However, the number is a much smaller fraction of its overall workforce of 1.55 million people, which includes workers in its warehouses.

Cuts are expected across multiple regions and countries, but they are likely to hit hard in the Seattle region, home to the company’s first headquarters and its largest corporate workforce. The region has already felt the impact of major layoffs by Microsoft and others, as companies adjust to the uncertain economy and accelerate investments in AI-driven automation.

Many displaced tech workers here have found job searches slower and more competitive than in previous cycles in which the tech sector was more insulated than other industries.

The cuts at Amazon are the latest pullback after a pandemic-era hiring spree. They come two days before the company’s third quarter earnings report. Amazon and other cloud giants have been pouring billions into capital expenses to boost AI capacity. Cutting jobs is one way of showing operating-expense discipline to Wall Street.

In a memo to employees in June, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote that he expected Amazon’s total corporate workforce to get smaller over time as a result of efficiency gains from AI.

Jassy took over as Amazon CEO from founder Jeff Bezos in mid-2021. In recent years he has been pushing to reduce management layers and eliminate bureaucracy inside the company, saying he wants Amazon to operate like the “world’s largest startup.” 

Bloomberg News reported this week that Jassy has told colleagues that parts of the company remain “unwieldy” despite the 2023 layoffs and other efforts to streamline operations. 

As part of its report, Reuters cited sources saying the magnitude of the cuts is also a result of Amazon’s strict return-to-office policy failing to cause enough employees to quit voluntarily. Amazon brought workers back five days a week earlier this year.

Impacted teams and people will be notified of the layoffs today, Galetti wrote.

Amazon is offering most impacted employees 90 days to find a new role internally, though the timing may vary based on local laws, according to the message. Those who do not find a new position at Amazon or choose to leave will be offered severance pay, outplacement services, health insurance benefits, and other forms of support.

Meta plans to lay off more than 100 employees in Washington state as part of a broader round of cuts within its artificial intelligence division.

A new filing with the state’s Employment Security Department shows 101 employees impacted, including 48 in Bellevue, 23 in Seattle, and four in Redmond, along with 23 remote workers based in Washington.

The filing lists dozens of affected roles across Meta’s AI research and infrastructure units, including software engineers, AI researchers, and data scientists. Meta product managers, privacy specialists, and compliance analysts were also affected.

Meta is cutting around 600 positions in its AI unit, Axios reported last week. The company is investing heavily in AI and wants to create a “more agile operation,” according to an internal memo cited by Axios. Meta has just under 3,000 roles within its superintelligence lab, CNBC reported.

The separations at Meta in Washington take effect Dec. 22, according to the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) notice filed Oct. 22.

Meta employs thousands of people across multiple offices in the Seattle region, one of its largest engineering hubs outside Menlo Park.

The latest reductions mark another contraction for Meta’s Pacific Northwest footprint following multiple rounds of layoffs over the past several years.

The company’s rapid expansion in Seattle over the past decade made it one of the emblems of the region’s tech boom, coinciding with Microsoft’s resurgence and Amazon’s rise.

Among the Bay Area titans, Google was among the first to establish a Seattle-area engineering office, way back in 2004. However, it was Facebook’s decision to open its own outpost across from Pike Place Market in 2010 that really got the attention of their Silicon Valley tech brethren.

In the decade that followed, out-of-town companies set up more than 130 engineering centers in the region.

However, more recently Meta has made moves to trim its Seattle-area footprint.

Apple earlier this year took over a building previously occupied by Meta in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood, near Amazon’s headquarters. CoStar reported in April that Meta listed its other Arbor Blocks building for sublease.

Meta previously gobbled up much of the planned office space at the Spring District, a sprawling development northeast of downtown Bellevue, including a building that was originally going to be a new REI headquarters. But it has subleased some of the space since then to companies such as Snowflake, which recently took an entire building from Meta at the Spring District.

Meta’s office in Redmond, near Microsoft’s headquarters, is focused on its mixed reality development.

GeekWire has reached out to the company for an updated Seattle-area headcount.

Meta’s cuts come amid reported layoffs at Amazon that could impact up to 30,000 workers.

Tech companies have laid off more than 128,000 employees this year, according to Layoffs.fyi. Last year, companies cut nearly 153,000 positions.

Follow-up: Amazon confirms 14,000 corporate job cuts, says push for ‘efficiency gains’ will continue into 2026

Original story: Amazon is preparing to lay off as many as 30,000 corporate employees in a sweeping workforce reduction intended to reduce expenses and compensate for over-hiring during the pandemic, according to a report from Reuters on Monday.

GeekWire has contacted Amazon for comment.

Layoff notifications will start going out via email on Tuesday, according to Reuters, which cited people familiar with the matter. One employee at Amazon told GeekWire the workforce is on “pins and needles” in anticipation of cuts.

Bloomberg reported that cuts will impact several business units, including logistics, payments, video games, and Amazon Web Services.

Amazon’s corporate workforce numbered around 350,000 in early 2023. It has not provided an updated number since then.

The company’s last significant layoff occurred in 2023 when it cut 27,000 corporate workers in multiple stages. Since then the company has made a series of smaller layoffs across different business units.

Fortune reported this month that Amazon planned to cut up to 15% of its human resources staff as part of a wider layoff.

Amazon has taken a cautious hiring approach with its corporate workforce, following years of huge headcount growth. The company’s corporate headcount tripled between 2017 and 2022, according to The Information.

The reported cuts come as Amazon is investing heavily in artificial intelligence. The company said earlier this year it expects to increase capital expenditures to more than $100 billion in 2025, up from $83 billion in 2024, with a majority going toward building out capacity for AI in AWS.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy also hinted at potential workforce impact from generative AI earlier this year in a memo to employees that was shared publicly.

“We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” he wrote. “It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.”

Amazon reported 1.54 million total employees as of June 30 — up 3% year-over-year. The majority of the company’s workforce is made up of warehouse workers.

Amazon employs roughly 50,000 corporate and tech workers in buildings across its Seattle headquarters, with another 12,000 in Bellevue.

The company reports its third quarter earnings on Thursday afternoon.

Fellow Seattle-area tech giant Microsoft has laid off more than 15,000 people since May as it too invests in AI and data center capacity. Microsoft has cut more than 3,200 roles in Washington this year.

Last week, The New York Times cited internal Amazon documents and interviews to report that the company plans to automate as much as 75% of its warehouse operations by 2033. According to the report, the robotics team expects automation to “flatten Amazon’s hiring curve over the next 10 years,” allowing it to avoid hiring more than 600,000 workers even as sales continue to grow.

GeekWire reporter Kurt Schlosser contributed to this story.

Zulily may no longer be a dominant player in Seattle’s tech scene, but physical pieces of the online retailer will live on in Evergreen Goodwill facilities across the region.

Hundreds of office chairs, desks, kitchen appliances, IT equipment, and more has been donated to Goodwill by Vanbarton Group, a commercial real estate investment firm that now owns the onetime Zulily building at 2601 Elliott Ave.

Vanbarton plans to convert the building, which occupies a full block near the waterfront, to 262 apartments, according to a Daily Journal of Commerce report from July.

A once-prominant online retailer, Zulily was a darling of Seattle’s growing tech scene when it was valued at $4 billion following its IPO in 2013. But after QVC parent Qurate paid $2.4 billion to buy the company in 2015, it was sold to Los Angeles investment firm Regent in May 2023 and eventually shut down.

In March, Zulily got a new owner for the third time in two years when Beyond, which emerged as a surprise buyer in 2024, announced plans to sell a majority stake in Zulily to Lyons Trading Company, the parent company of flash sales site Proozy.com.

Evergreen Goodwill said in a news release that the donation, facilitated by Vanbarton Group’s outreach, saved the nonprofit an estimated $100,000 in equipment costs and diverted valuable resources from landfills.

The office items are being repurposed in multiple locations, including Goodwill’s new Georgetown operations center, scheduled to open this fall, and job training and education centers that it operates in five counties.

Remaining items will be sold in Goodwill stores, with proceeds supporting free job training and education programs for people facing barriers to employment, according to Goodwill.

Previously:

• Zulily goes through another ownership change as Beyond to sell majority stake in retail site for $5M
• Zulily’s downfall: How the high-flying online retailer soared, sank, and shut down

Pioneer Square Labs has launched more than 40 tech startups and vetted 500-plus ideas since creating its studio a decade ago in Seattle.

Now it’s testing whether its company-building expertise and data on successful startup formulas can be codified into software — with help from the latest AI models.

PSL just unveiled Lev, a new project that aims to be an “AI co-founder” for early stage entrepreneurs.

Developed inside PSL and now rolling out publicly, Lev can evaluate ideas, score their potential, and help founders develop them into companies.

Lev grew out of an internal PSL tool that used PSL’s proprietary rubric to score startup ideas. The studio decided to turn it into a product after outside founders who tested early versions wanted access for themselves.

Here’s how it works:

• Users start by entering an idea (along with any associated information/background) and selecting “venture” or “bootstrap.”
• Lev walks founders through milestones from solution to customer discovery, go-to-market, and product build.
• It can generate “assets” like interview scripts, outreach templates, competitive maps, pricing models, brand palettes, customer personas, landing pages, potential leads, and even product specs.

“We’re mapping a lot of the PSL process into it,” said T.A. McCann, managing director at PSL.

Lev’s structured workflow sets it apart from generic chatbots, said Shilpa Kannan, principal at PSL.

“The sequencing of these components as you go through the process is one of the biggest value-adds,” she said.

Lev joins a growing number of startups leveraging AI to act as an idea validation tool for early-stage founders, though its precise approach makes it stand out.

Upcoming features will add team-building and fundraising modules and let users trigger actions — such as sending emails or buying domains — directly from within the platform.

McCann envisions Lev eventually connecting to tools like Notion and HubSpot to serve as a “command center” for running a company — integrating tools, drafting investor updates, tracking competitors, and suggesting priorities. There are several competitors in this space offering different versions of “AI chief of staff” products.

On a broader level, Lev raises an existential question for PSL: what happens when a startup studio teaches an AI to do the things that make a startup studio valuable?

“In some ways, this is ‘Innovators Dilemma,’ and you have to cannibalize yourself before someone else does it,” McCann said, referencing Clayton Christensen’s concept of technology disruption.

PSL also sees Lev as a potential funnel for entrepreneurs it could work with in the future. And it’s a way to expand the studio’s reach beyond its focus on the Pacific Northwest.

“It’s scaling our knowledge in a way that we wouldn’t be able to do otherwise,” McCann said.

Kannan and Kevin Leneway, principal at PSL, wrote a blog post describing how PSL designed the backbone of Lev and how the firm generated its own startup ideas at higher volumes with lower cost.

“As we see more and more individuals become founders with the support of AI, we are incredibly excited for the potential increase in velocity and successful outcomes from methodologies like ours that focus on upfront ideation and validation,” they wrote.

Kannan told GeekWire that PSL is prioritizing founders’ privacy and intellectual property. “We are making intentional product and technical decisions to ensure Lev is designed from the ground up to safeguard ideas and founder data, including guardrails on data we collect and our team can access,” she said.

For now, PSL is targeting venture-scale founders — people in tech companies or accelerators with ambitions to build fast-growing startups. But McCann believes Lev could eventually empower solo operators running multiple micro-businesses.

Lev is currently free for one idea, $20 per month for up to five ideas, and $100 per month for 10 ideas and advanced features. It’s available on a waitlist basis.

Lev also offers a couple fun tools to help boost its own marketing, including a founder “personality test” and an “idea matcher” that produces startup concepts based on your interests and experience.

— Deb Hall Lefevre, the longtime tech exec who was most recently CTO at Starbucks, announced her retirement on Sunday in a LinkedIn post.

Hall Lefevre resigned from Starbucks last month, according to a Sept. 26 report from Reuters, which cited a memo sent to staff about her departure.

The move came amid layoffs and various tech-related changes at the Seattle coffee giant.

“After an incredible journey leading technology and digital transformation across some of the world’s most iconic brands, including Starbucks, Circle K/Couche Tard and McDonald’s, it’s time to step into retirement,” Hall Lefevre said in her LinkedIn post.

“As I turn the page, I look forward to more time with family, continuing my tech and board work, and cheering on the next generation of leaders shaping the future,” she added.

Hall Lefevre, who was also an executive vice president, joined Starbucks in 2022. She previously spent more than 16 years at McDonald’s, where she was a corporate vice president and CIO, leading the fast food giant’s technology and digital commerce strategy. She was also EVP and CTO at Circle K Stores.

Ningyu Chen, who was senior vice president of global experience technology, is now interim chief technology officer at Starbucks.

Starbucks last month announced plans to lay off around 900 non-retail employees and close underperforming stores mainly in the U.S. and Canada. Starbucks previously cut 1,100 corporate workers in February.

Under the leadership of CEO Brian Niccol, the former Chipotle CEO who joined the company last year, Starbucks is making a bevy of technology tweaks as it tries to curb slumping sales.

— Lindo St. Angel, vice president of hardware for Amazon’s Lab126 devices group, is departing at the end of the month. Reuters first reported the news.

St. Angel joined Lab126 in 2010. The business unit, based in Silicon Valley, launched in 2004 and helped develop Amazon devices such as the Kindle Fire, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and other hardware.

— Mark Jewett joined New York City health data company Komodo Health as chief marketing officer. Jewett was previously a senior vice president at Informatica and CMO at SmartRecruiters. He also was a SVP and co-interim CMO at Tableau, and spent 15 years at Microsoft in various leadership roles.

Founded in 2014, Komodo Health reached a $3.3 billion valuation in 2021. The company helps healthcare stakeholders integrate data and generate insights related to treatment, research, and more.

— Nancy Mounir joined Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as a vice president leading security programs and platforms.

Mounir previously spent more than 12 years at Microsoft, most recently as a senior director and chief of staff overseeing the company’s Secure Future Initiative.

In a LinkedIn post, Mounir said she is “looking forward to a great journey of learning, innovation and growth with the Security Platform team!”

She added: “Extremely grateful for my time at Microsoft and could not be more proud of what we accomplished together over the years!”

Mounir initially worked at Microsoft from 2012 to 2015 in supply chain, and left to spend a year at Amazon working on advertising and accounting teams. She returned to Microsoft in 2016.

— Priya Vaidyanathan took a new role at Microsoft as director of product and design for Microsoft’s AI skilling platform. Vaidyanathan returned to Microsoft in 2020 after two previous stints and was most recently a group product manager. She previously founded a mealkit startup called SnapCurry and was a senior technical product manager at Amazon.

“This next chapter is about helping people everywhere gain the skills and confidence to grow with AI, creating opportunity, resilience, and impact at every level,” she wrote on LinkedIn.

— Jim Chi was named executive director of Oregon Startup Center, which is going through a relaunch, according to Portland Business Journal. Chi is also president of Oregon Sports Angels and is a longtime product management leader.

SAN FRANCISCO — Putting on Amazon’s new smart delivery glasses felt surprisingly natural from the start. Despite their high-tech components and slightly bulky design, they were immediately comfortable and barely heavier than my normal glasses.

Then a few lines of monochrome green text and a square target popped up in the right-hand lens — reminding me that these were not my regular frames. 

Occupying just a portion of my total field of view, the text showed an address and a sorting code: “YLO 339.” As I learned, “YLO” represented the yellow tote bag where the package would normally be found, and “339” was a special code on the package label.

My task: find the package with that code. Or more precisely, let the glasses find them.

As soon as I looked at the correct package label, the glasses recognized the code and scanned the label automatically. A checkmark appeared on a list of packages in the glasses.

Then an audio alert played from the glasses: “Dog on property.”

When all the packages were scanned, the tiny green display immediately switched to wayfinding mode. A simple map appeared, showing my location as a dot, and the delivery destination marked with pins. In this simulation, there were two pins, indicating two stops. 

After putting the package on the doorstep, it was time for proof of delivery. Instead of reaching for a phone, I looked at the package on the doorstep and pressed a button once on the small controller unit —the “compute puck” — on my harness. The glasses captured a photo.

With that, my simulated delivery was done, without ever touching a handheld device.

In my very limited experience, the biggest concern I had was the potential to be distracted — focusing my attention on the text in front of my eyes rather than the world around me. I understand now why the display automatically turns off when a van is in motion. 

But when I mentioned that concern to the Amazon leaders guiding me through the demo, they pointed out that the alternative is looking down at a device. With the glasses, your gaze is up and largely unobstructed, theoretically making it much easier to notice possible hazards. 

Beyond the fact that they’re not intended for public release, that simplicity is a key difference between Amazon’s utilitarian design and other augmented reality devices — such as Meta Ray-Bans, Apple Vision Pro, and Magic Leap — which aim to more fully enhance or overlay the user’s environment.

One driver’s experience

KC Pangan, who delivers Amazon packages in San Francisco and was featured in Amazon’s demo video, said wearing the glasses has become so natural that he barely notices them. 

Pangan has been part of an Amazon study for the past two months. On the rare occasions when he switches back to the old handheld device, he finds himself thinking, “Oh, this thing again.”

“The best thing about them is being hands-free,” Pangan said in a conversation on the sidelines of the Amazon Delivering the Future event, where the glasses were unveiled last week.

Without needing to look down at a handheld device, he can keep his eyes up and stay alert for potential hazards. With another hand free, he can maintain the all-important three points of contact when climbing in or out of a vehicle, and more easily carry packages and open gates.

The glasses, he said, “do practically everything for me” — taking photos, helping him know where to walk, and showing his location relative to his van. 

While Amazon emphasizes safety and driver experience as the primary goals, early tests hint at efficiency gains, as well. In initial tests, Amazon has seen up to 30 minutes of time savings per shift, although execs cautioned that the results are preliminary and could change with wider testing.

Regulators, legislators and employees have raised red flags over new technology pushing Amazon fulfillment and delivery workers to the limits of human capacity and safety. Amazon disputes this premise, and calls the new glasses part of a larger effort to use technology to improve safety.

Using the glasses will be fully optional for both its Delivery Service Partners (DSPs) and their drivers, even when they’re fully rolled out, according to the company. The system also includes privacy features, such as a hardware button that allows drivers to turn off all sensors.

For those who use them, the company says it plans to provide the devices at no cost. 

Despite the way it may look to the public, Amazon doesn’t directly employ the drivers who deliver its packages in Amazon-branded vans and uniforms. Instead, it contracts with DSPs, ostensibly independent companies that hire drivers and manage package deliveries from inside Amazon facilities. 

This arrangement has periodically sparked friction, and even lawsuits, as questions have come up over DSP autonomy and accountability.

With the introduction of smart glasses and other tech initiatives, including a soon-to-be-expanded training program, Amazon is deepening its involvement with DSPs and their drivers — potentially raising more questions about who truly controls the delivery workforce.

From ‘moonshot’ to reality

The smart glasses, still in their prototype phase, trace their origins to a brainstorming session about five years ago, said Beryl Tomay, Amazon’s vice president of transportation.

Each year, the team brainstorms big ideas for the company’s delivery system. During one of those sessions, a question emerged: What if drivers didn’t have to interact with any technology at all?  

“The moonshot idea we came up with was, what if there was no technology that the driver had to interact with — and they could just follow the physical process of delivering a package from the van to the doorstep?” Tomay said in an interview. “How do we make that happen so they don’t have to use a phone or any kind of tech that they have to fiddle with?”

That question led the team to experiment with different approaches before settling on glasses. It seemed kind of crazy at first, Tomay said, but they soon realized the potential to improve safety and the driver experience. Early trials with delivery drivers confirmed the theory.

“The hands-free aspect of it was just kind of magical,” she said, summing up the reaction from early users.

The project has already been tested with hundreds of delivery drivers across more than a dozen DSPs. Amazon plans to expand those trials in the coming months, with a larger test scheduled for November. The goal is to collect more feedback before deciding when the technology will be ready for wider deployment.

Typically, Amazon would have kept a new hardware project secret until later in its development. But Reuters reported on the existence of the project nearly a year ago. (The glasses were reportedly code-named “Amelia,” but they were announced without a name.) And this way, Amazon can get more delivery partners involved, get input, and make improvements.

Future versions may also expand the system’s capabilities, using sensors and data to automatically recognize potential hazards such as uneven walkways.

How the technology works

Amazon’s smart glasses are part of a system that also includes a small wearable computer and a battery, integrated with Amazon’s delivery software and vehicle systems.

The lenses are photochromatic, darkening automatically in bright sunlight, and can be fitted with prescription inserts. Two cameras — one centered, one on the left — support functions such as package scanning and photo capture for proof of delivery. 

A built-in flashlight switches on automatically in dim conditions, while onboard sensors help the system orient to the driver’s movement and surroundings.

The glasses connect by a magnetic wire to a small controller unit, or “compute puck,” worn on the chest of a heat-resistant harness. The controller houses the device’s AI models, manages the visual display, and handles functions such as taking a delivery photo. It also includes a dedicated emergency button that connects drivers directly to Amazon’s emergency support systems.

On the opposite side of the chest, a swappable battery keeps the system balanced and running for a full route. Both components are designed for all-day comfort — the result, Tomay said, of extensive testing with drivers to ensure that wearing the gear feels natural when they’re moving around.

Connectivity runs through the driver’s official Amazon delivery phone via Bluetooth, and through the vehicle itself using a platform called “Fleet Edge” — a network of sensors and onboard computing modules that link the van’s status to the glasses. 

This connection allows the glasses to know precisely when to activate, when to shut down, and when to sync data. When a van is put in park, the display automatically activates, showing details such as addresses, navigation cues, and package information. When the vehicle starts moving again, the display turns off — a deliberate safety measure so drivers never see visual data while driving.

Data gathered by the glasses plays a role in Amazon’s broader mapping efforts. Imagery and sensor data feed into “Project Wellspring,” a system that uses AI to better model the physical world. This helps Amazon refine maps, identify the safest parking spots, pinpoint building entrances, and optimize walking routes for future deliveries.

Amazon says the data collection is done with privacy in mind. In addition to the driver-controlled sensor shut-off button, any imagery collected is processed to “blur or remove personally identifiable information” such as faces and license plates before being stored or used.

The implications go beyond routing and navigation. Conceivably, the same data could also lay the groundwork for greater automation in Amazon’s delivery network over time.

Testing the delivery training

In addition to trying the glasses during the event at Amazon’s Delivery Station in Milpitas, Calif., I experienced firsthand just how difficult the job of delivering packages can be. 

• Strapped into a harness for a slip-and-fall demo, I learned how easily a driver can lose footing on slick surfaces if not careful to walk properly. 
• I tried a VR training device that highlighted hidden hazards like pets sleeping under tires and taught me how to navigate complex intersections safely.
• My turn in the company’s Rivian van simulator proved humbling. Despite my best efforts, I ran red lights and managed to crash onto virtual sidewalks.

The simulator, known as the Enhanced Vehicle Operation Learning Virtual Experience (EVOLVE), has been launched at Amazon facilities in Colorado, Maryland, and Florida, and Amazon says it will be available at 40 sites by the end of 2026. 

It’s part of what’s known as the Integrated Last Mile Driver Academy (iLMDA), a program available at 65 sites currently, which Amazon says it plans to expand to more than 95 delivery stations across North America by the end of 2026.

“Drivers are autonomous on the road, and the amount of variables that they interact with on a given day are countless,” said Anthony Mason, Amazon’s director of delivery training and programs, who walked me through the training demos. One goal of the training, he said, is to give drivers a toolkit to pull from when they face challenging situations.

Suffice it to say, this is not the job for me. But if Amazon’s smart glasses live up to the company’s expectations, they might be a step forward for the drivers doing the real work.

Get caught up on the latest technology and startup news from the past week. Here are the most popular stories on GeekWire for the week of Oct. 19, 2025.

Sign up to receive these updates every Sunday in your inbox by subscribing to our GeekWire Weekly email newsletter.

Most popular stories on GeekWire

AWS outage was not due to a cyberattack — but shows potential for ‘far worse’ damage

The outage serves as warning sign for a potentially more disruptive situation and reflects “tech monoculture” in a global infrastructure. … Read More

How the AWS outage happened: Amazon blames rare software bug and ‘faulty automation’ for massive glitch

A detailed explanation of this week’s Amazon Web Services outage, released Thursday morning, confirms that it wasn’t a hardware glitch or an outside attack but a complex, cascading failure triggered by a rare software bug in one of the company’s most critical systems. … Read More

Seattle mayor says Microsoft and Amazon have a ‘moral obligation’ to give back to the city

Harrell’s comments reflect a delicate balance faced by city leaders — ensuring that Seattle’s global tech corporations continue to bolster the economy and tax base, while addressing the ripple effects on housing, transportation, and communities. … Read More

Amazon customers report delivery delays after major AWS outage

Amazon’s e-commerce customers are experiencing unusual delivery delays following the Amazon Web Services outage on Monday — suggesting that the cloud glitch has impacted the company’s own operations more than than previously reported. … Read More

Tim Chen was deemed ‘too nerdy’ for venture capital. Now he runs one of the hottest startup funds in tech.

When Tim Chen tried to break into venture capital six years ago, multiple firms in Seattle turned him down. … Read More

Alaska Airlines cancels 360 flights, says significant IT outage was due to ‘failure’ at a data center

The impact of the outage was evident at Sea-Tac Airport on Thursday evening, where long lines wrapped around the concourse and a maze of suitcases piled up in the baggage claim area. … Read More

AWS outage hits major apps and services, resurfacing old questions about cloud redundancy

Amazon Web Services is recovering after an outage that disrupted Facebook, Snapchat, Fortnite, Coinbase and other major platforms, once again illustrating the internet’s heavy reliance on the cloud giant and a lack of redundancy in online services. … Read More

Amazon unveils AI-powered augmented reality glasses for delivery drivers

Amazon says it’s working on AI-powered augmented reality glasses for delivery drivers, offering hands-free navigation, package scanning, and proof-of-delivery tools. … Read More

Satya Nadella’s pay tops $96M as Microsoft stock soars; Walmart CFO set to join board

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s total compensation rose nearly 22% to $96.5 million, driven largely by the company’s surging stock price, a new filing reveals. … Read More

Carbon Robotics raises $20M as LaserWeeder maker plans secretive new ‘AI robot’ for farms

“It’ll blow your mind,” founder and CEO Paul Mikesell said of a carbon Robotics machine that relies on the same AI system used in Carbon’s other equipment. … Read More

When I was a kid, my mom used to call my Nintendo the “anti-social idiot box.” The widespread assumption back then was that video games, in any format, were a new and particularly efficient way to waste time and money while also becoming an obsessed shut-in.

Over the course of the subsequent decades, video games have grown into both a multi-billion-dollar industry and a much more socially acceptable hobby. While gaming does attract its share of anti-social obsessives, just like any other form of media, I’ve found it’s much more common for people to meet and bond over their mutual enjoyment of the hobby.

Whether it’s friends you meet through MMORPGs or fighting games, finding stories and characters that deeply resonate with you, or discussing your latest game in a shared space like Bluesky or a message board, video games often have a positive impact on the people who play them. That impact simply doesn’t get a fraction of the press of gaming’s various downsides.

That ability is the focus of a new paper from the University of Washington, “’I Would Not Be This Version of Myself Today’: Elaborating on the Effects of Eudaimonic Gaming Experiences.” The paper, by Nisha Devasia, Georgia Kenderova, Julie A. Kientz, Jin Ha Lee, and Michele Newman, was the focus of a presentation this month at the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI-PLAY) in Pittsburgh.

For the paper, the authors surveyed 166 respondents about the “meaningful experiences” they’d had as a result of playing video games, such as rich storytelling, becoming interested in specific skill development, or the experience of watching a narrative shift based upon the player’s in-game actions.

According to the paper’s abstract, “While much of the research in digital games has emphasized hedonic experiences, such as flow, enjoyment, and positive affect, recent years have seen increased interest in eudaimonic gaming experiences, typically mixed-affect and associated with personal meaningfulness and growth.”

Of the 166 respondents, 78% reported that they’d had meaningful, life-changing experiences from their time playing video games, the researchers said in a UW News story about the paper.

“We highlighted three conclusions drawn from modeling the data,” Devasia told UW News. “The first is that playing games during stressful times was strongly correlated with positive outcomes for physical and mental health. For example, during COVID, people played games they felt strongly improved their mental health, such as Stardew Valley.”

Devasia also noted that other respondents had developed new interests, such as sports, due to video games they’d played, or gained insight into themselves or their identities from the journeys undertaken by video game protagonists.

“Playing as a character and seeing your choices change the course of events is pretty unique to games, compared with other narrative media like novels or movies,” Devasia said.

“As researchers, we develop games for learning, for instance, for teaching people about misinformation or AI, or promote digital civic engagement, because we want to foster meaningful experiences,” Lee added. “But a lot of the existing research just focuses on the short-term effects of games. This study really helps us understand what actually caused a game to make a difference in someone’s life.”

It sounds obvious at first glance if you’re someone who grew up around video games. It’s almost a given that there’s at least one game that made a serious mark on you somehow, especially if you live in a heavily nerd-coded space like the greater Seattle area.

Anecdotally, that strikes me as an underexplored part of the hobby. If anything, there’s a strange critical drive in the space to deliberately treat gaming as disposable pop culture, without any real meaning or lasting value. If you read any op-ed in the gaming press that discusses the cultural or political meaning of a video game, someone will inevitably show up in the comments to accuse the author of overthinking something that isn’t meant to matter. It’s “just a game.”

Even so, modern video games have just as much ability to resonate with their audience as any novel or film, and people who’ve grown up with them will take lessons away from that. It’s something we don’t discuss often enough in the field; we’ll talk at length about how video games are fun or socially acceptable now or a surprisingly big business, but their influence as culture is less discussed.

“People have a tendency to treat technology as a monolith, as if video games are either good or bad, but there’s so much more nuance,” Kientz told UW News. “The design matters. This study hopefully helps us untangle the positive elements. Certainly, there are bad elements — toxicity and addictiveness, for example. But we also see opportunities for growth and connection.”

From empty offices in 2020 to AI colleagues in 2025, the way we work has been completely rewired over the past five years. Our guest on this week’s GeekWire Podcast studies these changes closely along with her colleagues at Microsoft.

Colette Stallbaumer is the co-founder of Microsoft WorkLab, general manager of Microsoft 365 Copilot, and the author of the new book, WorkLab: Five years that shook the business world and sparked an AI-first future, from Microsoft’s 8080 Books.

As Stallbaumer explains in the book, the five-year period starting with the pandemic and continuing to the current era of AI represents one continuous transformation in the way we work, and it’s not over yet.

“Change is the only constant—shifting norms that once took decades to unfold now materialize in months or weeks,” she writes. “As we look to the next five years, it’s nearly impossible to imagine how much more work will change.”

Listen below for our conversation, recorded on Microsoft’s Redmond campus. Subscribe on Apple or Spotify, and continue reading for key insights from the conversation.

The ‘Hollywood model’ of teams: “What we’re seeing is this movement in teams, where we’ll stand up a small squad of people who bring their own domain expertise, but also have AI added into the mix. They come together just like you would to produce a film. A group of people comes together to produce a blockbuster, and then you disperse and go back to your day job.”

The concept of the ‘frontier firm’: “They’re not adding AI as an ingredient. AI is the business model. It’s the core. And these frontier firms can have a small number of people using AI in this way, generating a pretty high run rate. So it’s a whole new way to think about shipping, creating, and innovating.”

The fallacy of ‘AI strategy’: “The idea that you just need to have an ‘AI strategy’ is a bit of a fallacy. Really, you kind of want to start with the business problem and then apply AI. … Where are you spending the most and where do you have the biggest challenges? Those are great areas to actually think about putting AI to work for you.”

Adapting to AI: “You have to build the habit and build the muscle to work in this new way and have that moment of, ‘Oh, wait, I don’t actually need to do this.’ “

The biggest risk related to AI: “The biggest risk is not AI in and of itself. It’s that people won’t evolve fast enough with AI. It’s the human risk and ability to actually start to really use these new tools and build the habit.”

Human creativity and AI: “It still takes that spark and that seed of creativity. And then when you combine it with these new tools, that’s where I have a lot of hope and optimism for what people are going to be able to do and invent in the future.”

Audio editing by Curt Milton.

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

“It is here, it is real, it is happening,” said play-by-play announcer Ian Eagle. “The NBA on Prime.”

And with that, Amazon’s foray into live streaming NBA games tipped off.

Amazon marked a major milestone with its growing sports portfolio on Friday, broadcasting its first-ever live NBA game around the world. The matchup — Celtics vs. Knicks — was part of an 11-year deal that gives Amazon exclusive rights to select regular season and playoff games.

We watched the game via Prime Video — accessible with a $139/year Prime subscription — and came away impressed.

The stream ran seamlessly across Fire TV, iPhone, and MacBook. The quality was crisp, load times near-instant, and there wasn’t a hint of lag — at least on a home WiFi connection. Amazon’s 1080p HDR video and 5.1 surround sound were a slam dunk.

The broadcast looked and felt like a traditional national telecast. The graphics mirrored what fans expect from ESPN or TNT, the commentary came from familiar voices — Eagle and Stan Van Gundy — and the pregame show from featured a slick set with former NBA stars at Amazon MGM Studios.

But under the surface, Amazon quietly tested a new frontier: in-stream sports betting.

The most noticeable new feature was the FanDuel integration, Amazon’s latest experiment in blending live sports and interactive technology.

Fans watching on Fire TV could log into their FanDuel accounts through Prime Video to view real-time betting information and track wagers directly within the broadcast.

You can’t make actual bets on Prime Video — not yet, at least— but it marks a subtle yet significant shift in how live sports may evolve on streaming platforms.

And it comes at a fascinating moment: the NBA is dealing with a major betting scandal that made headlines this week and involves the FBI.

I was surprised when NBA Commissioner Adam Silver joined the broadcast for a live interview. Sideline reporter Cassidy Hubbarth opened by asking about the scandal.

Silver said he was “deeply disturbed” upon hearing the news.

“There’s nothing more important to the league and its fans than the integrity of the competition,” he said.

Silver also praised Amazon’s coverage: “I should have started [by saying] how excited we are to be on Amazon,” he said. “I guess I wouldn’t have predicted that my first interview on Amazon would be about sports betting.”

The interview underscored how Amazon’s coverage didn’t shy away from real-time news relevance — adding a traditional journalistic layer within a tech-powered broadcast.

It was also a surreal moment: the NBA’s top official discussing a sports betting scandal during the league’s debut on a platform now integrating betting tools into its stream.

Amazon has other new tech-fueled features including advanced NBA stats powered by Amazon Web Services — but I didn’t notice that during Friday’s broadcast.

One of the only stumbles for me came on the Fire TV user experience, which feels clunky compared to mobile or desktop. Navigation wasn’t intuitive, and the remote’s button mapping made simple actions harder than expected.

But overall, the whole experience felt less like a tech demo and more like a finished product.

Amazon’s sports strategy is crystalizing: use live sports to drive Prime signups and boost engagement across its ecosystem. The broadcast was promoted on Amazon’s homepage and apps. Live sports also helps fuel Amazon’s growing advertising business.

Bloomberg reported that Amazon is paying $1.8 billion annually for the NBA rights.

As more people cut the cord, sports leagues are increasingly partnering with tech companies as their existing deals with traditional cable providers expire. Companies like Amazon, Apple, and Netflix are hungry for valuable content such as live sports to draw more subscribers to their respective platforms.

Amazon also aired the Timberwolves vs. Lakers game on Friday evening. It will stream 66 regular season games this year, along with some playoff games.

The company also separate deals to air the NFL’s Thursday Night Football, WNBA, and Premier League, among other sports-related programming on its Prime Video platform.

The NBA debut on Friday was a reminder of Amazon’s approach to live sports: combine the reliability of broadcast TV with subtle tech layers — such as betting, data, and e-commerce — built on its AWS cloud infrastructure and Prime membership model.

The prime crew nails it again 👏

More of this and fewer hot takes! https://t.co/G3IN2BOyFO pic.twitter.com/swHUtlVXXN

— Oh No He Didn't (@ohnohedidnt24) October 25, 2025

Alaska Airlines already tried to shore up its IT infrastructure after an outage in July forced the Seattle-based company to ground flights across the country.

Apparently, it wasn’t enough.

Alaska was hit with another major outage on Thursday, leading to a ground stop that lasted eight hours and resulted in more than 400 flights canceled across Alaska Airlines and its subsidiary Horizon Air.

In a new update Friday afternoon, the company said more than 49,000 passengers had their travel plans disrupted.

The outage was severe enough to postpone the company’s scheduled quarterly earnings call Friday. Shares were down more than 6%.

Alaska said it was still working to normalize operations.

The company has blamed the outage on a failure at its primary data center. It was not due to a cybersecurity incident.

“Following a similar disruption earlier this year, we took action to harden our systems, but this failure underscores the work that remains to be done to ensure system stability,” the company said in its latest update. “We are immediately bringing in outside technical experts to diagnose our entire IT infrastructure to ensure we are as resilient as we need to be. ”

It added: “The reliability of our technology is fundamental to our ability to serve guests and get them to where they need to be.”

Alaska said its July outage was caused by a failure of a “critical piece of hardware” at its data centers.

The airline operates a hybrid infrastructure, blending its own data centers with third-party cloud platforms, according to an interview last year with Vikram Baskaran, Alaska’s vice president of IT.

Alaska began migrating workloads to Microsoft Azure around 2015 and continues to maintain its own data centers for critical workloads, according to the interview.

The company last year partnered with Google Cloud on a generative AI-powered search experience.

The impact of this week’s outage was evident at Sea-Tac Airport on Thursday evening, where long lines wrapped around the concourse and a maze of suitcases piled up in the baggage claim area.

Alaska said Friday it does not have an estimate of the financial impact of the outage. The company’s Hawaiian Airlines subsidiary was not affected.

Alaska said the July outage was expected to reduce earnings by about $0.10 per share, or roughly $12 million.

The company on Thursday reported third quarter revenue of $3.8 billion, up 1.4% year-over-year, while profit dropped 69% to $123 million.

Hundreds of global leaders gathered in the Pacific Northwest this week for the inaugural One Ocean Week Seattle, a maritime conference with dozens of events that brought together company executives, government officials and advocates charting paths toward cleaner shipping, sustainable fishing and ocean conservation.

The conference, organized by Washington Maritime Blue, was anchored by Wednesday’s One Ocean Summit, where leaders from global companies with Seattle ties discussed their climate progress and the challenges of deploying sustainable technologies.

Seattle-based SSA Marine, a global marine terminal operator, has 200 locations worldwide, moving cargo from ships to terminals and onto trains and trucks. The company has carbon emissions targets and is working to shift from gas and diesel to electrical power for the machines moving moving the cargo, but the move requires juggling sometimes competing factors.

“If you have a piece of electrical equipment, you have to think about charging time that’s required in between shifts, and when can you actually fit it in there?” said Meghan Weinman, SSA Marine’s vice president of sustainability. “One of those big pieces of innovation that we really have to think about is the overlay of technology, labor planning, and can it do the job that we need it to do.”

Corvus Energy is a Norwegian clean shipping company with Seattle offices and a manufacturing facility in Bellingham, Wash. The business is helping vessels go electric with its maritime battery technologies, serving ferries, cruise ships, tugs, cranes and fishing boats.

It’s an evolving sector and the company spends up to 15% of its annual revenue on research and development to fine-tune its technology to meet demanding oceanic conditions.

“It is totally different to operate a battery in an EV versus a maritime setting,” said Corvus CEO Fredrik Witte. “For an EV, you’re traveling three, four hours a day, maybe. But in a maritime setting, you’re potentially operating 24/7.”

Seattle’s Trident Seafoods operates fishing boats and onshore production facilities, including the largest seafood processing plant in North America in Akutan, Alaska. While seafood typically has a much lower carbon footprint than beef, pork or dairy, the company wants to reduce the climate impacts associated with its operations.

But Paul Doremus, Trident Seafoods’ vice president of policy and sustainability, pointed to a hard reality: the company competes directly with Russian and Chinese seafood companies that are doing business under less stringent environmental regulations.

He said the seafood sector — “which has been kind of famously fragmented, small, fairly scrappy” — needs to come together to collectively make improvements.

Doremus applauded events like One Ocean Week Seattle for gathering maritime interests to draw attention and capital toward “sustainable use of the ocean for the benefit of local communities, regional and national.”

“I think that’s the next wave,” he said.

Collaboration and innovation

The call for collaboration echoed throughout the One Ocean Summit, which also featured former NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco, United Nations officials, and Norway’s ambassador to the U.S.

Washington Lt. Gov. Denny Heck gave a welcome address, highlighting the state’s maritime economy while calling out threats from plastic pollution, undersea noise, and environmental degradation.

“To face these challenges, we will need to develop new technologies and strengthen our institutions,” Heck said. “It will require sustainable fuel storage, habitat restoration, quiet propulsion and so many other inventions and innovations. But more importantly, it will require the dedication and teamwork of thousands of people.”

The message was reinforced by Haakon Vatle, leader of the One Ocean Expedition, which is sailing a 111-year-old Norwegian tall ship across the globe. The ship, named the Statsraad Lehmkuhl, was moored just outside Bell Harbor International Conference Center during the event.

“The role of our ship is to create attention and share knowledge of the crucial role of the ocean for a sustainable future,” Vatle said. “We’re going to use a ship to reduce the gap between science and the public — get the people we need for the ocean we want. We cannot save the ocean alone.”

Editor’s note: GeekWire reporter Lisa Stiffler was the volunteer emcee of the One Ocean Summit.

Out of Office is a new GeekWire series spotlighting the passions and hobbies that members of the Seattle-area tech community pursue outside of work.

• Name: Maksim Surguy.

• Day job: Senior design technologist for Amazon Devices, working on concepts for new devices or new features on existing devices, such as Fire TV, Alexa, and Echo smart speakers.

• Out-of-office passion: Using machines to create art.

Before he pursued a bachelor’s degree in computer science, Maksim Surguy made an initial — and brief — run at a bachelor’s in art.

“Two weeks later, I realized that I suck at art and I switched to computer science,” he laughed.

Fourteen years after completing his education at California State University, Fullerton, Surguy has found happiness and success in marrying the two disciplines, as a technologist and an artist in Seattle.

“My sketching is not to the level that I want, so instead I use code to create artwork,” he said in describing the “robot art” that occupies his free time.

Surguy not only relies on machines to generate his artwork, he creates the software tools that facilitate such art, whether the finished pieces exist as digital NFTs or as physical works such as pen plotter drawings made via scalable vector graphics.

“I spend a lot more time making the tools than actually using them,” Surguy said. “But other people use them to actually make something. So I enjoy both sides of this.”

Surguy is a 2018 graduate of the University of Washington’s Master of Science in Technology Innovation (MSTI), a program at the UW’s Global Innovation Exchange (GIX) — a joint initiative of the College of Engineering and Foster School of Business.

For a hardware/software project, he created a 3D-printed drawing machine with his own electronics program. During the process, he couldn’t find a community for like-minded people who make such things. So he started DrawingBots, a website/Discord that’s attracted thousands of artists and engineers.

Surguy was born and raised in Ukraine and was an accomplished breakdancer who competed as a professional in Eastern Europe when he was younger. He moved to the U.S. in 2004.

He’s been at Amazon for six years and his artwork has been displayed in the company’s headquarters buildings, in public exhibitions — including at Seattle’s NFT Museum, and on his website and social media channels. He’s also written extensively about technology.

And in the blurring space between human and AI-created artwork, he’s leaning further into technology.

“I use AI for a lot of things, and especially now with code, it makes it easier to create tools that are custom and specific for whatever use case,” Surguy said. “I just open-sourced one last weekend. It’s a tool that allows artists to preview their artwork, how it’s going to look before they make it on paper. So it saves them time and money and art supplies.”

Most rewarding aspect of this pursuit: Surguy most enjoys the growing community he helped foster around the tools and art he makes.

“I got to know thousands of people that do this kind of stuff and are very interesting people,” he said. “Some of them were TED speakers. Some of them are PhDs, very well known researchers, scientists, artists. I had conversations with all of these people and consider some of them my friends. So that’s the most rewarding part.”

The lessons he brings back to work: “This kind of procedural and algorithmic art definitely has a place in making products that are digital experiences,” Surguy said of the connection between his hobby and his work at Amazon.

For example, his Devices team launched a dynamic art feature for Fire TV: a screen saver that created artwork on the fly based on data such as weather, time of day, and other inputs.

Surguy said the ideas he generates outside of work serve as inspiration for what he creates at work, whether it’s creative coding or simply expanding the boundaries of what he makes and how he makes it.

Read more Out of Office profiles.

Do you have an out-of-office hobby or interesting side hustle that you’re passionate about that would make for a fun profile on GeekWire? Drop us a line: tips@geekwire.com.

SAN FRANCISCO — Amazon showed off its latest robotics and AI systems this week, presenting a vision of automation that it says will make warehouse and delivery work safer and smarter. 

But the tech giant and some of the media at its Delivering the Future event were on different planets when it came to big questions about robots, jobs, and the future of human work. 

The backdrop: On Tuesday, a day before the event, The New York Times cited internal Amazon documents and interviews to report that the company plans to automate as much as 75% of its operations by 2033. According to the report, the robotics team expects automation to “flatten Amazon’s hiring curve over the next 10 years,” allowing it to avoid hiring more than 600,000 workers even as sales continue to grow.

In a statement cited in the article, Amazon said the documents were incomplete and did not represent the company’s overall hiring strategy.

On stage at the event, Tye Brady, chief technologist for Amazon Robotics, introduced the company’s newest systems — Blue Jay, a setup that coordinates multiple robotic arms to pick, stow, and consolidate items; and Project Eluna, an agentic AI model that acts as a digital assistant for operations teams.

Later, he addressed the reporters in the room: “When you write about Blue Jay or you write about Project Eluna … I hope you remember that the real headline is not about robots. The real headline is about people, and the future of work we’re building together.”

He said the benefits for employees are clear: Blue Jay handles repetitive lifting, while Project Eluna helps identify safety issues before they happen. By automating routine tasks, he said, AI frees employees to focus on higher-value work, supported by Amazon training programs.

Brady coupled that message with a reminder that no company has created more U.S. jobs over the past decade than Amazon, noting its plan to hire 250,000 seasonal workers this year. 

His message to the company’s front-line employees: “These systems are not experiments. They’re real tools built for you, to make your job safer, smarter, and more rewarding.”

‘Menial, mundane, and repetitive’

Later, during a press conference, a reporter cited the New York Times report, asking Brady if he believes Amazon’s workforce could shrink on the scale the paper described based on the internal report.

Brady didn’t answer the question directly, but described the premise as speculation, saying it’s impossible to predict what will happen a decade from now. He pointed instead to the past 10 years of Amazon’s robotics investments, saying the company has created hundreds of thousands of new jobs — including entirely new job types — while also improving safety.

He said Amazon’s focus is on augmenting workers, not replacing them, by designing machines that make jobs easier and safer. The company, he added, will continue using collaborative robotics to help achieve its broader mission of offering customers the widest selection at the lowest cost.

In an interview with GeekWire after the press conference, Brady said he sees the role of robotics as removing the “menial, mundane, and repetitive” tasks from warehouse jobs while amplifying what humans do best — reasoning, judgment, and common sense. 

“Real leaders,” he added, “will lead with hope — hope that technology will do good for people.”

When asked whether the company’s goal was a “lights-out” warehouse with no people at all, Brady dismissed the idea. “There’s no such thing as 100 percent automation,” he said. “That doesn’t exist.” 

Instead, he emphasized designing machines with real utility — ones that improve safety, increase efficiency, and create new types of technical jobs in the process.

When pressed on whether Amazon is replacing human hands with robotic ones, Brady pushed back: “People are much more than hands,” he said. “You perceive the environment. You understand the environment. You know when to put things together. Like, people got it going on. It’s not replacing a hand. That’s not the right way to think of it. It’s augmenting the human brain.”

Brady pointed to Amazon’s new Shreveport, La., fulfillment center as an example, saying the highly automated facility processes orders faster than previous generations while also adding about 2,500 new roles that didn’t exist before.

“That’s not a net job killer,” he said. “It’s creating more job efficiency — and more jobs in different pockets.”

The New York Times report offered a different view of Shreveport’s impact on employment. Describing it as Amazon’s “most advanced warehouse” and a “template for future robotic fulfillment centers,” the article said the facility uses about 1,000 robots. 

Citing internal documents, the Times reported that automation allowed Amazon to employ about 25% fewer workers last year than it would have without the new systems. As more robots are added next year, it added, the company expects the site to need roughly half as many workers as it would for similar volumes of items under previous methods.

Wall Street sees big savings

Analysts, meanwhile, are taking the potential impact seriously. A Morgan Stanley research note published Wednesday — the same day as Amazon’s event and in direct response to the Times report — said the newspaper’s projections align with the investment bank’s baseline analysis.

Rather than dismissing the report as speculative, Morgan Stanley’s Brian Nowak treated the article’s data points as credible. The analysts wrote that Amazon’s reported plan to build around 40 next-generation robotic warehouses by 2027 was “in line with our estimated slope of robotics warehouse deployment.”

More notably, Morgan Stanley put a multi-billion-dollar price tag on the efficiency gains. Its previous models estimated the rollout could generate $2 billion to $4 billion in annual savings by 2027. But using the Times’ figure — that Amazon expects to “avoid hiring 160,000+ U.S. warehouse employees by ’27” — the analysts recalculated that the savings could reach as much as $10 billion per year.

Back at the event, the specific language used by Amazon executives aligned closely with details in the Times report about the company’s internal communications strategy.

According to the Times, internal documents advised employees to avoid terms such as “automation” and “A.I.” and instead use collaborative language like “advanced technology” and “cobots” — short for collaborative robots — as part of a broader effort to “control the narrative” around automation and hiring.

On stage, Brady’s remarks closely mirrored that approach. He consistently framed Amazon’s robotics strategy as one of augmentation, not replacement, describing new systems as tools built for people.

In the follow-up interview, Brady said he disliked the term “artificial intelligence” altogether, preferring to refer to the technology simply as “machines.”

“Intelligence is ours,” he said. “Intelligence is a very much a human thing.”

Follow-up: Alaska Airlines will ‘diagnose our entire IT infrastructure’ after latest outage disrupts 49,000 passengers

Alaska Airlines is still working to restore operations following a major outage that forced the Seattle-based company to cancel more than 360 flights on Alaska and its subsidiary Horizon Air.

The outage began Thursday around 3:30 p.m. PT. Alaska grounded planes across the U.S. as it addressed what it described as a “significant IT outage.”

In a statement, Alaska said a “failure occurred at our primary data center.” The outage was not a cybersecurity incident, according to the company.

“The IT outage has impacted several of our key systems that enable us to run various operations, necessitating the implementation of the ground stop to keep our aircraft in position,” Alaska said. “The safety of our flights was never compromised.”

The ground stop was lifted at 11:30 p.m. PT Thursday, but the company is still actively addressing operational impacts that resulted from the disruption.

The company canceled its planned third quarter earnings call on Friday. “We do not yet have an estimate of the financial impact of the operational disruption on our fourth quarter results,” Alaska said in a regulatory filing. The company reported revenue of $3.8 billion, up 1.4% year-over-year, while profit dropped 69% to $123 million.

The impact of the outage was evident at Sea-Tac Airport on Thursday evening, where long lines wrapped around the concourse and a maze of suitcases piled up in the baggage claim area.

The company’s Hawaiian Airlines subsidiary was not affected.

Alaska encouraged customers to check their flight status before heading to the airport, and flagged its flexible travel policy.

It’s Alaska’s second outage in three months. The Seattle-based airline grounded flights after an IT outage in July that lasted about three hours.

When Tim Chen tried to break into venture capital six years ago, multiple firms in Seattle turned him down. “Nobody wanted to hire me,” he recalled in an interview with GeekWire. “I was too technical, they said. Too nerdy.”

Chen, a University of Washington graduate and infrastructure engineer who had just sold a startup, decided to launch his own firm.

Six years later, Chen’s investors — known as limited partners, or LPs — line up to give him money before he even opens a pitch deck.

Chen recently raised $41 million for a fourth fund at Essence VC, his venture firm that backs infrastructure startups. His LPs include institutional investors such as Andreessen Horowitz’s Martin Casado and Cendana Capital’s Michael Kim.

TechCrunch described Chen as “one of the most sought-after solo investors,” highlighting how investors preempted the latest fund.

“I had no deck, no memo — I hadn’t even started raising,” Chen told GeekWire. “The LPs just all came in.”

Chen used AngelList to raise $1 million for his first fund in 2019, focusing on developer tools and infrastructure — categories he knew inside out. The experiment quickly snowballed: he raised $5 million for Fund II and $27 million for Fund III.

A dozen companies from the Essence portfolio have been acquired, including Tabular, a data management startup that sold to Databricks last year for a reported $2.2 billion.

What started as rejection has become a calling for Chen — and an unconventional venture capital success story.

After studying computer science at the UW, Chen worked at Microsoft and VMware, helped launch open-source cloud startup Mesosphere, and later founded Hyperpilot, an “AIOps” company acquired by Cloudera.

Chen’s experience as a software engineer and operator has become his edge in VC — especially amid the AI boom. He’s able to make faster decisions and gain respect from founders.

“Tim asked the hardest, most interesting questions about how we were going to build what we said we were going to build,” said Jordan Tigani, CEO of Seattle startup MotherDuck. “From a founder perspective, this let me trust that he actually believed in what we were doing and was coming to his decisions on his own.”

Seattle entrepreneur Patrick Thompson raised capital from Chen twice — with his previous startup Iteratively, which was acquired, and his current company Clarify. “He’s one of the most technically-minded people, but also super humble and easy to work with,” Thompson said.

The combination of engineering depth and empathy has helped Chen win competitive early-stage deals. He’s built a niche around helping technical founders translate research and code into products and go-to-market strategies.

“I’m looking for people that have a deep enough background, with high intensity, and huge flexibility on learning,” he said.

Essence’s portfolio spans across the U.S. and beyond. LPs ask Chen why he hasn’t moved to the Bay Area yet.

Chen is staying in Seattle, where he’s lived since high school. He believes Seattle’s tech scene is under-networked but brimming with talent.

“There’s so much great engineering talent with great iconic companies here,” he said.

Essence plans to make around 40 investments out of its fourth fund. Seattle is certainly on Chen’s radar.

“Of course,” he said. “I’m meeting people here, like UW PhDs. I like technical people. The nerdier, the geekier, the better.”

Updated at 8:40 p.m. Pacific.

Alaska Airlines said it’s recovering from an IT outage and “actively restoring operations” as of 7 p.m. Thursday after grounding flights across the U.S. for about three hours.

In a statement sent to GeekWire, Alaska said the outage began around 3:30 p.m. PT with a failure at the company’s primary data center.

“The IT outage has impacted several of our key systems that enable us to run various operations, necessitating the implementation of the ground stop to keep our aircraft in position,” the company said. “The safety of our flights was never compromised.”

The outage was not a cybersecurity event or related to other events, according to Alaska.

Flights are resuming but passengers at some airports are facing long delays as they await inbound planes.

During the outage, passengers on Reddit reported that some planes were sitting on the tarmac or de-boarding. Customers also reported issues with the company’s app and website.

It was Alaska’s second outage in three months. The Seattle-based airline grounded flights after an outage in July that lasted about three hours.

Alaska Airlines is experiencing an IT outage affecting operations. A temporary ground stop is in place. We apologize for the inconvenience. If you're scheduled to fly tonight, please check your flight status before heading to the airport.

— Alaska Airlines News (@AlaskaAirNews) October 23, 2025

100 fewer Alaska Airlines aircraft in the air now compared to last week as the airline is experiencing an IT outage this evening. Some flights are now departing, but a delays will be felt for some time to come. pic.twitter.com/zIkJTTETiz

— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) October 24, 2025

Hanging out with my Alaska homies on the tarmac at SEATAC
byu/DripIntravenous inAlaskaAirlines

How will the companies that have invested tens of billions of dollars in the infrastructure for artificial intelligence fare when the enshittification hits the fan? That question came in for a lot of attention — and snark — when tech pundits Cory Doctorow and Ed Zitron sat down in Seattle to muse about what’s happening in the world of AI.

Both men know a thing or two about enshittification, the process by which tech offerings gradually turn to crap due to the hunger for profits.

Doctorow’s Seattle stopover was part of a publicity tour for his newly published book on the subject, “Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.” For Wednesday night’s appearance at the Seattle Public Library, he was paired with Zitron, a public relations specialist, podcaster and writer who surveys the tech scene with a critical eye.

The way they see it, the bursting of the AI investment bubble is a given. And that’s not by any means a contrarian view. Even Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have acknowledged that the AI tech sector seems likely to go through some retrenchment, while insisting it will be followed by a resurgence that will bring huge benefits to society.

That’s where Doctorow and Zitron part ways with Nadella and Bezos.

“This cannot succeed,” Zitron said. “On top of the fact that everyone’s unprofitable, it’s not actually that popular, either. ChatGPT is very popular because a lot of people love being driven insane. … People will tell you AI’s coming, you must learn AI. The reason it’s not able to do your job is, it’s shit.”

Even if the bubble bursts for good, Doctorow holds out hope that there’d still be some use for the billions of dollars’ worth of AI-boosting chips that have already been purchased for power-gobbling data servers. “If you want to think about a post-AI world, imagine what you would do if GPUs were 10 cents on the dollar, if there were a lot of skilled statisticians looking for work, and if you had a bunch of open-source models that had barely been optimized and had a lot of room at the bottom,” he said.

Zitron is more pessimistic. “The thing that terrifies me about this bubble is, this is not useful infrastructure at all.”

Doctorow defended his vision of a post-AI world by citing a few examples — including AI-augmented search engines that can plow through hours upon hours of podcast audio to find a key quote and whip up a transcript, and AI models that can serve as a backstop when radiologists search through X-rays for signs of cancer.

He also pointed to a nonprofit organization called the Human Rights Data Analysis Group. “They did a project with Innocence Project New Orleans, where they used LLMs [large language models] to identify the linguistic correlates of arrest reports that produced exonerations,” he said. “They used that to analyze a lot more arrest reports than they could otherwise. And they put that on top of a funnel where lawyers and paralegals were able to accelerate their exoneration work.”

When do Doctorow and Zitron think the AI bubble will burst? “No later than Q3 2026,” Zitron said. Doctorow had a less definitive answer.

“I’m a firm believer that the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent,” he said. “I would say that the number of foundation models that will be around after the crash very likely could be zero. I’m not saying that it must be zero. … You can’t kill an open-source model if people like it and contribute.”

So, what’s a techie to do? “Now is the time to unionize,” Doctorow said. He acknowledged that President Donald Trump’s moves against the National Labor Relations Board have made things more difficult for unions, but insisted that all was not lost for the labor movement.

“Trump thinks that we fired the referee, and so that means all the players have to leave the field,” Doctorow said. “He’s wrong. When you fire the referee, it means there are no more rules, right? And there’s a reason that fascists attack unions first. It’s because the opposite of fascism is solidarity.”

When asked what they would advise the next generation of techies to study, neither tech pundit mentioned computer science. “Finance,” Zitron said. “In all seriousness, finance is not as difficult or complex as it sounds, and indeed, the world runs on money.”

Doctorow passed along the advice he said he gave to his daughter. “If you don’t know what you want to do at university, don’t go to university. Go to college and become an electrician,” he said. “There’s so much work for electricians, and we are going to be solarizing for the next 40 years. … It’s like being a plumber, but you don’t have to touch poo.”

He noted that the benefits extended beyond the money. “If you want to learn more, and you like it, you can become an e-eng [electrical engineer],” Doctorow said. “And if you don’t, you can put yourself through college by being an electrician — and learn finance.”

A detailed explanation of this week’s Amazon Web Services outage, released Thursday morning, confirms that it wasn’t a hardware glitch or an outside attack but a complex, cascading failure triggered by a rare software bug in one of the company’s most critical systems.

The company said a “faulty automation” in its internal systems — two independent programs that began racing each other to update records — erased key network entries for its DynamoDB database service, triggering a domino effect that temporarily broke many other AWS tools.

AWS said it has turned off the flawed automation worldwide and will fix the bug before bringing it back online. The company also plans to add new safety checks and improve how quickly its systems recover if something similar happens again.

Amazon apologized and acknowledged the widespread disruption caused by the outage.

“While we have a strong track record of operating our services with the highest levels of availability, we know how critical our services are to our customers, their applications and end users, and their businesses,” the company said, promising to learn from the incident.

The outage began early Monday and impacted sites and online services around the world, again illustrating the internet’s deep reliance on Amazon’s cloud and showing how a single failure inside AWS can quickly ripple across the web.

Related: The AWS outage is a warning about the risks of digital dependance and AI infrastructure

For the last two years, Microsoft’s video game division has been working to meet financial targets that are well in excess of the typical industry standard, which has led to waves of layoffs, canceled projects, and a general perception that the company is scrambling.

These allegations come from a new report from Bloomberg journalists Jason Schreier and Dina Bass, who reported that Xbox has been told it’s expected to work toward a profit margin of 30% across the board.

As far as can be told from outside Microsoft, this is significantly above Xbox’s profit baseline. A typical quarterly report from Microsoft only discloses revenue, but as noted by TweakTown, Xbox head Phil Spencer testified in court in 2022 that “the Xbox business today runs at a single-digit profit margin.”

It’s worth noting that even the biggest game studios usually maintain a profit margin of roughly 20% under typical circumstances. As an example, Xbox subsidiary Activision Blizzard, which runs some of the most popular games-as-a-service in the world today, “only” had a profit margin of 22-to-25% two years ago before Microsoft’s acquisition completed.

Even Sony, Microsoft’s primary competitor in the console space and the makers of the PlayStation 5, reportedly only runs at a 9.5% profit margin. Through that lens, any video game company that’s honestly eyeing a consistent 30% is living in a dream world.

The new financial target reportedly came directly from Microsoft CFO Amy Hood in the fall of 2023, which marked the start of a series of big decisions and policy reversals at Xbox.

Since then, Microsoft has drawn fire for multiple waves of layoffs; reorganized several subsidiaries such as Halo Studios; raised the base MSRP of the Xbox Series X twice so far this year; made moves to phase out physical media; officially ported many of its hit first- and third-party games to PlayStation and Switch; and canceled multiple highly-anticipated game projects such as Rare’s Everwild, a reboot of Perfect Dark, and ZeniMax’s MMO code-named Project Blackbird.

Earlier this month, Microsoft hiked the price of its Xbox Game Pass subscription service, claiming it was part of a significant “upgrade package.” Less relevantly to consumers, it has also allegedly raised the price of Xbox development kits by $500, blaming unspecified “macroeconomic” factors.

Some of that, to be fair, is due to circumstances outside Xbox’s control such as the ongoing chaos over tariffs. This year has been a rough time to be a hardware manufacturer.

Xbox is also apparently locked into at least one more console generation, according to recent interviews with Microsoft’s Sarah Bond. The phrase that keeps coming up is “very premium, very high-end curated experience.” If the recently-released Xbox Ally is any indication, the next-gen Xbox will be something more like an expensive, user-friendly Windows PC than what we’d currently recognize as a game console.

For a while now, though, Xbox has come off like its left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing, which made little sense in the wake of reports that the division was both growing and pulling in increased revenue. If it’s being forced to contend with unrealistic expectations from higher up at Microsoft, however, that would explain the overall sense of disorganization.

This is one of the most infamous types of “creative accounting” in the video game industry: issue an inflated revenue forecast, then blame developers/titles when their games fail to reach those numbers. Square Enix notoriously came under fire for this in the 2010s with releases like the 2013 reboot of Tomb Raider. It was a solid success (3.4 million copies sold), but its publisher wanted a blockbuster, so it regarded the game as a failure. History repeats.

In theory, Xbox ought to be one of the leading voices in video games as a hobby and medium right now, but it’s being forced to burn much of its time and effort in an attempt to meet a profit goal that no company on Earth could expect to reach.

If you’re inclined to believe the rumor that’s been in circulation in Seattle this year, that Microsoft’s current leadership would like to shut down Xbox entirely so it can use those resources for more AI research, this is more data for your theory.

Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell has a message for his city’s tech giants: it’s time to reinvest in the community.

Harrell, speaking at an event Wednesday hosted by the Fremont Chamber of Commerce, said Seattle’s large companies have a “moral obligation to give back.”

The mayor specifically called out Microsoft and Amazon, citing their annual profits. “Microsoft … they made $88 billion last year … they have an obligation to give back to society, as does Amazon,” he said.

Harrell also described Seattle as a “city of innovation,” and one that has become a “great launching pad and fertile grounds for large companies.”

“That’s a good thing,” he said. “That’s not a bad thing.”

His comments reflect a delicate balance faced by Harrell and other city leaders — ensuring that Seattle’s global tech corporations continue to bolster the economy and tax base, while addressing the ripple effects on housing, transportation, and communities.

Harrell has delivered a similar message since taking office in 2022.

“What I’ve tried to do as mayor is to say, without ambiguity, that we value their jobs,” he said of Amazon, Seattle’s largest employer, in an interview with GeekWire earlier this year. “We also believe in a culture of accountability.”

During an appearance at the GeekWire Summit in 2022, Harrell urged the business and tech industry to get more involved in civic life to help make improvements in the city.

“There’s just plenty of opportunities for you all to engage,” he said, “and I’m just a call away to facilitate that engagement.”

Harrell, a former attorney in the telecom industry, is seeking re-election next month. He’s facing off against Katie Wilson, a progressive community organizer who won nearly 51% of the vote in the August primary.

The race is drawing national attention, in part due to the contrasting profiles and campaigns between the incumbent and challenger.

Wilson was inspired to run after Seattle voters earlier this year approved a measure creating a publicly funded social housing developer, financed by a 5% tax on salaries above $1 million paid to employees working in the city.

Harrell supported an alternative funding mechanism for social housing in Seattle. The proposed ordinance received financial support from Amazon and Microsoft.

The debate over who should pay for city services — and how much — underscores a broader tension between Seattle’s progressive tax ambitions and its reliance on the tech industry’s prosperity.

Harrell briefly spoke about taxes during Wednesday’s event, noting how the city “lost 10,000 jobs from Amazon” following years of friction over tax policy in Seattle. “That’s not a sustainable strategy, just to tax people,” he said.

However, Harrell earlier this year supported a proposal that would shield smaller companies from paying Seattle’s business & occupation tax — while increasing rates for larger companies.

Harrell was city council president in 2018 when lawmakers approved — and then repealed — a controversial per-employee “head tax” on big businesses. The council in 2020 later passed the “JumpStart” payroll tax, which Wilson helped craft.

Speaking to GeekWire last month, Wilson — whose platform is focused on raising more revenue “from the wealthiest corporations” — said she aims to have a working relationship with Amazon and other tech companies, calling them “very important players in our city and our economy.”

While tech dominates the Seattle economy, Wilson is interested in diversifying that focus. In a recent post on Reddit, she cautioned that a heavy reliance on the tech sector could pose problems for Seattle down the road.

“We’ve really been blithely riding the tech wave for the past 15 years and I don’t think we can just assume that will continue,” she wrote.

At the event Wednesday, Harrell also discussed public safety and the city’s new high-tech operations center designed to help officers fight crime in real time.

The Real Time Crime Center (RTCC) pulls live footage and data from surveillance cameras and other sources into a centralized command room staffed by analysts up to 20 hours a day.

Critics, including Wilson, have raised concerns about the federal government using surveillance footage to target immigrants.

Seattle Police Department Captain James Britt said earlier this year that data requests from outside agencies — including federal law enforcement — are screened and must comply with state and local laws. “We control where all of our data goes,” Britt said at a press event in July touting the RTCC.

Harrell reiterated the point on Wednesday, saying that third parties cannot obtain footage. He also noted other cities that have similar systems in place.

“We have actually caught criminals because of the technology,” he said.

Harrell last month announced a “responsible AI plan” that provides guidelines for Seattle’s use of artificial intelligence and its support of the AI tech sector as an economic driver.

Award-winning immunologist ​​Susan Kaech is the new executive vice president of the Allen Institute’s Immunology Moonshot, an initiative that aims to understand the immune system’s role in human health and disease.

Kaech currently leads the NOMIS Center for Immunobiology and Microbial Pathogenesis at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and will join the Allen Institute in January.

“The appointment comes at a critical time in bioscience when the immune system is regarded as the cornerstone of all diseases and understanding its foundational principles is vital to unlocking new treatments and therapies,” the institute said in a statement.

Kaech’s research includes the investigation of how the immune system remembers infections to develop immunity, T-cell communications, and the role of metabolism in the immune system’s fight against cancer.

—  Seattle RFID company Impinj named Arthur Valdez Jr. to its board of directors.

Valdez recently left the role of executive VP of global supply chain and customer solutions at Starbucks and his career includes leadership roles at Amazon, Target and elsewhere.

“Arthur’s expertise transforming and optimizing strategic supply chain and logistics networks for large consumer-facing companies will be invaluable as we continue to advance our vision of connecting every thing,” said Impinj CEO Chris Diorio in a statement.

— Jason Bennett has taken a new role at Amazon Web Services, shifting from VP of U.S. enterprise to VP of worldwide startups and venture capital. Bennett has been with the company for more than 17 years.

On LinkedIn Bennett shared his fondness for working with startups and said he was eager to return to a position serving that community.

“I’m energized by the opportunity to work alongside our teams to support a thriving startup ecosystem — from founders and VCs, to accelerators, and the broader innovation community,” he said, adding that the work “has a lasting impact on the direction of industries and the future of AI.”

— NuScale Power named James Canafax as chief legal officer and corporate secretary. The Tigard, Ore.-based nuclear energy company is developing small modular reactors.

Canafax has decades of legal experience and joins NuScale from Maritime Partners. Past positions include executive leadership at BWX Technologies, which supplies nuclear components and services.

“[Canafax’s] extensive experience in the nuclear industry, deep familiarity with the regulatory environment and track record of guiding organizations through key growth periods make him uniquely suited to support NuScale at this important moment for our company,” CEO John Hopkins said in statement.

— Seattle entrepreneur Elvis Dieguez is now VP of data science, analytics and platforms for the healthcare startup hims & hers. Diegeuz joins the company from symphonie, a Seattle e-commerce marketing platform where he was CEO and co-founder. He was previously at Amazon for more than four years working in business analytics and as a senior manager.

Hims & hers offers a telehealth platform for conditions including sexual health, hair loss, mental health, skincare and weight loss.

“I look forward to leading and working with a ~70 person team who’ve been working hard to make the #healthcare system work for all Americans,” Dieguez said on LinkedIn.

— Biotech startup Synthesize Bio named Ariel Brumbaugh as senior director of business development. In the role, Brumbaugh will help the company partner with biopharma companies interested in using Synthesize’s AI-based research platform to accelerate and de-risk drug development.

Seattle’s Synthesize Bio was founded by leaders from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. Last month it announced $10 million in funding from Madrona.

Brumbaugh joined the startup from the San Francisco biotech company Gladstone Institutes.

— Sophie Brougham is director of philanthropic operations for the recently launched Clean Economy Project. Nicknamed CleanEcon, the effort includes past employees of the Bill Gates-led Breakthrough Energy and is a policy and advocacy platform promoting clean power.

Prior to Breakthrough, Brougham was with the Paul Allen holding company Vulcan (now known as Vale Group) for more than a decade, where she was a senior manager and led programs including philanthropic and grants management.

— Seattle’s Jake Laes is now executive director of AI Tinkerers, a global network of AI engineers and builders. Laes joined the group from Deel, where he helped facilitate partnerships between investors and accelerator programs. Laes is the founder of YoungTech Seattle, and his background includes mentoring and leadership roles at the University of Washington’s CoMotion and Techstars.

— Pranam Kolari, VP of search and recommendations at Coupang, is resigning from his role next month. Coupang is South Korea’s largest e-commerce platform and is headquartered in Seattle. Kolari, based in San Jose, Calif., was previously at Walmart Labs for nearly a decade where his roles included vice president of engineering for search.

— Datavault AI appointed Pete Scobell as VP of global security. The Beaverton, Ore.-based company helps businesses monetize their data and create digital twins of physical objects. Scobell is a decorated U.S. Navy SEAL veteran and will oversee Datavault AI’s security operations, risk management and asset logistics.

— Erin McHugh Saif, a former Massachusetts-based Microsoft executive, is CEO of an as-yet unnamed data and AI venture to serve “place-based partnerships,” which are networks of nonprofits, government agencies, and educational entities that aim to address education, jobs and housing needs.

“With better access to data, these organizations will leap ahead in this moment of AI transformation, gaining faster insight into which programs deliver the greatest improvement to significantly scale their impact,” Saif said on LinkedIn.

The effort has the support of the Ballmer Group, a philanthropic organization co-founded by former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and his wife Connie, and the nonprofit TechSoup.

— Karen Ng was promoted to executive VP of product at HubSpot. Ng has been with the company since 2022, joining as senior VP of product and partnerships. Past employers include Common Room, Google and Microsoft, where she was chief of staff across the company’s developer tools business. Ng is based in the Seattle area.

Seattle-area cybersecurity startup Chainguard landed $280 million in new financing, just six months after a Series D round pulled in $356 million.

The new funding, announced Thursday, comes from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund (CVF).

Founded in 2021, Chainguard aims to help customers secure their “software supply chain,” a term used to describe a company’s software production line.

Chainguard focuses on helping companies keep their open source software secure and offers tools to manage container images, a core code component of cloud-based applications. It has more than 200 customers, including ANZ Bank, Canva, GitLab, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, VPBank, and Wiz.

Technically based in Kirkland, Wash., the remote startup employs more than 500 people and has raised $892 million to date as its valuation has risen to $3.5 billion. The company is ranked No. 3 on the GeekWire 200 index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups, and Chainguard recently landed on LinkedIn’s list of the top 50 startups in the U.S. (at No. 18).

In fiscal year 2025, Chainguard says it grew its annual recurring revenue seven times to $40 million.

CEO and co-founder Dan Lorenc said the funding will help accelerate the adoption of Chainguard across more companies.

“Open source powers the world, but the way it’s delivered and deployed often introduces risk,” Lorenc said in a statement. “At Chainguard, we’re flipping that script: we guard open source from all the things that can go wrong with it, so engineering teams can build anything they want with it.”

Chainguard CFO Eyal Bar said the partnership with General Catalyst enables Chainguard “to scale go-to-market investment without diluting ownership or slowing innovation.”

Instead of using equity to fund sales and marketing spend, General Catalyst provides structured growth capital tied directly to customer acquisition and recurring revenue. The goal is to let startups like Chainguard preserve equity while using outcome-based financing to scale efficiently.

Previous Chainguard investors include Amplify, IVP, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mantis VC, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Spark Capital.

Previously:

• Cybersecurity startup Chainguard lands $356M at $3.5B valuation, up from $1.1B a year ago
• Chainguard doesn’t have an office. Here’s how the $3.5B cybersecurity startup makes remote work.

Microsoft is rolling out a series of updates to its consumer Copilot AI assistant, including shared group chats, long-term memory, and an optional visual persona named Mico.

New capabilities include a “real talk” conversation style, a Learn Live feature that acts as a voice-enabled Socratic tutor, new connectors that link to services like Google Drive, Gmail, and Outlook, and deeper integration with Microsoft’s Edge browser.

Microsoft is competing against AI tools including Google’s Gemini, Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s revamped Siri, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Anthropic’s Claude in the consumer market. 

It looks to be the single biggest Copilot update to date from the group led by Mustafa Suleyman, the Google DeepMind co-founder who joined Microsoft last year as its AI CEO. 

“This release is a milestone for what AI can deliver,” Suleyman writes in a blog post, explaining that the idea is to make Copilot a comprehensive assistant that connects users to their personal information, contacts, and tools with the goal of improving their lives.

The features are rolling out starting today in the U.S, and the company says they will be available soon in the UK, Canada, and other parts of the world. Microsoft is showing the new features in the live stream below.

Every Friday at 5 p.m., Diego Oppenheimer gets an email that remembers his week better than he does. It pulls from his calendar, meeting transcripts, and inbox to figure out what really mattered: decisions made, promises to keep, and priorities for the week ahead.

“It gives me a superpower,” said Oppenheimer, a machine-learning entrepreneur best known as the co-founder of Algorithmia, who’s now working with startups as an investor in Seattle. 

What’s notable is that Oppenheimer didn’t buy this tool off the shelf — he built it. What started as a personal experiment turned into a challenge: could he still code after years away from writing production software?

With the rise of AI-powered coding assistants, he realized he could pick up where he left off. His personal project, with the unglamorous name “Actionary,” has grown to somewhere around 40,000 lines of what he jokingly calls vibe-coded “spaghetti.” It’s messy but functional.

Oppenheimer’s do-it-yourself AI assistant is more than a novelty. It’s a window into a broader shift. Individuals and companies are starting to hand off pieces of judgment and workflow to autonomous systems — software that analyzes data, makes recommendations, and acts independently.

Exploring the agentic frontier

This emerging frontier is the subject of Agents of Transformation, a new GeekWire editorial series exploring the people, companies, and ideas behind the rise of AI agents. A related event is planned for Seattle in early 2026. This independent project is underwritten by Accenture.

For this first installment, we spoke with startup founders and DIY builders working to replicate different aspects of the work of great executive assistants — coordinating calendars, managing travel, and anticipating needs — to see how close AI agents are getting to the human standard.

The consensus: today’s agents excel at narrow, well-defined tasks — but struggle with broader human judgment. Attempts to create all-purpose digital assistants often run up against the limits of current AI models. 

“I might have my travel agent and my finance agent and my stock trading agent and my personal health coach agent and my home chef agent, etc.,” said T.A. McCann, a Seattle-based serial entrepreneur and managing director at Pioneer Square Labs, on a recent GeekWire Podcast episode. 

McCann foresees these narrow agents handling discrete tasks, potentially coordinated by higher-level AI acting like a personal chief operating officer.

But even the term “AI agent” is up for debate. Oppenheimer defines a true agent as one with both autonomy and independent decision-making. By that standard, his system doesn’t quite qualify. It’s more a network of models completing tasks on command than a self-directed entity.

“If you asked a marketing department, they would say, absolutely, this is fully agentic,” he said. “But if I stick to my AI nerd cred, is there autonomous decision-making? Not really.”

It’s part of a much larger trend. The market for AI workplace assistants is projected to grow from $3.3 billion this year to more than $21 billion by 2030. according to MarketsandMarkets. Growth is being driven both by enterprise giants such as Microsoft and Salesforce embedding agents into workplace software, and by startups building specialized agents. 

A report by the newsletter “CCing My EA,” citing an ASAP survey, notes that 26% of EAs now use AI tools. Some fear job loss due to AI, but most top EAs see AI as an augmentation tool that frees time for strategic work. 

From summaries to scheduling

One company exploring this emerging frontier is Read AI, a Seattle-based startup known for its cross-platform AI meeting summarization and analysis technologies, which has raised more than $80 million in funding.

Co-founder and CEO David Shim revealed that Read AI has been internally developing and piloting an AI executive assistant called “Ada” for tasks including scheduling meetings and responding to emails.

Ada replies so quickly that Read AI has been working on building in a delay into the email response time so that it seems more natural to the recipients.

Shim has been personally testing the limits of the technology — giving Ada access to a range of workplace data (from Outlook, Teams, Slack, JIRA, and other cloud services) and letting the assistant autonomously answer questions about Read AI’s business that come in from the company’s investors in response to his periodic updates.

“It answers questions that I would not have the answer to right off the bat, because it’s not just pulling from my data set, but it’s pulling in from my team’s data set,” Shim said during a fireside chat with GeekWire co-founder John Cook at a recent Accenture reception.

Shim laughed, “I’m willing to take that risk. We’re doing well, so I don’t mind giving out the data.” 

However, there are limitations. Ada can struggle with complex multi-person scheduling or tasks requiring data it can’t access, and can still occasionally hallucinate. To manage this, ReadAI incorporates human oversight mechanisms like “sidebars” where Ada asks for confirmation before sending replies to messages deemed more sensitive or difficult. 

Shim argues against the idea of building a single, all-encompassing agent. 

“The approach of agents doing everything is not the right approach,” he said. “If you try to do everything, you’re not going to do anything well.”

Instead, he believes successful AI assistants will focus on solving very specific problems, much like Google Maps gives driving directions without trying to be a general travel agent. 

The “book-me-a-hotel” challenge

Travel is a use case that’s close to the heart of Brad Gerstner, founder and CEO of Altimeter Capital. Gerstner is known for backing some of the biggest names in tech — from Snowflake to Expedia — and for distilling big tech shifts into simple tests, such as his hotel booking challenge.

The specific example he gave at the 2024 Madrona IA Summit in Seattle was telling an AI agent to book the Mercer Hotel in New York on a specific day at the lowest price — a common challenge for business travelers.  

“Until we can do that, we have not built a personal assistant,” he said. 

That’s part of the larger problem Michael Gulmann, a former Expedia product executive, set out to solve with the startup Otto, which is developing an AI agent specifically for business travelers.

As shown publicly for the first time at this year’s Madrona conference, Otto tackled Gerstner’s specific challenge. After receiving the request to book the Mercer Hotel on a specific day, it found the cheapest available room, confirmed the price and details, and completed the booking, with minimal prompting, within about two minutes.

“Who would have thought that Brad Gerstner wanted the cheapest room?” Gullman joked.

Otto handles various aspects of travel. It understands and learns detailed user preferences — from specific amenities like rooftop bars to preferred airline seats, hotel room types, and loyalty programs — using this knowledge to refine searches and make personalized recommendations. 

As Gulmann explained in an interview, Otto doesn’t use a single monolithic model. It coordinates a bunch of narrow agents: one to interpret messages, another to manage loyalty programs, another to handle payments. Together they simulate a small operations team working behind the scenes.

Otto confirms details with the user before completing purchases, even though it could do that autonomously. Gulmann described that precaution as psychological, not technical — knowing that most people aren’t yet comfortable with AI buying things without their involvement.

After learning about Otto’s capabilities, Gerstner was impressed and wanted to see how it performs as it moves into public beta, said Mike Fridgen, a venture partner at Madrona, which incubated the company.

The grand challenge of scheduling

If hotel booking is the acid test for autonomous assistants, scheduling meetings is the everyday nightmare.

That’s the problem Howie is trying to solve. The Seattle startup’s AI assistant lives in the email inbox. CC Howie on a thread, and it proposes times, confirms with all parties, creates invites, and adds meeting links.

Howie works from a detailed “preferences document,” inspired by how experienced executives train their human EAs — which cafés are acceptable for meetings, how late is too late on Fridays, etc.

The company recently launched publicly with $6 million in funding and a growing number of paying customers. It uses a hybrid model: AI supported by human reviewers. That helps avoid the tiny errors that destroy trust — mixing up time zones, dropping a name from a thread, or misreading social cues.

The system simulates decisions internally, flags potential errors for review, and escalates anything ambiguous to a human before hitting send. 

“If you think about the things that a great human EA does, software is not replacing that anytime soon,” said Howie co-founder Austin Petersmith.

In fact, Petersmith said, many of Howie’s users are human EAs themselves, using it to offload logistics. “Nobody wants to do scheduling,” he said. “Everybody wants the machines to take this particular task on.”

As models improve, Petersmith hopes Howie can expand into other “meta-work” — the administrative overhead that keeps knowledge workers from the higher-value activities that are still the realm of humans.

More time in the day

For Diego Oppenheimer, this isn’t a hypothetical issue. “I’m extremely calendar dyslexic,” he explained. “I’ll triple-book myself. I’ll agree to go to places I shouldn’t be. I’ll travel to the wrong city. Really bad.”

Over the years, he relied on human EAs and a chief of staff to keep him on track. But when he stepped back from running a company full-time, hiring someone just to manage his complex, multi-role calendar no longer made sense. So he built Actionary to help. It sends the Friday recap to catch him up on the week, flagging issues right before his weekend “reboot.”

Oppenheimer’s project won the People’s Choice Award at an AI Tinkerers event in New York last month. But he is very clear: Actionary is a personal project, not a product in the making. He developed it for himself, and can’t imagine taking on the headache of feature requests and technical support from others.

He’s bullish on the larger trend, and a user and investor in tools like Howie. But he also recognizes that AI agents can’t match the comprehensive skills and judgment of a human EA, let alone a chief of staff in a higher-level strategic role.

Oppenheimer’s ultimate goal is more straightforward, but still ambitious. “I’m trying to make time in the day,” he said. “That’s what I’m trying to do.” 

GeekWire’s Todd Bishop reported and wrote this article with editing assistance from AI tools including Gemini and a custom OpenAI GPT trained in GeekWire’s editorial approach. All facts, quotes, and conclusions were reviewed and verified prior to publication.

Seattle agriculture-tech startup Carbon Robotics raised $20 million in new funding to support the creation of another piece of AI-powered machinery for farms.

With its signature LaserWeeder and relatively new Autonomous Tractor Kit (ATK) already being used by hundreds of customers, Carbon founder and CEO Paul Mikesell told GeekWire that “a brand new AI robot” is coming.

Mikesell said the machine, which is at least nine months away from being revealed, will leverage the same AI system used in Carbon’s other equipment but perform tasks beyond weeding.

“It’s very flexible, capable of doing a lot with the world around it, understanding what it’s seeing, what’s happening,” Mikesell said of Carbon’s system that uses an array of AI, computer vision and machine learning technology. “We see our ability to reinvest in that platform and double down on what it can do in some new activities.

“It’ll blow your mind,” he added.

Founded in 2018, Carbon Robotics made its name across ag-tech with the LaserWeeder, a machine which can be pulled behind a tractor and uses its tech to detect plants in fields and then target and eliminate weeds with lasers. The latest iteration, the LaserWeeder G2, was released in February.

In March, the company unveiled the Carbon ATK, previously called the AutoTractor. That autonomous platform is designed to fit on and control existing farm equipment and serve as an answer to labor shortages and increased productivity in farming.

Both platforms are continuing to grow and scale, and “things are moving really fast,” according to Mikesell, a longtime technologist and entrepreneur who previously co-founded data storage company Isilon Systems.

LaserWeeders are active on farms across the U.S. and in 14 countries around the world. Mikesell said revenue continues to grow every year, but Carbon is not yet profitable.

Ranked No. 9 on the GeekWire 200 list of top privately held startups based across the Pacific Northwest, Carbon has previously been backed by NVIDIA and Seattle-based Voyager Capital.

The Series D-2 extension round attracted Giant Ventures as lead investor. The UK-based VC invests across a variety of “purpose-driven” startups, and Mikesell said, “They got what we were trying to do.”

Giant previously invested in a $140 million round for Tidal Vision, a Bellingham, Wash.-based company turning discarded crab shells into a valuable industrial chemical called chitosan.

Beyond the secretive new machine, Carbon is revealing more about the “large plant model” at the heart of how it does computer vision through its AI systems.

Mikesell said the company is at the point where it has enough training data and labeled images that it can teach its AI to learn about the basic structure of the plants it’s seeing. This allows Carbon to run one model on every machine in the world.

“If new weeds pop up in an onion field in France, and those are eventually going to show up in a carrot field in the U.S., the first time we see that weed anywhere it can be part of the model and be ready to go,” Mikesell said. “It also means that if we want to go into a new crop that we’ve never seen before, we can do it immediately.”

A LaserWeeder is designed to target the meristem of a weed to kill it as quickly as possible and the large plant model helps it understand where to precisely target its zap.

Carbon Robotics, which has raised $177 million to date, now employs about 260 people. The company runs a manufacturing facility in Richland, Wash., and added another in the Netherlands to offset some trade and tariff issues as well as speed deployment of machines in Europe.

Mikesell said as far as competition, there are some companies in Europe who claim to be building some version of a LaserWeeder, but he’s never seen one in a field or competed against one.

“It’s very hard to create a LaserWeeder,” he said. “The targeting system is so special, and the AI is so special. It’s not just about detecting where the weeds are. The trick to making it work is you need a targeting camera to be able to keep the lasers on target [while moving], and everybody I’ve seen that says they’re gonna build a LaserWeeder doesn’t understand that concept.”

Hyphen AI, a new Seattle-based startup using generative AI to help developers deploy cloud applications, raised $5 million in a seed round led by Unlock Venture Partners.

The company’s product, Hyphen Deploy, aims to make cloud infrastructure setup as simple as describing what an app should do.

The product automates complex DevOps processes — replacing YAML files, Dockerfiles, and Terraform modules with natural language prompts and business rules. Developers can describe service goals such as latency, scale, or compliance, and the platform automatically generates production-ready cloud infrastructure across providers such as AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and Cloudflare.

“Today infrastructure automation typically takes weeks to setup and configure and then monthly maintenance on those configurations — Deploy reduces it to minutes,” Jared Wray, CEO and founder at Hyphen AI, said in a statement.

Wray previously founded Tier 3, a Seattle-area enterprise cloud startup acquired by CenturyLink (now Lumen Technologies) in 2013. He spent two years as an exec at CenturyLink and was later CTO at streaming company iStreamPlanet and clean tech startup Palmetto.

Hyphen joins a growing number of startups using generative AI to automate infrastructure work, including fellow Seattle startup Pulumi.

Unlock Ventures partner Andy Liu, who is based in Seattle, said the market “desperately needs” a “truly developer-first operations platform.”

“Deploy returns software development to the promise of developers leading the way with no infrastructure overhead, just focus on code,” Liu said in a statement.

Wray declined to disclose the company’s revenue metrics. He said customers have been using the platform for the past five months. Hyphen employs 10 people, including Jim Newkirk, who is serving as a fractional COO and was also an exec at CenturyLink and Tier3.

Seattle-based venture capital firm Ascend also participated in the seed round.