Jeff Bezos explains the “releasing the work” framework he used to build Amazon In the early days of Amazon, Jeff Bezos had too many ideas. Then Jeff Wilke, a new Amazon executive at the time, told his boss, “Jeff, you have enough ideas to destroy Amazon.” “This was just a shocking idea for me,” Bezos recalls. “As a founder, I had the great luxury of always being able to hire my tutors. I would hire these experienced, senior executives . . . And I would listen to them and they would teach me.” When Bezos asked Wilke what he meant by this, Wilke responded, “You have to release the work at the right rate so that the organization can accept it.” Bezos reflects on this point: “Every time I released an idea, I was creating a backlog of work in process. And because it was just stacking up, it was adding no value. In fact, it was creating distraction . . . This sounds so obvious, but it was not obvious to me at the time. And this was a profound insight for me. So I started prioritizing the ideas better, keeping lists of them, and keeping ideas to myself until the organization was ready for the ideas.” He continues: “I also started figuring out how to build an organization that can be ready for more ideas. That’s about having the right senior team and leadership and giving those people the executive bandwidth so they could do more ideas per unit of time. And that is what we built. We built a company that’s very good at inventing and doing more than one thing at a time. And as the company gets bigger, you do want to be able to do more than one thing at a time. But that idea of ‘releasing the work’ was very profound for me. It made us operationally more effective while still being inventive.” Video source: @Reuters (2025)

One way to think about AI Agent opportunities is to figure out which software categories are customers not fully taking advantage of because they don’t have the resources to leverage the tools. The vast majority of software in the world is underutilized relative to what it can do, solely because there aren’t people on the other end to use the service productively. The categories are endless. Security tools that could protect companies but there’s no security resources on the other end, marketing automation systems that lack the right administrators, contract management software that can’t automate work because it’s missing data entry, and so on. In a lot of these spaces, the addressable market size for the use case is actually orders of magnitude larger than the existing market size. And the only limitation previously has been the cost and availability of talent. Basically the ratio of potential value to realized value. This is an area where existing software products can very naturally add AI Agents to their offerings, because they have visibility into what people can’t fully take advantage of with their offering. A great example of this is Meta’s push for AI to help with ad creation and optimization. Think about the millions of small businesses that want to reach new customers and would actually spend way more than they do today on advertising, but ultimately can’t because they don’t have the resources. AI Agents can now basically deliver entire ad campaigns better than the majority of their customer base, growing Meta’s TAM in the process. Or, for instance, at Box we know the majority of enterprise content never gets tagged or has data extracted from it because most companies have not applied resources here. AI Agents finally then give all companies the same capabilities that only a few ever had, now letting you bring automation to contracts, invoices, onboarding, and thousands of other workflows. And there will also be lots of opportunities for new startups to do the same. A lot of software is underutilized because of the cracks between existing technology, which is a natural spot for new startups to emerge in. And there will be plenty of categories where there’s no natural incumbent as well. Huge opportunity all around to automate the parts of software categories that never fully get utilized today.

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