Grow Fast, Do Good: Amazon’s Kara Hurst on Turning Sustainability Into an Edge

As AI reshapes industries and accelerates innovation, how can companies grow responsibly at scale? In this episode of How Success Happens, Amazon’s Kara Hurst shares lessons from the front lines of building for a future where technological advancement and sustainability go hand in hand. She breaks down the strategies, investments, and innovations helping Amazon scale solutions while continuing to grow – and offers practical advice for entrepreneurs to turn sustainability into a competitive advantage.

To learn more about Amazon’s sustainability progress, visit sustainability.aboutamazon.com

Episode Transcript:

Kara Hurst: I think stepping up and saying, “Hey, we tried this, it worked, it didn’t work,” share one success, share one failure, and everybody does that, you’re going to learn 10 things in a day. And I think that moves the world forward much quicker than anything else.

Dan Bova: Hey everyone, welcome to a special episode of How Success Happens. I’m Dan Bova, writer and editor at entrepreneur.com. Today’s bonus episode of How Success Happens is brought to you by Amazon. So, I always ask guests on this show to define what the word success means to them. And across all industries in business and sports and entertainment, I’ve been hearing a common theme, which is that people aren’t just about chasing money. They want to build businesses that serve their customers, their employees, and the planet. And today’s guest knows all about that. Kara Hurst is Amazon’s chief sustainability officer. And for over a decade, she’s been leading worldwide teams working on environmental sustainability, human rights, and social and community impact. So, we’re going to pick her brain to find out what strategies she’s put into place to help Amazon grow responsibly that you can apply to your business. Welcome, Kara.

Kara Hurst: Thanks for having me. Excited to have this conversation.

Dan Bova: Yeah, great to talk to you. So, let me, chief sustainability officer. You know that word sustainability means something different to everyone. So, I thought we could start off. What is your working definition?

Kara Hurst: Yeah, sustainability can mean a lot of different things to people. I think for Amazon and for me personally, what it really means is when I think about our customers and how we want to show up in all of the communities where we live and work and operate around the world, everybody wants clean water, clean air, and access to connection with people in their communities. We want to be able to thrive. And so all of the things that we work on are really about enabling that and particularly putting all of the things that we have at Amazon, the scale that we have, the resources that we have, and the superpowers that we have into action around those things. So, our teams work on things like how we protect natural resources, how we utilize and empower more clean energy, how we think about water in those communities, but also importantly, you know, how we might help to address a natural disaster with our logistics capabilities, how we might, for example, deliver food to communities who need it. So, sustainability can mean many different things underneath that, but it’s really about protecting people and the planet everywhere where we live and work and operate.

Dan Bova: So before we get into all the details of all that, I’m just curious what drew you to this? What made you want to be a chief sustainability officer?

Kara Hurst: Yeah, it’s a windy road for I think a lot of us in these types of positions. I’ve worked in a lot of different fields, including politics. I spent a lot of time in nonprofits and thinking about how communities interact with companies and really had the opportunity when I came to Amazon to think about how do I build and put all of these resources to scale. So, sustainability for me, I’m a systems thinker and it’s a perfect place to land because what you get to do is to think across all of not only all of the different industries that we operate in at Amazon, but you really get to think what I call to be multilingual. So, we have to work with the public sector, governments, governmental institutions, multilaterals, places like the UN. You’ve got to work with the nonprofit sector and all of our different partners, the NGOs that work in environmental issues or human rights issues. And then we work certainly with the private sector and all of our different corporate partners in all the industries and businesses that we work with. So, I love that kind of systems thinking and how you partner across those different domains and you bring those different partners together to think about how to solve society’s biggest issues, whether that is climate change or how we provide clean water or think about how, you know, to protect human rights for people. So, that’s systems thinking for me. I love the biggest, most complex problems and there’s no better place to work on those than the company I’m at right now.

Dan Bova: That’s certainly a superpower because not many people can speak, you know, the five different languages that you just named there. So, that’s pretty amazing. So, you know, it’s hard to argue why people would want clean water or, you know, clean air, but for entrepreneurs listening, what’s a compelling business case for sustainability, like how this can actually help their bottom line?

Kara Hurst: Yeah, I think that’s a great question because a lot of entrepreneurs that I’ve worked with over the years or you know if you think about all of the small businesses, the majority of what we sell on Amazon is small and medium-sized enterprises selling on our retail site, they are growing their businesses and you know they might say well we don’t have time to think about sustainability right now or it’s costly you know and that’s a premium that I don’t know if I can pay, but I really think that if you understand how we’re working on sustainability and you understand how to serve a customer, it’s actually the opposite. Sustainability can help your business to be much more efficient with its resources. That’s actually at the heart of what sustainability is about. And so, when you’re entrepreneurial, you’re usually starting to work in a constrained environment, right? And it’s one of the things actually I love about working here is that we are asked to work sometimes within these constraints, but we’re asked to think really big. And so, you know, those constraints actually force a lot of innovation. And entrepreneurs are the people who actually do that the best. You are tackling a problem sometimes no one else has thought about, right? And you’re inventing new solutions. Sustainability is a lot like that. We’re trying to tackle problems that haven’t been solved before and we’re doing it within a series of constraints whether they’re what we might call like a planetary boundary or they’re a set of constraints because that problem hasn’t been solved before, but we’re doing so with an eye towards how can we do this with efficient use of resources or conservation if you will of those resources, and when you do that you generally are saving. So, when you think about saving energy, you’re saving money. Or you think about water conservation, you’re at the end of the day going to save money. When you think about swapping out one material for another, if you can reduce the amount of material you use to produce a product, you can generally reduce, you know, your money. Now, right now, some of those materials sometimes if you make a sustainable swap, they might be more expensive, but the more companies we have at scale doing this, the lower that price becomes. And that’s a lot of the work that we do here when we bring companies together and we aggregate that demand to lower the price.

Dan Bova: You know what I’ve read about, using AI, make sure you’re giving someone the thing they really want so they don’t send it back and then you send them another one and then they send it back and this thing goes on and on. You don’t, a lot of us don’t think about that in terms of sustainability, but obviously there’s a lot of resources and time and energy wasted going back and forth with stuff. So, I wanted to ask you, I mean Amazon obviously operates at this, you know, unimaginable scale for most of us to think about, but for someone who’s running a growing business that has like say 10 or 50 employees, what’s a good starting point for them to start thinking about sustainability?

Kara Hurst: Well, I think AI is obviously going to empower a lot of us to go faster. We’re using it in so many different parts of our business and we’re using it on our sustainability team to develop tools that are allowing us to move much faster whether it’s in tools that we’re coding or it’s in thinking about risk mitigation. But the thing for entrepreneurs is to really start where your superpowers are. So, whatever you’re working on and whatever your focus area is, that’s where you should start. If you are a beauty company and you’re making a beauty product, think about what your customers might want in terms of the ingredients in that product or how it’s packaged. Those are the kind of things that customers can look and feel and touch. And that’s what they’ll think about first. And that’s going to be different for every single business, for every single entrepreneur. But that entrepreneur is going to know what they’re really good at and what they’re going to be able to kind of double down on within their own business. I don’t think it’s necessarily always AI, but I do think that AI is leading a lot of us to understand how we can work more efficiently and how we can get more out of every day.

Dan Bova: Yeah, absolutely. So, I know that Amazon is doing a lot of things, you know, outside of the business, you know, investing in communities. So, can you talk a little bit about that and what’s the thinking behind it?

Kara Hurst: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the things that we’re absolutely passionate about is to give back to our communities, but we’re also a key part of these communities where we have, you know, people who live in the communities who are part of our business. And so, we are, you know, fulfillment centers, data centers, our Whole Foods grocery stores. We live and work and operate there all over the world. So, we give back in many, many different ways. I mean, part of this is not only our community giving, but we show up when there’s a natural disaster. We have a disaster relief program because we’re good at fulfillment, logistics, and operations. So, that’s one way when there’s a natural disaster that we utilize our logistics operations. We’ve, you know, involved in over 200 disasters already using our planes, using, donating items. We’ve actually pre-positioned these items in a number of our fulfillment centers all over the world. That’s a really important part of how we operate because we know when disaster strikes, sometimes there’s not time to figure out, you know, how to get things there or that’s one of the hardest things because the area is in distress. So, we’ve actually utilized space in our fulfillment network to actually already put the items that we know if that’s an area that’s going to be hit by wildfires. As an example, we know what supplies are going to be needed by those first responders. So, we’ve prepositioned those items in that area already so that first responders can access those items in the fastest way possible. We’ve also utilized our technology to help in that way. And AI has played a part in that. So, we can utilize AI to help provide information very quickly to first responders about where it might be safe to travel into in a wildfire as an example so that to protect their safety and the safety of the community. We’ve also done food delivery, so we’re using our driver network to deliver food. We partner with food banks all the time to provide, you know, food that we’re not going to use in our system that might be, you know, food we can’t sell anymore. We give it to food banks. But we know that it’s really hard sometimes for people also to get to a food bank in their very busy day. So, we’re now utilizing our drivers to go out and deliver that food to people who need it, which is a great way to save time and money, frankly, for the people who need to access that food. So, we have a lot of programs like that. We also invest a lot in education. We do a lot of volunteering in community, and we do a lot of upskilling because we know that, you know, working on things like our career choice and how people are going to transition into this new AI economy is really important. So, there’s a whole variety of ways that we’re participating.

Dan Bova: I’m wondering, it’s amazing, you know, you just said there’s you’ve responded to over 200 emergencies already. I wonder if this year or if you look back, is there anything that really springs to mind like that particularly makes you proud that you are part of helping out in a situation?

Kara Hurst: Well, I think the recent events in Venezuela are really probably the most top of mind right now. And we did one of the first ever airlifts into Venezuela. It’s very difficult in a situation like that to get supplies into an area like that when that happened. So, we were really proud to be able to, you know, provide supplies very quickly in that situation.

Dan Bova: Yeah, that’s amazing. So, we’ve talked about, you know, as anyone who reads the news knows, Amazon is investing billions in AI and the infrastructure behind it. Is sustainability built into what Amazon is trying to accomplish with its AI infrastructure? What’s the starting point there?

Kara Hurst: We build differently and that’s what we want to get across about how we’re doing this. So, in 2019, we committed to The Climate Pledge and co-founded that with Cristiana Figueres and her group at Global Optimism. So, for the whole company, we’re looking to be net-zero carbon by 2040. And that’s a very long-term vision. That’s for all of Amazon. How are we going to decarbonize all of our operations across Amazon, including our data centers? But what that meant when we looked at the data centers is we have to think about building differently. So how would we use better concrete, better steel, even mass timber? How do we think about from the ground up? Even the chips that we build, having those be more efficient. And then we look at, you know, things like water that’s used for cooling in data centers. And we set a goal to be water positive on our AWS business by 2030, and we’re already 75% of the way there, which means we have over 60 water replenishment projects around the world where we return more water to the communities where we operate data centers than we utilize ourselves. We have over 700 renewable energy projects around the world where we have investments in carbon-free energy across wind and solar, now nuclear as well. And we think about how we build. So, we’re building efficiently, we’re procuring clean energy, we’re working on policies that support grid efficiency, and we’re thinking about, you know, being stewards of all of that in the communities where we operate these data centers and also giving back in terms of economic development, the jobs that we create, the job training that we do, and how we support the communities where those data centers are. So, all of that is really about, you know, you want if you’re going to have a data center in your community, which we all need the power. We utilize data centers every day for groceries that we might order online or the hospitals that are in that community, the education, the Ubers that we order. The data centers really support a lot of different power needs.

Dan Bova: So, I mean, you just mentioned so many different things. I can’t imagine many people being able to wrap their heads around that many different things, but if there’s one thing that you look back on or look forward to that you could that just still makes you go like, “Wow, we did that,” is there something that springs to mind?

Kara Hurst: Well, I think I mentioned The Climate Pledge, and you know, we took that goal ourselves at Amazon, but when we took it, we knew that nobody does this alone. We don’t, we’re not able to hit that kind of a massive goal unless we bring industry along with us. And so, we went out on a limb and said please join us in this, and that was in 2019. And we didn’t know if anyone would, if people would step into that. And one of the things I’m super proud of our teams in doing is now we have almost 700 companies that have joined Amazon in that commitment to the climate pledge. And that’s across many multiple industries and many geographies. And they’re companies of all different sizes. And I think that is a testament to both the sort of permission and inspiration and kind of action-orientation that we are promoting. We want to say this is not just a statement. And it’s not just sign this pledge, but we have 33 joint action projects. And we’re really about at Amazon always saying, okay, let’s take this commitment, but now let’s talk about what’s working, what’s not working, where did you fail, how do we think about really decarbonizing our operations, and then also open sourcing every solution that we have. So, I’m so proud of the teams that have pushed into, things like ocean freight, ports, thinking about heavy industrial industries and engaging those industries in a conversation to say we really take seriously wanting to decarbonize the world and to get started on this because we want our communities to be healthy and livable and to transform.

Dan Bova: And I was going to ask, you know, when you work for one of the biggest companies on the planet, uh, how do you define success at this point? Because it seems like it feels like from the outside Amazon could do anything. So, what really gets you juiced up and like high fiving like we did it?

Kara Hurst: I think success for me is when the people I get to work with every day are continually inspired by what we’re doing, and they continue to think bigger. They want to show up and they want to say, “Okay, we’ve done all of this, but how can we keep pushing? How can we now think about utilizing AI to go further? How can we think about utilizing new tools that we have access to and we have the privilege to utilize every day to make the lives better for all the workers in the supply chains that we work with? Or how can we take this thing that we built and scale it even bigger and then open source it and give it to more people? How can we get more food to more people in communities? How can we move faster on that? That to me is success when I’m able to think about how do we enable the things that we’ve built to go bigger and scale into more communities and to have the people who work on our teams get really excited about their opportunities to scale those ideas.

Dan Bova:  Speaking of excitement and being fired up, let’s talk about energy, personal energy, like what do you do? What do you advise people? Because you’ve obviously got a lot of energy. You’re all fired up. You are leading these gigantic teams. What do you do personally? And what do you advise people to, you know, to keep that energy up over, you know, decades of work?

Kara Hurst: Yeah, I think, you know, one is surrounding yourself with people who, you know, can support that vision, who can believe in it and who want to think big. And the second thing is really taking a moment every now and then to reflect back on what has happened. A lot of us in these types of jobs have the tendency to just kind of go, go, go. And so, what I’m trying to do more of at this point in my career is also to stop and reflect and think and acknowledge some of the progress that we’ve made. That’s, that’s not a typical thing that I would say that we do a lot of at Amazon either. We’re very much relentlessly focused on the next.

Dan Bova: Yeah.

Kara Hurst: And so, I think that kind of moment in time to stop and say, “Okay, we’ve done all of this. That’s a that’s a really big milestone, and how can we build on it?” And that that’s helpful. There’s a lot that’s happening right now, especially as fast as AI is moving. So, I think those kinds of moments are really important in the day.

Dan Bova: Give us a little homework. What’s something that we could do tomorrow to help make our businesses just a little bit more angled towards sustainability?

Kara Hurst: I think everybody has one solution to share and one thing that hasn’t worked to share. And so, if you think about, you know, things that you’ve tried that are that are working and maybe that you have, even if they’re really small, what is that and how can you share it, or one thing that you’ve tried that has failed, but people learn as much from failure than they do from success. And so, we have a lot of forums where we can share those successes and failures, and we really want to encourage people to come forward and share those in a collective way. I think stepping up and saying, “Hey, we tried this. It worked; it didn’t work. How are you guys tackling this?” If you can do that, share one success, share one failure, and everybody does that, you’re going to learn 10 things in a day. And I think that that moves the world forward much quicker than anything else.

Dan Bova: I love it. That’s fantastic. And what a great note to end on. Kara, thank you so much for your time and thanks again to our sponsor, Amazon

Kara Hurst: Thank you.