It seems that Amazon is now pushing employees to use AI to write its famous six-pagers:

[Amazon’s] leadership is encouraging employees to let AI do the writing for them. The company’s internal marketing for Cedric, its ChatGPT-style tool, promises “six-page narratives in seconds.”

This might seem like fairly routine change, and in fact exemplary of the sort of work GenAI is supposed to automate. The difference here is that the six-pager is not just another routine document, written and then filed without much further consideration. Amazon’s six-pagers are absolutely foundational to how it operates.

An Amazon product planning meeting does not run on PowerPoint, following an edict1 from Jeff Bezos himself:

Well structured, narrative text is what we’re after rather than just text. If someone builds a list of bullet points in word, that would be just as bad as powerpoint.

The reason writing a 4 page memo is harder than “writing” a 20 page powerpoint is because the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what’s more important than what, and how things are related.

There have been at least cosmetic attempts to adopt this same process across the IT industry. Partly these are due to an honest identification of the same flaws in slide-driven presentations that Bezos’ email flags, and partly to simple cargo-culting of everything Amazon does in the hope for similar results. I have written my fair share of six-page memos like this, and let me tell you, they are hard to get right.

Getting your proposal down like this, with its supporting materials, background, and what is needed for a positive outcome, is a significant effort. You might think that you might struggle to fill six pages, but honestly, the problem is more in the other direction: you constantly need to ask yourself hard questions about what needs to be included, and what can be relegated to appendices and lists of supplementary reading materials.

The point of the exercise is not the production of the six-page document; the drafting and redrafting, thinking hard about what to include, and the deep knowledge which results from that effort — that work is the object of the exercise. Handing the creation of the document over to an LLM is like trying to train for a marathon by taking a taxi.

Silent reading

Also, once again, the AI is being focused only on one step in a much bigger process, and not even the most valuable part. Much like vibe-coding in a product lifecycle, writing the document is not the bottleneck of the process it is embedded in. By all means use AI tools to help you gather and marshal your data, to proof-read your document and check your logic, perhaps to rehearse your arguments. But you still have to do the thinking yourself, or the document has no value.

Remember that Bezos introduced the six-pager for executive meetings, and the meetings began with twenty minutes’ of silent reading. Can you imagine the financial cost of those twenty minutes, multiplied by the hourly salaries of all the senior Amazon execs present? And yet, it was worth it to have all the assembled luminaries sit quietly and absorb that laboriously-assembled information. Would it be quicker to just have an LLM distill the six-pager down to three bullet points and put them up on the screen? Absolutely, yes — but it would not achieve the goal of shared in-depth understanding. Remember, “a list of bullet points […] would be just as bad as powerpoint.”

We are now living in the ridiculous world where Alice uses her LLM to expand three bullet points into a verbose email to Bob, who uses his LLM to (lossily) compress the email back down to three bullet points. What sort of decision will Bob be able to take, based on such superficial information?

  1. That link goes to Business Insider, which is simply spectacularly reader-hostile — but it also seems to be the authoritative source which other articles all refer back to. Sorry.’ ↩