Amazon’s latest back-to-office shift is welcome news to small businesses around Seattle HQ

The pandemic-driven shift to remote and hybrid work models has hurt businesses in Seattle and other urban centers across the country that rely on the steady drumbeat of worker foot traffic.

• So the news of Amazon’s new back-to-office mandate was certainly welcome to the food truck owners, restaurant managers, and others who spoke with GeekWire reporter Kurt Schlosser Friday afternoon in Seattle. 

• "Our whole plan was kind of based on having the Amazon crowd here,” said Shannon Rau (above), who opened a dog daycare two years ago in the heart of Amazonia near downtown Seattle. “Hopefully this will really create a bit of change.”

• In a memo to employees, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote that “our communities matter to us, and where we can play a further role in helping them recover from the challenges of the last few years, we’re excited to do so.”

The headlines about problems with Microsoft’s Bing chatbot haven’t dulled software developer Patrick Husting’s enthusiasm for generative artificial intelligence. 

• AI is “going to make me smarter. It’s going to allow me to bring my facts in quicker. And it’s going to allow me to get through my job much more efficiently, much more accurately,” he says on a new episode of the GeekWire Podcast.

• Husting is the developer of a third-party add-in called Ghostwriter that lets users query ChatGPT and other OpenAI language models inside Word, Outlook, and Excel.

• Read more and listen here, and subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.