The “invisible army” behind Amazon’s robotaxi revolution

Introduction

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Zoox CEO Interview

2:08We're sending machines out there to go drive amongst humans. People should ask us questions. People ask me all the time, what's waking you up at 3 a.m.? What's stressing you up? And I think they expect me to say, I don't know, capital or execution or this or that, but I'm constantly asking myself, are we going as fast as we can, but as slow as necessary? We just passed 2 million miles. That's driverless miles on the robo-taxi, on U.S. public roads. That's a huge milestone.

2:41And as you do that, you do become a household name because you earned it, not because you said so.

2:49That's Aisha Evans, CEO of the autonomous vehicle business Zooks, Z-O-O-X. As robo-taxis increasingly pop up across American cities, I wanted to hear about Zooks' strategy as a subsidiary of Amazon, about its competition with Waymo, and about the plan behind a new Zooks partnership with Uber. Aisha talks with me about what it'll take for robo-taxis to go from consumer novelty to everyday routine and how far down that path the industry actually is in 2026.

3:22She also shares lessons, both positive and negative, from her time at Intel, and why she has what she calls an invisible army of rebels within the Zooks team.

Rapid Response Introduction

3:34Aisha is direct, funny, and a beacon of optimism, so let's get to it. I'm Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

3:45I'm Bob Safian. I'm here with Aisha Evans, CEO of Zooks. Aisha, thanks for joining us. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. So, Zooks is in the red-hot center of building a new mobility future, electric, autonomous vehicles. You have a new partnership with Uber. Your robo-taxis are operational in Las Vegas and San Francisco. How close are we, though, really to, like, a dramatically different mobility paradigm? I think as an industry, there's a lot of progress.

4:18So, I think we're at the proof point stage. I want to say that over the last 20 years, we've had a lot of, you know, kind of, oh, it's happening tomorrow morning. Oh, it's never going to happen. And we're past that stage now. The proof points are there, us and also fellow travelers. And now it's a matter of starting to prepare for scale. But I've always been very, very consistent that this is not going to be like a consumer product where all of a sudden, boom, 100 million people experience it. It's going to be step by step.

4:49But we're well on our way, which is really exciting. Your most well-known fellow traveler, Waymo, has chosen to retrofit existing cars. You guys have opted for sort of purpose-built vehicles with a striking design, right? It's got two benches sort of facing each other. There's no driver controls, no steering wheel. It doesn't really look like a car. Why make that choice? If AI is going to be doing the driving, it's really now about the customer experience. And it's about also what is the best way to materialize this product.

5:24First, you have the safety aspect. In a regular passenger car that is architected for a human driver, the safest place to be is actually the front seat. For us, we were able to look at redundancy. We were able to look at our optimal sensor architecture so that we can see things and we can see occluded things. In Silicon Valley, sometimes maybe we think about the customer's second hand. Here, they thought about it firsthand. And the customer experience, it just does not feel like you're in a car.

5:54What we're seeing from folks, both people who ride, but also in the communities that we ride in, we're seeing curiosity. First couple of minutes, oh my gosh, what is this? And then, wow, this makes so much sense. Look, you're not doing the driving. So why have a bunch of things that are involved in the driving? Calling an AV still feels like a novelty. You know, like that's what I hear from others who sort of request these robo rides. Do you have clarity about what it's going to take for sort of self-driving to become, I don't know, more routine?

6:27Like, is that about the design? Is it about the tech? Is it about the product? Or is it something else? Look, this is a big deal. I mean, these types of transformation, they don't happen overnight, right? Look at aviation. It took a while. But then now you're at JFK and you're like, how can so many planes be coming and going? So I think we're going to have to continue to deploy, continue to really put safety at the forefront, continue to engage in a dialogue with the regulators and the communities.

6:58And then, I don't know, maybe a decade from now we'll be like, or maybe two, I don't know for sure. I'm not in the intoxicating business, but at some point I know we'll be like, it's just, yeah, I still own a car, but for certain modes of transport, it just makes more sense to use a robo taxi. You must be good at projecting in some ways because you were part of the team that, you know, made Zoox a subsidiary of Amazon, which acquired it for $1.3 billion in 2020.

Amazon Partnership

7:29How does Amazon help Zoox's trajectory? Like, is it about financial resources, access to technology and AI? I mean, how is Zoox different than if it were on its own? Focus, focus, focus. The financial backing is important, right? A strong relationship also with AWS, that goes without saying, the compute. One of the things I love about Amazon is the plurality and multitude of businesses and industries that it has been in. We forget, Amazon started by selling books.

8:02So they've seen a lot. They've experienced a lot. There's a lot of pattern recognition. There's a lot of the customer obsession. So we get a lot of advice. When something's going really well, well, can you do more of that? When something is going poorly, why is that? And how are you looking at bottlenecks? This summer, it'll be six years. So we're way past the dating phase. And I've been both sides of an M&A at big companies. And I would say Amazon gets an eight and a half out of ten. Eight and a half. Yes.

8:32I have the freedom I should have. I tell people all the time, it's not like when you have a startup that is fully in the private sector with a board. I mean, I've been on the other side where, you know, you have VCs and you have institutionalists, you have independents. There's always a decision maker and a boss. Make your peace with it. And, you know, we're sending machines out there to go drive amongst humans. People should ask us questions, whether it's the regulators or our bosses. It is the right thing to do.

9:03And I welcome it. And we are better for it. There are people who get nervous about the idea of robots taking over. Not all necessarily, you know, robots on the road, but robots in our lives. Absolutely. I mean, I have two teenagers and I'm like, oh, my gosh, on the one hand, you're so lucky because this is really an era of transformation in almost every sector because of AI. On the other side, I'm like, oh, why did I have to have young adults slash teenagers during the transformation phase?

9:36Because there will be a lot of change. Having said that, I'm on Team Optimism, you know, Humanity, a couple thousand years. I know we take ourselves very seriously because we're the ones alive right now. But there's been a lot of change throughout those years. And somehow we're still here. So I tend to think that statistically, why should it be different this time? We'll have a lot of hard conversations. We'll have some hard transitions. But in general, things will be better because they always that's how it's always been.

10:09With your kids, do you teach them to drive or is driving a skill that they're not going to need, you know, in the world they're going into? Well, they are, you know, they are, what, 18 and almost 20. So they did learn to drive. But with my son, it's interesting. If he's in the city, he'll order a Zoox. If he's around our house, he'll order a Waymo, which is totally OK, by the way. It's a great product. I use it too. I need to sit down and ask him on what basis is he making those decisions.

10:43And hopefully I like the answer. Your partnership with Uber, I'm curious how big a deal that is, because Uber also partners with Waymo. What makes that deal meaningful for you? So, I mean, yes, they do partner with almost everybody, which is great. If I were in their shoes, I would probably do the same. Dara has taken rides in Zoox and he totally gets and Uber totally gets the differentiated experience.

11:13For Zoox, for almost 12 years, this summer will be 12, we've been so focused on building the tech, on building the processes. And I want to say that over the last couple of years, we've really started thinking about commercialization and how we're going to do this. I don't see this category as just, oh, taking share from whatever exists today. I actually see an expansion of the market. As far as Zoox and Uber, for us, it's about learning.

11:43It's about experimenting. I'm pretty sure if you arrive in Las Vegas, maybe you know about Zoox, maybe you don't know about Zoox. Now, you will see them on the strip and be like, what is that? Oh, my gosh. But I'm pretty sure you know about Uber. So, right there, that makes it worth it to Zoox. And some element of transportation has nothing to do with pleasure. It's frankly, it has to do with, you know, being utilitarian. And if we can help serve that together and scale faster, the experiment will have worked.

12:18You're expanding into other cities. You're testing in L.A. and Austin and Miami. How do you decide where to go? I'm not sure how soon before I might see them here in New York. Some cities tougher than others for AVs. How much of that is weather? How much of that is density? How much of that is regulation? A little bit of all of the above. Weather is important. No question about it. For example, for Zoox, snow is not really a short term. I mean, we're working on it, but that's not a city we're going to pick to start.

12:49Having at least some evidence that this is something that the community welcomes, at least the seed of demand. The regulatory environment, you know, I've said publicly in the past that New York is the holy grail. But first, it has to be legal to have a robo-taxi there. So please, please, please tell the political and governmental infrastructure that you would like robo-taxis in New York. Zoox isn't yet quite a household name, but it's kind of an old timer in AV terms.

13:22I mean, you mentioned it around for 12 years. Is that an advantage in AVs or is like, you know, the tech stack changes so fast, there's so much going on that, you know, that building today could be just as fast? Like, what are the pros and cons of that time? I think part of it is choice and sort of leadership style and culture. Being a household name, you know, to me, I believe in the earned life.

13:52Nobody has a God-given right to anything. You have to work hard at it. And as we're out there serving more customers, we just passed 2 million miles. For us, that's driverless miles on the robo-taxi, on U.S. public roads. That's a huge milestone. We have roughly 500K people on the wait list. We have close to 400K riders who have given us feedback and continuing putting points on the board. And as you do that, you do become a household name because you earned it, not because you said so.

14:26The explosive growth in generative AI, how does that change what you do, how the AV world is going to develop from here? We're going faster. That's really how it's impacting us. That's simulation is more capable, ability to sort of correlate data and information. Engineers, actually, I shouldn't even say engineers. Every Zoot's employee is way more productive. You get to answers quicker. Everybody's talking about physical AI, too.

14:57I'm like, well, yeah, we've been doing physical AI since we were born. Every time there's one of these big transformations, a new set of sort of giant companies are born. And some companies also maybe don't adapt and don't figure out how to be the elephant that can dance and are replaced. And I expect basically the same dynamics, but just bigger and probably the fastest we've ever experienced. Do you think about like, oh, we should sort of rebuild our stack from scratch because we have this new capability?

15:33Not for us. We have a certain architecture we believe in. There are really big parts of the stack that we are able to essentially modernize. And it's not the first time we've modernized it, by the way. Sometimes I'm like, well, what if somebody looks at our code? I'm like, by the time they can understand it, it'll have changed again. Because we're learning constantly, applying new techniques and new algorithms. We basically modernize our stack as we go.

16:03But it's important to have explainability and to have traceability because no matter what we do, the systems will be safer than humans. But they will also make mistakes. They will not be perfect. And being able to understand when a mistake was made, why that was the case, and be able to correct that is really key. You can't just have this part where you just throw a bunch of things and then a soup arrives and you can't decompose the soup backwards. Yes, I do love that term explainability, which is like for many Silicon Valley companies

16:39is a euphemism for we really don't know how we got to these outputs. And we're trying to trace it back and figure it out. Yeah, well, at least in driving. I mean, I don't like commenting on other people's businesses because I don't like it when people do it to me because I have no idea what's going on inside. But at least for physical AI, for driving these robot taxis in human communities, that is unacceptable. That's our view. You have to know. You have to know. Period. I talked with Ford CEO Jim Farley recently, and he was all amped up about China's auto industry,

17:16the scale, the advances, the pace. How much do you look at China and what's happening there? From an EV standpoint, our expectation is that there will be an ecosystem in China that we don't have access to as an American company. Now, I think that when it comes to Europe, Middle East, Africa, Latam, and so on, you'll probably have a mix of both ecosystems. So, we keep track of them with that basic foundational premise. I think with EV, as you go from internal combustion engines or ICE to EVs,

17:53you start going from sort of a machine with wheels to a computer on wheels. And that means that integration between hardware and software and not treating software just as, you know, basic control functions or controlling the infotainment. But really, software being a first-class citizen in the architecture design and having decision rights becomes very important. Lots of people very good at hardware. Lots of people very good at software.

18:23Not a lot of people good at both and treating them as sort of equal right, decision rights when it comes to major architectural and sort of strategic decisions. The ecosystem in China, when you look at a lot of these consumer electronics companies that came from the smartphone era and that by definition had to be good at hardware and software and system-level thinking, are finding a glide path to EVs and AVs

18:55because that foundational knowledge and mindset is already native to them. And if you're not native, then get busy being native.

19:08Aisha is definitely busy. She's digging into the details of Zoox's operations, managing Amazon oversight, and trying to create a whole new future. So how does she use what she calls her invisible army inside Zoox to get things done? And where did the idea for an invisible army come from anyway? We'll talk about that more after the break.

Invisible Army

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21:15Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. There's going to be two types of companies. Those are great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future that is human-centered? I'm Rana Elkhaubi, and on my podcast, Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future,

21:47and we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find Pioneers of AI wherever you tune in.

21:59Before the break, Zooks' Aisha Evans talked about how she's leveraging both Amazon and Uber to get more robo-taxis on the streets in 2026. Now, she talks about leveraging enthusiasm without slipping into hype, why she deploys what she calls an invisible army inside Zooks, and lessons from her tenure at Intel. Let's dive back in.

22:24You clearly have a lot of enthusiasm about this area, and you alluded to this before, this sort of this balance between, you know, not extending too far into hype, but, you know, maintaining that enthusiasm over a long period of time. How do you think about that, about sort of modulating those two things? So, I live by something that I was taught by a friend of mine, which is you have to think about going as fast as possible, but as slow as necessary.

22:56You also have to build a culture where you earn it, a lot of transparency. Sometimes people visit, and they're like, how do you know all these people? I'm like, I work at it, because I want to know that they all feel comfortable telling me if they think there's a problem somewhere so that we can deal with it, because you have to earn it. If it's a culture of fear, or if it's a culture where you're not making it easy and providing several channels to do that, you won't go as fast as possible. People ask me all the time, you know, what's waking you up at 3 a.m.? What's stressing you out?

23:27And I think they expect me to say, I don't know, capital or execution or this or that, but I'm constantly asking myself, are we going as fast as we can, but as slow as necessary? Because we all know what happens when you go too fast and you don't consider safety, then bad things happen, and they should happen, by the way. So the balance and the blend is the struggle and the triumph. Prior to Zouk's, you spent some years at Intel. Are there things from that experience that you draw on,

23:58or is Zouk's such a different business? You look elsewhere for lessons and inspiration. Both. In general, I'm a curious person. I have this wonderful coach who taught me very 15 years ago that it's okay to ask for help. That is actually a sign of strength. So when I'm stuck, I'm known to pick up the phone and say, hi, I'm Aisha Evans from Zouk's, an Amazon company. I please need some help. I was, so-and-so told me about you or introduced me to you. But taking it back to Intel,

24:29I learned the tongue at Intel. 12 years, it's a company that's important. I root for that company to this day. I learned about hardware-software integration. I had a front seat to people who are hardware-only or software-only. And I was like, huh, that's a problem. I learned about, you're going to laugh, inside of probably some ex-Intel. If some ex-Intel or current Intel people who know me listen to this day, I'm going to chuckle because I was known as a little bit of a rebel. I complained about every process and why we're so slow and so dogmatic

25:00and so bureaucratic and don't you understand? And yeah, well, guess what? Thank you, thank you for that training because then I came to Zouk's and it was still a very early startup, roughly a little less than 500 people and had a lot of technology, but really needed to be orchestrated and coordinated and put processes in place, put orgs in place, put sort of a common language in place in order to succeed. So lots of learnings that I apply, but also, you know, lots of things not to do

25:31that I won't tell you about. That you won't tell me.

25:36Yes, well, because you have to move as fast as you can as well, right? Not just slow. That's, I guess that's what being the rebel in that group means. I guess you want to have your own rebels within your own organization, but maybe not too many of them. I want enough of them because you need a uniform distribution in all functions. One of the things at Zouk's is because we're vertically integrated, one day you are talking to a traditional sort of automotive engineer. You're talking chassis, battery, suspension,

26:08brakes, harnesses. The next day you're talking to marketing about, you know, how much do we want to emphasize safety or not? So you want to make sure that I call them affectionately, my invisible army or the invisible army. You want to make sure that they are distributed across the corporation. But we also have to have a contract that we will debate, we will discuss, we will consider alternatives. But once we make a decision, we commit and we move

26:39and we don't revisit unless there's evidence that or assumptions that were incorrect. And then we do a little bit of a feedback loop and then keep moving forward. I talked to the leader of a big, well-known brand who, you know, was distraught about the way immigrants and other diverse populations and women are being sort of, things have been made more difficult for them over the last year or so since the Trump administration came in,

27:11the second Trump administration came in. But at the same time, she felt like as a woman of color who was born in another country, it is not her place to talk about it. Like, she just can't. It makes her too much of a target. And I don't, obviously, I don't want you to feel like you're a target, but I'm just, I'm wondering whether you have any thoughts or experiences about this or how you manage that part of being who you are. My views pre and post

27:44this administration haven't really changed. The person I admire the most is Mary Curry. Well, there are two of them, Mary Curry and Nelson Mandela, and I'll explain why. Mary Curry, every time I'm like, yeah, of course, I get disrespected or assumptions are made that are very annoying. Yeah, I mean, that happens on a daily basis. But I've basically made the decision that I was going to live my life happy and not miserable. And I am going to shut people up by doing the work.

28:14And when I succeed, it feels really good. And when I fail, I'm like, what the hell happened and what can I learn after a good cry, of course. And maybe that's a very selfish way of living life, but that's what I learned from Mary Curry. Nothing is to be feared. Everything is to be understood so that we can feel less. And on my worst days, I'm like, wow, she was an immigrant. She was a wife. She was in physics way back then. She was a mummy. You know, she had it way worse than I did.

28:44And somehow, she figured out to thrive and get two Nobel Prizes, by the way, along the way. And so, let's just understand why what's happening is happening, what we can do about it, and also understand that progress is never fast and it's also rarely linear. So that's how I live my life. Then you have Nelson Mandela on the other side, I don't understand how you are in jail for 27 years. 27 years, that's a long time. And by the way, it's totally unjust,

29:15right, by any, I mean, I think, by any reasonable standard. You become friends with the jailers. You, I mean, what, seriously. And then you come out of jail and you don't go on a revenge tour. You go on a, okay, what have I learned and what do I understand and how do I bring people together? So, that's sort of how I look at the whole situation. I think there's been a lot of progress. I also fundamentally believe that inclusion

29:47is more important than diversity because if you do inclusion, you will get diversity. If you only do diversity, you will get some drama. And I think that's sort of what's happening. But it will all work out because it always does.

Conclusion

30:01This was great. Thank you so much for doing it. I really enjoyed the conversation.

30:07Listening to Aisha, I was reminded of the move fast and break things era of tech development that turned social media from a promising tool to something impersonal, often angry, sometimes addictive. Her admonition to move as fast as possible and as slow as necessary is a prudent mantra, not just for robo-taxis, but for all of us in the age of AI. I also want to double-click on her encouragement that asking for help is a sign of strength, not weakness, especially when things

30:38are changing so fast. We need to rely on each other for perspective and support. On Friday, we turn the tables. I'm talking to the other side of Zooks' recent partnership, Uber, sitting down with President Andrew McDonald on how autonomous vehicles fit into their evolving business model, plus Uber's surprising expansion into hotels and what gas prices are really doing to their driver community. If you're listening to us on Master's Scale right now, search for Rapid Response and subscribe so you don't miss

31:09that episode. Rapid Response comes out each Tuesday and Friday, so if you just listen on Master's Scale, you're missing out on half of our shows. I'm Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.

31:24Rapid Response is a Wait What original. I'm Bob Safian. Our executive producer is Eve Trow. Our senior producer is Alex Morris and our associate producer is Masha Makutonina. Mixing and mastering by Aaron Bastinelli and Brian Pugh. Our theme music is by Ryan Holiday. Our head of podcasts is Leetal Malad.

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