Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, center left, speaks with Amazon employees after he made a surprise appearance during a Amazon Veterans Day celebration, honoring the Warriors@Amazon, a group of employees who have served in the military and their spouses, in an event outside a hanger at the Long Beach Airport in Long Beach on Monday, November 12, 2018.

Jeff Wilke, the CEO of Amazon's worldwide consumer business, has spent nearly two decades at the company and was promoted to his current job more than three years ago. But until this week, consumers and investors had never seen him on TV.

Wilke's 20 minute interview with CNBC on Thursday was his first broadcast appearance since being promoted to run Amazon's biggest unit in 2016. More importantly, the on-the-record chat fit into Amazon's recent effort to elevate the public profiles of CEO Jeff Bezos' top lieutenants.

Since starting Amazon 25 years ago as an online bookseller, Bezos has been the larger-than-life face of the company in its march to a $900 billion market cap. He's not alone among tech founders in creating a cult of personality. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Salesforce's Marc Benioff and Netflix's Reed Hastings are all synonymous with the companies they started, and the same was true for many years of Microsoft's Bill Gates and Apple's Steve Jobs.

Amazon is unique in how few of its product leaders have established real name recognition outside of the company's walls. Apple's public figures include lead software engineer Craig Federighi and operating chief Jeff Williams. Facebook's COO Sheryl Sandberg often speaks for the company, while Google's CFO Ruth Porat and cloud boss Thomas Kurian are prominent names on Wall Street.

At Amazon, Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services, has become a bigger presence in recent years, but most senior executives have stayed below the radar, rarely speaking in public and only sparingly being quoted in press releases.

For Bezos' sake, that has to change. Investors need to see and hear from the leaders of the massive and costly businesses they're putting their money behind, and Bezos has an ever-growing portfolio of ambitious projects outside of Amazon to occupy his time and energy.

"We're seeing a concerted effort to show that Amazon is much more than just Bezos," said Tom Forte, an analyst at D.A. Davidson, in an interview. Forte said he was "shocked" to see the Wilke interview, which took place at Amazon's re:Mars conference on artificial intelligence.

Dave Limp, Amazon's devices chief, also spoke to CNBC at the event. He and Wilke both stuck to the party line, emphasizing the importance of the customer experience in everything Amazon pursues.

"I think you're going to get a lot of evidence this week that our business model is producing great things for customers and for the world," Wilke said.