Amazon is rebuilding Alexa and other products around AI

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 46:18

   So one of the things that, you know, has been kind of interesting and us kind of looking at the market is you can do a lot of things with AI. One is you can, like, cut costs, you can reduce the number of accountants you have, or lawyers, or that kind of thing. And there's a lot of, there's actually venture capital firms that now are like, okay, we're going to go buy old companies and cut their costs.

2. 46:44

   And that's never been that interesting to us because we're like, okay, if that's your idea, you have very few ideas. And then there's like, okay, we're going to go build something the world's never seen before, and that's super exciting. But then there's a third thing which you've done with Alexa where you've had a product, a successful product, and you said, okay, let's like rethink this whole thing from the beginning because we have this new platform.

3. 47:13

   You know, how do you get to that and where does that make sense? Yeah. Well, I think that's actually an interesting delineation on the three elements. And I think that organizations, as we just talked about, are going to really change and get more streamlined. And if you do it right, it will enable your really good builders and these small teams to build that second bucket you talked about, which are things that people haven't seen before.

4. 47:41

   You're going to be able to do it. And when you have experiences, like I was talking about earlier, where in four days you completely build a new idea that's 80% of the way there, it's so inspiring to people that they actually spend more of their free time and free thought cycles thinking about new ideas. That is, to me, it's one of the most exciting parts. of what's happening with AI, but I also think that for existing companies who have successful customer experiences at scale, that if they think about AI as primarily just incrementally improving the experience, they will very likely not have the winning experiences three to five years from now, because I think every single one of these experiences we know, even the ones that seem the most difficult to imagine changing are going to be meaningfully different with AI

5. 48:31

   in a few years. And so it means that if you want to think more than incrementally, you have to find a way to get teams to reimagine from scratch what those applications look like if you were building it today with all the new technology available like AI. And in some cases, to me, in Alexa, I felt like it was fairly obvious that we had to do that. It was, you know, the brains of Alexa were really inventive at the time it was built, but the capabilities of what the brains could be were so different because of generative AI that you had to rewire the brains of Alexa if you wanted to be, you know, provide great customer experience and be relevant over a long period of time.

6. 49:17

   And so that was fairly obvious. By the way, even though it was fairly obvious, it was difficult, actually, with you know the teams you know are connected to what they've built and proud of what they built and um you know hard-earned scars on the tenets of what works and doesn't work and to try and get get teams to completely start over and reimagine it takes time because teams will say well that's not how we've done it we've tried that and that hasn't worked or you know so um but i think what's harder is to take experiences you know take our other consumer experience take our retail business or take our prime video business or our fire TV business or our prime music, those experiences, they're not as obvious that the technology has a much better solution today.

7. 50:06

   But I actually believe every single one of those businesses, we need to reinvent. And we have teams of people working on versions of those businesses that are totally reimagined. Now, do I think we'll get it right from the get-go? Probably not. We'll find ways to iterate our way into it, but it's already yielding all sorts of new ideas and customer experiences that we think are very compelling. And then what will be interesting is the race between do you want a completely different experience that's like something, like a new app almost, or do those advance quick enough and you add them into the existing experience where you end up meaningfully changing the overall customer experience bit by bit over the next couple few years as you find elements that work.

8. 50:54

   But I do think every one of these experiences has to be different in the next few years if you want to be a successful leader.